About Metacognitive Therapy (MCT)

Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) was originally developed by Professor Adrian Wells and initially used to treat Generalised Anxiety and subsequently expanded as a general treatment approach. The approach is in the recent years backed by scientific evidence from a wide range of studies.

There are several common  features of psychological disorders such as anxiety or depression. Specifically, that thinking becomes difficult to control and biased in ways that lead to a worsening and maintenance of emotional suffering. An important feature is that the persons thinking and attention becomes fixed into patterns of brooding and dwelling on the self and negative information. Metacognitive therapy recognises this change in thinking patterns and believes it is very important and has named it the Cognitive-Attentional Syndrome (CAS).

This pattern consists of worry, rumination, fixation of attention on threat, and coping behaviours that the person believes are helpful but accidentally backfire and keep emotional problems going. The CAS is controlled by metacognitions and it is necessary to remove the CAS by helping patients develop new ways of controlling their attention, new ways of relating to negative thoughts and beliefs, and by modifying metacognitive beliefs. This approach has been developed into successful ways of understanding and treating disorders such as generalised anxiety, trauma and post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, depression and health-anxiety.

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Our goal is to try and make access to effective and properly delivered MCT as widely available as possible. This is why we have established an on-line route to accessing this useful treatment.