What are Long-term conditions?

Long Term Conditions are physical health issues that affect your day-to-day life.  Conditions such as Diabetes, Coronary Heart Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Chronic Pain can be difficult to manage and will also impact on our psychological wellbeing. 

What does it feel like?

Sometimes, difficulties in our psychological health can also make managing these conditions more difficult, which in turn can have a negative impact on our health.  For example, feeling low in mood may lead you to make poorer choices about the food you eat (often we want to eat sugary foods when we feel low) – doing this may then make it more difficult to manage our diabetes which in turn, lowers our mood. 

Long-term health conditions can also affect our mental health by leading to us thinking differently about ourselves, by increasing worries about the future, by changing our lifestyles and affecting negatively our self-worth.   

Potential therapy options

Depending on the nature of your difficulties and their interaction with your long term health condition, the best treatment may be a cognitive behavioural therapy based intervention (such as SilverCloud, or working with a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner or CBT Therapist).  In some cases, you may benefit from a more counselling-based approach.

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