Rehabilitation Psychology

Adaptive Workplace Solutions employs psychologists focused on rehabilitation and recovery post injury or illness. Our psychologists can work with you and provide support and strategies to maximise your recovery and return to independent living. We have experience working with cognitive, emotional and functional challenges and help people to manage change and adapt where necessary. The main goal of therapy is to improve quality of life, mental, physical and social functioning. Our psychologists have experience working with chronic, traumatic and developmental conditions which impact their ability to engage in everyday activities.

Treatment modalities

Our psychologists all have slightly different training and therefore offer different treatment approaches. More information about the specific treatment modalities can be found on the psychologist’s profile page.

Treatment approaches provided at our clinic include:

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Mindfulness-Based Therapy
• Motivational Interviewing
• Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)
• Schema Therapy
• Activity Based Therapy
• Internal Family Systems

While we work with a broad range of mental health conditions, we commonly work with people experiencing the following mental health conditions:

• Adjustment Disorder
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Substance Use Disorders
• Persistent Pain
• Somatic Symptom Disorder
• Health Anxiety
• Work-related stress
• Personality Disorder
• Grief and Loss

What to Expect 

Your first appointment will generally be a little different to your follow-up appointments. At the first appointment, we will spend some time introducing ourselves, discussing confidentiality and completing an assessment. We like to start here because you will often already have some insight into the challenges you are facing. For therapy to be productive, the psychologist working with you needs to develop a clinical understanding. This assessment will explore the reasons you are seeking treatment, your current functioning, e.g., sleep, mood and activity level, any history of mental or general health concerns, social supports, current coping strategies, and identify any risks. Our first session is usually a little longer, 80 minutes, so we have enough time to explore these areas.

Once the assessment phase has been completed, we develop strategies to help support you. Typically we commence with what we call psychoeducation. The purpose of this step is so that the psychologist can explain what they think is causing your concern and what can be done to address it.

During this phase of treatment, it is helpful to ask questions of the psychologist and qualify anything that you do not think fits for you. This process must be informative and educational; at the same time, it is a chance to continue to build and develop understanding. We believe this is a critical step in the recovery process because once our clients have developed a better understanding and awareness of their challenges and the reasons for the strategies or practice tasks, they will likely start to see change and improvement. While psychoeducation is often a starting point, this often continues throughout therapy. Depending on the therapeutic approach used, which will be discussed with you, the sessions will begin to focus more on challenges and building strategies for you to practice in between sessions. Practice outside our sessions is critical to most of the therapies we use. You will spend between 50 – 80 minutes a week or fortnightly with the psychologist, but there are many more fantastic practice opportunities outside of sessions. These opportunities allow us to develop, practice and maintain our strategies between appointments.

Depending upon the situation and the severity of your challenges, we usually structure therapy so that you might see the psychologist initially once per week to help build some momentum. But as your symptoms improve, your appointments will move to fortnightly appointments to allow enough time between sessions for practice and, in some cases, monthly if required. We believe that we are here to support you and improve your quality of life, and that should be spent doing things you enjoy, not coming to therapy. So stepping back out of treatment and returning to everyday activities is the best measure of recovery.

Assessments 

Your psychologist may ask you to participate in brief or more extended assessments to help build the clinical picture and further enrich our understanding of your challenges. These will be discussed with you at the time of your appointment. We routinely use questionnaires to explore symptom severity to help understand this. Further, these will often be repeated every few sessions so that they can be reviewed, and we can consider the areas we are making progress in and which areas we need to focus on with future sessions. Some referrals to our service are assessment-only. This means we will complete an assessment based on a referral letter but will not be involved in further treatment. This will be explained at your appointment if this type of referral applies to you.

Referrals  

Depending on how you access our services, referrals can be made via your treating doctor or case manager if you have a ReturnToWorkSA claim. If you are privately funding your sessions, the session fees will be discussed with you on booking your appointment. If you seek a referral as part of a ReturnToWorkSA claim or other funded service, we will ask your permission to confirm with the third-party payer that they will accept the costs.

Communication with others   

At your initial appointment, we will discuss this with you further. If you approve for our psychologist to liaise with your treating GP or specialist, we will give them a treatment update after our assessment, then approximately every six sessions. If you are referred to AWS concerning an insurance matter, please understand that the claims manager can request a report. This will be discussed with you and will only be completed if we have your approval. There are certain situations where we can be required to provide information to other parties; this will be confirmed with you at our initial appointment.