Application for Psychotherapy

Information and registration for outpatient psychotherapy

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Dear patient, you have decided to start psychotherapy. In this section, I want to give you the registration procedure and some essential information about the therapy topics.

For the request, it is necessary to fill out the registration form and forward the registration by post to New Leaves joint practice, Stefan Schmidinger, Zeltweg 25, 8032 Zurich, or by e-mail to drschmidinger@hin.ch. I want to point out that registration does not guarantee a place in therapy. 

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A psychotherapeutic treatment can be roughly divided into three sections:

1. Diagnosing and evaluating the problem(s) that are causing you distress? Often, several problem areas or stress factors are the reason for starting therapy. Initially, it is necessary to separate and disentangle these. In the beginning, it is also important to define one or more therapy goals so that this can give you and the therapist orientation in the treatment process. 

2. Where does the problem come from, and why does it not go away? For the emergence of symptoms and the maintenance of the condition, it is often important to know the biographical context and to consider why symptoms cannot go away or be resolved independently.

3. What can you do to make the problem go away? In this step, we will discover what you can do to experience relief of your symptoms. The basic idea is to teach yourself skills to solve the problem. Since the therapist cannot usually solve the problem for you, it is crucial to think about and work out strategies to cope with it. Various aids and techniques are used here (e.g., skills to deal differently with negative thoughts or dysfunctional behavior patterns).

What do you have to do for the therapy yourself?

A fundamental requirement for psychotherapy is your motivation to change and your cooperation. Your cooperation is necessary because only you know and can describe your problem exactly. This is important to tailor the solution to the problem for you. Since the problem or suffering usually does not solve itself, even if you understand it, it is essential to integrate the new insights and solution strategies into your everyday life through changed ways of thinking, processing emotions, and behavior. To achieve rapid therapeutic progress towards the therapy goal, it is necessary that, in addition to the therapy time of usually one hour per week, you spend about one hour per day planning exercises and changes in your everyday life. This way, you can strengthen your resources and promote resilience so that changes remain permanent. 

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Duration of therapy:

The duration of therapy is limited to 40 sessions (approx. one year). If additional sessions are necessary or new therapy goals arise on your part, we can discuss further sessions during therapy. 

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Dates/case of prevention:

We request at least a 24-hour notice to cancel appointments to avoid a cancellation fee. I appreciate your understanding.