Clinical and Counseling Psychology

Biography

Biography: Lawrence Tan kok Kah

Abstract

The aim of the above workshop is to help create a better understanding of Single Session Therapy (SST), a type of brief intervention that has been used widely to work with a range of different psychological disorders. In the realm of addictions (especially for people struggling with a gambling disorder) where the default rate of help-seekers is known to be high, SST has a special role in assessing motivation, planting seeds of change and getting help-seekers to think about utilizing resources available for them. It is also about “seizing the moment” where therapists work with the understanding that the very first contact with the help-seeker could very well be the one and only contact they would have.

In this workshop, we would attempt to give participants a brief overview by looking at the efficacy of brief interventions for gambling disorder and going through the key components of SST (which includes brief advice & assessment, paradoxical interventions, motivational enhancement therapy, solution focused brief therapy, cognitive behavioural approaches, narrative therapy and the use of metaphors and analogies). We would also attempt to give participants a sense of what goes on in a typical SST session (which includes the types of questions to ask to gather important information, ways to make these questions therapeutic in the process of gathering information, linking the information gathered to interventions and suggestions and making a closure). These mentioned sub-components of the workshop will be further enhanced by the use of video clips and real life clinical examples encountered in the process of administering SST.