Services

One on one (or a few) Therapy

This is mostly done in a counselling room, however tele-health (phone, video, chat message) is available on request.

Therapy and Counselling for What?

Not sure if we provide the Therapy / Counselling you are looking for? Here is a list of things we have and do cover. We haven’t listed them all, so if you want to know if your specific experience can be helped by us, contact us and we will discuss it with you.

  • General mental well-being
  • Adolescent
  • Anger Management
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Grief
  • Individual
  • Parenting
  • Sexual Abuse / Sexual Assault
  • Trauma

Why Labels? While we work with people, a diagnosis can be an excellent starting point or guidepost about what needs to be done. We will check with you if any current diagnosis is accurate to your experience, or if a better diagnosis (label) is applicable.

Beyond a diagnosis, we investigate all of the issues you may wish to work on – life, family, circumstances, work etc.

Our general therapeutic model is CBT and DBT, but we also use an eclectic mix depending on what works best for you.

See Therapeutic Philosophy below.

Therapeutic Philosophy

Systems Theory

We are very systems based, that is, you exist in various systems and what you experience is both personal and influenced by the systems that you are part of. You also affect those systems. Those systems may including your family, various government departments, work place, social groups and housing (where safe and relevant).

Importantly we believe in your right to privacy, confidentiality and advocacy – nothing about you without you!

For example, it can be very hard to work out why you might be experiencing anxiety if we ignore that you homeless. We are guided by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and we are able to intervene, advocate or liaise on your behalf with other systems that affect your life, and coach and support you to advocate on your own behalf better.

Bio-Psycho-Socio-Spiritual Model

We are strong proponents of the Bio-Psycho-Socio-Spiritual model. We look at how your biological health, psychological health, social health and spiritual health (community involvement, how you see yourself in this world – not religion, but we do work with your beliefs) are all affecting your overall health. As such we want to have a good relationship with your medical team and with your agreement, will likely make suggestions to your GP and or Psychiatrist if we find an area that needs investigation or perhaps change.

Psycho Education

We believe that your choice is vitally important in your life. To make good choices requires knowing that there are choices that you can make, and how to tell which ones are likely to lead to positive outcomes and which are likely to lead to less desirable outcomes. In our practice, we often find that people do not have the knowledge, models, templates or data to make good informed decisions.

When we find an area of knowledge that you are missing or misinformed that is relevant to your ability to make wise decisions, we will run in situ mini Psycho Education to help you fill in those gaps or address those misunderstandings so that you can learn to make good decisions for your life.

There are two important parts here:

  1. We want you in charge of your life – not the life we want you to have, the life you want to have.
  2. We want you to be able to do this without us – our goal is to become redundant in your mental health.

By helping you know more, you become more independent and capable.

We want to do ourselves out of a job with you, hence the next section.

Therapeutic Model

Our goal is to become redundant – we want you to know what to do about how your body and mind work so that you don’t need us anymore.

Our basic process for therapy intervention goes like this:

  1. We hear what you are experiencing and from that discussion we begin to form some hypotheses as to what is going on for you
  2. We investigate your current circumstances and prioritise present safety, intervening or advocating as necessary, but preferring to help you to advocate for yourself
  3. We investigate what the symptoms you describe imply about both your neurology and ability to manage yourself
    • If there are some neurological aspects eg likely neurotransmitter imbalance, Autism, ADHD, PMDD etc or other biological causes to your struggles, we will make recommendations to you and your medical team for medications that will likely help.
      • We then help you trial those medications (with a strong scientific approach) and give feedback about that to your medical team to help inform them of how the medication is going.
      • When medication works as expected, that is useful data for refining the hypothesis
      • When medication does not work as expected, that is also useful data for refining the hypothesis
    • If there is a diagnosis that is fitting to your symptoms, we will give you a provisional diagnosis and where needed, recommend a referral to a full diagnosis and medical treatment
    • Where therapy and psychoeducation are helpful, we give Evidence and Science Based Therapies to help you learn how you can manage your mental health, life satisfaction and environment.
      • The most common therapies are CBT, DBT and cbt Trauma therapy, however we will use the model that works best for your needs
      • We have also developed in house material and methods that work well with neurodivergent people, gender diverse people, people at risk of suicide and self harm, and people in adversarial relationship conflict (family, work and other).

Often, people have lost hope, or can’t see a way to a positive life. We will hold that belief and hope for you when you can’t.

Psychosocial Funcational Capacity Assessment Report

A Functional Capacity Assessment (FCA) is an assessment for NDIS or DSP to show them what your functional capacity is for self care, employment and socialising. For people who are applying for DSP or NDIS, or for and adjustment to either of these, a psychosocial FCA is a recommended report to properly inform Centrelink and NDIA what your measured and reaslistic capcity is and thus can inform proper funding for your situation.

Joshua Davidson Therapy will invest a few hours in exploring your experience, performing an ABAS-3 assessment, reviewing supporting documents and other assessments, and then compile a report for DSP or NDIS.

Often, FCA’s only focus on physical capacity and miss the psychosocial component for a proper report. If your NDIS is not psychosocial and is due to biological physical limitations, then an OT FCA Report is what you are looking for. If you have had a basic OT assessment and report, we can incorporate that, if relevant, into a combined Psychosocial and Physical Functional Capacity Assessment Report.

Presentation, Education, Training and Workshops

We can provide workplace and school education and training. It can be very helpful for workplaces to understand mental health, accomodation and inclusivity, and the earlier that students and staff understand good mental health, the better.

Talk to us about how we can meet your needs.

Professional Supervision, Mentoring, Peer and Coaching

Here at Joshua Davidson Therapy we have a unique model of therapeutic intervention that has yielded excellent results. Let us share that with you.

We can teach/coach you how to deliver therapy that is beyond the traditional version of “listen, don’t solve”, “how are you feeling about that?” and “let us look at your childhood”.

We give supervision, mentoring and coaching support for the clients that you have, help you give the most to your clients, help you manage your boundaries in complex situations and brainstorm with a wealth of professional experience and research to add to your options.

Here at Joshua Davidson Therapy, we look at medical conditions, medications and neurology to understand a person’s biological experience; life experience, self management style and cognitive tools to help understand their psyche; home situation, work situation, education, social groups and self esteem to understand how their support network; and how people see themselves in terms of the world, the future and community for special connections that give life broader meaning.

That is, how to effectively use the whole bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model to comprehend and support your client’s actual life for better outcomes.

As we work with people via NDIS, MHTP, CDM, Insurance and Private *, we can help you understand what each of these systems needs from you so that you can best support your clients in these systems. This includes understanding the systems, understanding report writing, and understanding your mutual obligation to both organisations and your client. We can mentor you in your business to find that good work life balance.

* National Disability Insurance Scheme, Mental Health Treatment (care) Plan, Chronic Disease Management plan; private and state Insurance

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