ACT for Depression and Anxiety Disorders

This 6-week long course will take you from “chunky clunky ACT” to “fluent, flexible ACT”. You’ll go deeper into the ACT model, take your ACT skills to the next level, and learn specific methods for depression and anxiety disorders. You’ll learn about common stumbling blocks and sticking points, and how to quickly get around them. And you’ll discover a wealth of practical tools and strategies to effectively target depression – both major depressive disorder and dysthymia – and the full range of anxiety disorders from OCD & phobias to social anxiety & panic disorder. (Note: we don’t cover trauma in this training. That’s such a huge topic, we’ve created a whole course on it: Trauma-Focused ACT).

As with all our courses, the online format gives you total flexibility to learn whenever it suits you, and access a whole range of powerful resources that simply aren’t available anywhere else. 2.5 hours of new content will be released, week-by-week, over a 6-week period. Plus, on top of that, you’ll have an extra 16 weeks of access to the whole course – so you can watch all your favorite videos again. (And if you’ve fallen behind due to sickness, or taking a vacation, or work commitments etc, this will give you plenty of time to catch up). The entire course has been carefully designed with professional learners in mind, to ensure that you gain a comprehensive and practical grounding in the theory and application of ACT, which you can immediately put into practice with depressed and anxious clients.

This course assumes at least a beginners-level knowledge in ACT. Before enrolling, you must do at least one of the following:

• Attend an introductory level 2-day ACT workshop (with any trainer; doesn’t have to be Russ).

• Complete our ACT for Beginners course.

• Thoroughly work through a beginners-level ACT textbook from start to end – such as ACT Made Simple or Learning ACT. (This means not just reading it, but actively doing the experiential exercises. An ACT self-help book such as The Happiness Trap will not suffice; it must be a textbook.)

Russ will take you much deeper into the ACT model and show you how to adapt and enhance it to effectively address all the common problems of depression and anxiety disorders:phobias, panic attacks, obsessions, compulsions, rumination, worrying, withdrawal, avoidance, shame, guilt, self-hatred, suicidality, hopelessness, lack of motivation, social disengagement, comorbidity, and so on.

He’ll also show you how to overcome resistance, win over mandated clients, and work at an interpersonal level.

If you already know your ACT basics and you want to upgrade and streamline your skills to work efficiently, compassionately and creatively with the entire spectrum of depression and anxiety disorders, this is the course for you. And as with all our courses, you’ll get to see Russ’s unique teaching style direct-to-camera, discover delightful animations that bring the model to life, watch videos of therapy sessions with a range of common trauma issues, download numerous audio exercises and reading materials, participate in online discussion forums, answer multi-choice quizzes that test your learning as you go, print out powerful resources to use with clients … and a whole lot more.

There are 16 CE/CME hours available. Prior to registering, please visit this page to review CE/CME details, course objectives, speaker/planner conflict of interest disclosure and more.

This course is open to any professional who works with physical or psychological health. This includes therapists, coaches, counselors, physicians, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, physios, dietitians, occupational therapists, youth workers, BCBAs, speech therapists, and any other type of health professional - as well as students and researchers in these fields.