Session simulator

The complete first hour: consent, the presenting problem, history, mental state, risk, measurement, a first formulation, a plan, and the documentation afterwards. Every decision is yours.

A focal theme, a defense operating in real time, and a transference moment you can either use or step over. The session where the work stops being about his week.

No agenda, no technique, no questions designed to get anywhere. The hardest session in this app, because everything you have been trained to do is unavailable.

Structure, socialisation, and a behavioural experiment. The whole session hangs on whether she leaves able to explain her own panic to somebody else.

The session most therapists dilute. You are going to ask a frightened woman to deliberately produce the sensations she has organised her life around avoiding — and to do it first yourself.

The session that makes the rest of the treatment possible: the inventory, the sick role, one problem area, and an explicit contract she agrees to.

The same patient as the cognitive session, approached without any attempt to change what she believes. The target is the struggle and what it has cost her.

He wants to talk about his mother. The diary card says he cut on Thursday. The target hierarchy is not a suggestion, and holding it warmly is the whole skill.

Every instinct you have to persuade him will make him more certain. The entire session is an exercise in not arguing.

Four people, one identified patient, and a family that wants you to fix him. What you do in the first twenty minutes decides whether there is a treatment at all.

A cognitive formulation that fits half the material. The clinical task is to work out, with them, which half — and the last therapist got it wrong.