Our two day workshop is a “great opportunity to reflect on clinical practice and learn new skills”. Find out more about the application of Ayres’ Sensory Integration beyond childhood to support health and wellbeing.
We can also offer 2 or 3 day onsite bespoke training and consultation for your organisation to support the development of sensory integration informed care pathways.
On our courses, we teach staff from CAMHS and adult/older adult mental health services how to use Ayres’ Sensory Integration to inform care including for those who have had early trauma.
On our in-house courses, we regularly teach mixed staff teams including Mental Health Nurses and Healthcare Assistants, CPN’s, OT’s, PT’s, SLT’s and Therapy Support Staff, Complementary Therapists, Psychologists and Psychiatrists. Working with staff teams from forensic, secure, acute and longer stay units, our lecturers help teams to develop and implement sensory informed care pathways. This includes working with sensory providers to develop secure safe sensory rooms for safe self-regulation and sensory-rich movement activities suitable for secure and forensic environments, where ligature risks mean traditional swings and other equipment cannot be used.
The use of Ayres’ Sensory Integration to support health and well-being has grown across the UK and Ireland.
The research and evidence base is expanding across the globe, with more clinical audits and studies being published that report that Ayres’ Sensory Integration is
this means that there are significant reductions in
We’d like to thank Tina Champagne for pointing us in the direction of this resource which fits so neatly alongside the resources and tools we teach on our courses.
Tina is a colleague and critical friend of ASI WISE – having started her journey into sensory integration in parallel to our journey here in the UK where we were focussing on improving participation in care and daily life, addressing development of skills and occupations including self care to reduce self harm and use of PRN medication. We finally met in 2004 at a first conference about ASI in MH in Cornwall, UK.
Her work in addressing the use of chemical (mace) and mechanical (cuffs) restraints in the US helped transform their mental health care and she wrote several chapters in this free online resource about developmental trauma and practical ways to institute trauma-informed care.
Resources for Eliminating Control and Restraint aka Therapeutic Manage of Aggression and Violence
https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2016/07/vq/restraint-resources.pdf
Mental Health Awareness Week 2018: Millennials feel more stressed in the workplace than older colleagues, study finds
— Read on www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-stress-workplace-higher-baby-boomers-mental-health-awareness-week-2018-a8350631.html?amp
The first Sensory Ladders were made in 2001 for adults with sensory integration difficulties receiving help with mental health difficulties in Cornwall. Influenced by the paediatric Alert Program, they offered therapists a way to combine Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Ayres’ Sensory Integration, addressing the development of the person’s self-awareness in collaboration with ward staff on an acute psychiatric inpatient unit.
The need to start with the person where they are at, before introducing learning about new ways of being, including the development of new skills, made it necessary for the Sensory Ladder to remain a very individualised and personalised journey within a close safe therapeutic relationship.
Both Ayres’ Sensory Integration(ASI) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy(DBT) share a common understanding that development and change can only occur within a safe environment. The DBT idea of balancing safety and challenge reverberates strongly with Ayres’ concept of the ‘just right challenge’.
Creating a Sensory Ladder is about creating opportunities for an adult or child to learn to become aware of themselves in a new way – to explore and discover new things about mind, body and brain. It allows the therapist and person to do “curious wondering” together, and for the person to try new things – creating and promoting active but informed risk-taking; testing how we might feel and experience something when we do it differently; new ways of being – new ways of responding.
Making and using a Sensory Ladder is about the journey together within a safe therapeutic relationship. It’s about getting to see and know someone in a very different way, getting underneath the skin of behaviours that are perhaps being described by others as tricky or challenging.
The Sensory Ladder facilitates the reframing of behaviour that are a result of sensory integration challenges, providing the first step of acceptance of the behaviour necessary before strategies and therapy support development and change to happen.
To see more Sensory Ladders, visit our Sensory Ladder FB Page
https://.www.sensoryladders.org.
This feature article was written by Claire Smith, one of the first UK OT’s to deliver Sensory Integration alongside Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). I am delighted to introduce Claire to you, as she was one of the first people I ever lectured about how to apply Sensory Integration’s in Mental Health. That was way back in 2004 and tonight she features on a BBC Documentary – Girls on the Edge.
Here is what Claire would like to add about how Ayres’ Sensory Integration can be used when we work with adults who have trauma and related sensory integration challenges.
As a DBT therapist and SI Practioner I am fortunate to be able to deliver a full DBT programme, alongside an inter-disciplinary DBT team, provide ASI intervention and use sensory strategies that I believe make a real difference to people’s lives.
We combine sensory strategies with DBT skills that support young people to self-regulate and reduce high emotional arousal. These are personalised and individualised to each young person forming part of their positive behavioural support care-plan. Sensory strategies are often used to help young people become ‘talking therapy ready’ prior to starting DBT. There is much stigma around mental health and what it means to be in a secure unit.
Three teenage girls and their families will be sharing their stories and lookIng at the impact on families in a documentary on Thu 22nd Feb, Girls on the Edge, at 9pm on BBC2. Their bravery, openness and honesty helps to break some of this stigma.
The programme has footage of some of the activities offered at FitzRoy House and features glimpses of a number of OT’s I work with providing meaningful occupations and supporting young people in their journey to recovery.
You can see some short clips from the documentary here, and once it has aired, links to watch it again on the BBC.
You can learn more about DBT here.
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