Dr Chris Taylor, clinical psychologist and chief investigator on the trial, said: “We know that imagery has a more powerful impact on emotions and how we feel than just words alone.<\/p>\n
“Imagine you’re somebody who’s suspicious with paranoia and you have a fear that someone’s going to break into your flat and attack you and hurt you.<\/p>\n
“If you get a visual mental image of that as well, it makes you feel more anxious, more worried, worsens your paranoia.”<\/p>\n
He said he hoped a full clinical trial would take place into the cost and clinical effectiveness of the treatment, and lead to it being used widely.<\/p>\n
Mr Brandwood-Spencer said the therapy helped him separate the images from the “menacing feelings of threat” they caused.<\/p>\n
“One of the most difficult aspects was the powerlessness and the idea that what was happening to me was permanent and inescapable,” he added.<\/p>\n
“IMAPS helped me to address this, by changing this narrative of powerlessness.”<\/p>\n
He now works in the substance use and mental health sectors, where he said he was “able to give people what I needed when it all began”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Chris Taylor, clinical psychologist and chief investigator on the trial, said: “We know that imagery has a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-300059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}