MERIT: Psychotherapy for Promoting Recovery in Serious Mental Illness.

These webinars are sponsored by Richmond Fellowship Queensland 

There is no cost for attending these webinars

Date: 1st Thursday of each month. 

Time:  9.30 am - 10.30 am or  4.00 pm - 5.00 pm  Brisbane time.  Time will be dependent on the time zone of the International presenter.

We wish to invite practitioners working in the field of mental health to join us for a monthly "group discussion" during which we will invite eminent clinicians who work from a MERIT Framework, to share their learnings and expertise in promoting recovery in people with serious mental illness.

We are planning to schedule zoom meetings on the first Thursday of each month. The first meeting will be led by Prof Ilanit Hasson-Ohayon, Chair of the Department of Psychology and Director of the Rehabilitation Psychology Lab at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Ilanit worked closely with Prof Paul Lysaker. She brings expertise in studying processes of coping with illness and disability, mainly in the fields of psychiatric rehabilitation and psycho-oncology.

Each month we will invite different experts to provide input on the essential elements of MERIT and engage in general discussion of  MERIT's applications.

Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT) is a form of integrative individual psychotherapy that seeks to assist adults diagnosed with psychosis to make sense and meaning of the challenges and possibilities in their lives and to find ways to manage these and direct their own recovery.

Building from advances in both cognitive and interpersonal research, MERIT seeks to expand the boundaries of cognitive-behavioural, personal centered and psychodynamic approaches to treatment by focusing on how persons make sense of their experiences of their own purposes and place in the world allowing the development of a sense of belonging to our larger communities. In contrast to other approaches, MERIT focuses on core processes that should be present in a given session, rather than a predetermined curriculum. This allows for a therapy to be truly tailored to meet the needs of unique individuals in real world clinics while also unlocking therapists’ unique potential for creativity as they seek to jointly make meaning with the person diagnosed with psychosis.