I am seeing a lot of evidence at the moment that supports the view that if you have a mental health problem then you ought to invest in your own recovery. The ‘system’ will not necessarily look after you.

In the UK the annual number of prescriptions for drugs to treat depression and anxiety has almost doubled in 10 years to over 70 million. If this means something to you, please take a moment to reflect on that figure.  I have witnessed this happening and I have been preaching about it for over 20 years. I think the crucial points are that first, antidepressants and anxiolytics  are not a treatment for depression and anxiety as they do not ‘cure’ these problems, they only help manage them. That is a profound truth. You may not know this and you may expect that when you are given a prescription for these that you are being given something that is akin to an antibiotic, you will experience a cure. You are not and you may not. The antidepressants are...

There is hope and here it is.

I can't compete with big pharma. But I don't need to. I only need to tell this story to those who want to learn how to be happy, healthy and free from anxiety and depression. 

Many people seem skeptical that they have the ability to help themselves out of the common mental health problems such as panic, anxiety and depression without a drug or a course of (hard to get) Face to face therapy. I have proven that it is possible. Here is the evidence. It's a longish video but then it's a big story.

Check out The www.DrPurves.online CBT programs

If you missed the FB Live Q and A last January 24, 2019, this is the recorded video. Hope you get some nuggets from this Facebook Live.

I know it seems like a curious thing to say but nevertheless here it is. Each day you live you are practicing the process of living as you lived yesterday. Yesterday is a blueprint or a pattern for the next day, and so on. It seems very unlikely that tomorrow will be so drastically different from today that you go WOW…I didn’t see that coming. When that does happen it’s either because of a holiday or some other (maybe) planned experience or it’s because of an accident. Which by definition you didn’t see coming.

So each day is a practice run for tomorrow.  Here is the million-dollar question. Is today how you want it to be? If so brilliant; tomorrow will also, more than likely, be how you want it to be. If, however your today is not how you want it to be then you have only two options. The first is to simply accept this and make the best of it. Which I have to say is what most people seem to do. The other option is to change your day, today, and so...

Once you accept that computer based CBT is as face to face CBT in treating depression and anxiety then you have no excuses that stand up to scrutiny for allowing these life sapping problems to remain in your life. You need some additional knowledge and that comes from The computer based CBT course but that's almost all you need. The final bit of what you need is revealed in the third video of this 3 part series.

Research has shown that computer-based CBT is as effective as face to face CBT. This means that, as I have been saying for nearly 20 years, that you don’t need a therapist to treat depression and anxiety so long as you use computer-based CBT instead, or as well if you want to speed things along a bit more. This also means that you have right at your finger tips the means to get depression and anxiety out of your life once and for all. You can access my Drpurves.online CBT courses right on your phone or tablet of desktop. All it takes a little bit of …the topic of this video.

Engagement with the problem. If you avoid the problem then you will see no change at all. However if you engage with the problem, interrogate it, stand back from it and examine it from all sides…ask questions about it.

Then you are taking the first step to leaving depression and anxiety behind and getting on with your life.

If you feel you have no emotional control then it feels like anything might happen and there is nothing you can do about it. This makes you feel both frightened and vulnerable. Normally the way you would deal with this makes it much worse. I have created two very short videos that explain what you are doing wrong and how to make it right. I know these will be helpful if you want to feel in control.

The only sure way to guarantee feeling in emotional control is to learn how you give it away and then how you can keep it. This teaching forms a big part of what you learn when you join The Dr Purves Online CBT courses Bundle. Right now you get 7 days free which gives you an opportunity to try everything out. I know you will be delighted to finally have access to everything you need to take back control from panic, anxiety, depression and stress. 

Problems like panic, anxiety, depression and stress have the quality of pulling you towards them like a black hole. In this video I share 3 tools for regaining perspective.

Last month I was featured on a podcast focused on all things wedding related. That may not interest you but I was talking about how to not be perfect but still be brilliant. With the added bonus of keeping emotional control while doing it. I shared some of my powerful stories and tools, the ones I use in clinical practice...the ones that really do work. If you struggle with high standards, persistent self criticism, the feeling that you are not doing well enough, the feeling that you are failing of that you will be found out. Then this podcast will give you some brilliant tools to use in your own life. And as an added bonus I went over the top and gave the exact recipe for keeping emotional control. Listen in to the podcast here. 

But I have also copied the link to the Bridechilla website because they have done a brilliant job to creating show notes and annotating the important parts of the podcast with a time stamp so you can find what you want again and again.

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The Guardian newspaper today published an article showing that:-

Girls’ much-higher rate of depression than boys is closely linked to the greater time they spend on social media, and online bullying and poor sleep are the main culprits for their low mood, new research reveals.

As many as three-quarters of 14-year-old girls who suffer from depression also have low self-esteem, are unhappy with how they look and sleep for seven hours or less each night, the study found.

This is not a surprise to me. The research has always shown that women have much higher levels of depression than men. There has never been a definitive explanation as to why this is, but it existed before social media was in our lives and it will probably persist. It is made news by the inclusion of the correlation with social media use. What is of more interest to me and what ought to be of more interest to you, is what to do about it. If you find yourself to be one of those who suffer from...