Case study: Creating cognitive behaviour therapy tools for people with visual impairments

Rupal Panchal and Maggie Galbarczyk from South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's Wellbeing Matters service have adapted graphic representations of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) formulations to meet the needs of people with visual impairments.

Wellbeing Matters offers support to people with mild to moderate mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, phobia, obsessive compulsive disorder and trauma.

One treatment is CBT, which is used to break down a problem into manageable parts to focus on within treatment. This process is called formulation. Many people find it helpful to do this using diagrams or graphic representations, which can be a problem if a person has a visual impairment.

Initially, Rupal and Maggie’s goal was to find a technique that would enable Maggie to learn CBT formulations and their graphic representations and to be able to apply them in her clinical practice.

Because Maggie is completely blind, they made sure that the models of CBT formulations were fully tactile, but also took into consideration the needs of potential future practitioners and clients with various degrees and types of sight loss.

Maggie and Rupal researched and used colour contrast, lighting and magnification and have used Braille stickers and even a glue gun to create raised lines and arrows.

Maggie says, “This work has really helped me to develop a mental image of the diagrams so I can guide my clients through them. I need to build up the full picture in my mind rather than viewing the whole diagram at once”.