Outpatient Program

Prior to being discharged from the hospital my psychiatrist decided that I would benefit from the hospital’s outpatient program. The outpatient program provides therapy sessions similar to those run in the hospital, which is just upstairs. I will be attending a young adult program on Mondays, and on Wednesdays I am doing creative arts therapy. I was also supposed to do understanding depression, but I hated it so requested to swap groups, there aren’t any spaces in the other groups running at that time so I just dropped it. I couldn’t cope with the therapist, she speaks very slowly and the people in the group wanted / needed to go over the same things time and time again. Depression affects concentration and I guess they’re worse than me, but I just couldn’t exercise that much patience, I understood what had been said and wanted to move on. Creative arts therapy was really good – one woman wouldn’t shut up, but I can get past that. We were each given an old art book from a collection thrown away by Kew library, they are well bound and we get to ‘make it ours’ by cutting out images and putting them elsewhere in the book, playing with the words, adding images we’ve come across and generally whatever we want to do. It will be a 12 week project that we can work on at home as well. I think I will enjoy that group and having done creative arts therapy as an inpatient I know it has genuine therapeutic value, especially if it is well facilitated.