What is Active Mind & Body?

Active Mind and Body is one of the only practices in Melbourne totally dedicated to taking an integrated and holistic approach to mental health. One of the keys to holistic health care and deep lasting change is finding the cause of your mental health issues. Consequently at Active Mind & Body our initial holistic assessment takes 2 to 3 hours encompassing all the major areas and potential causes of mental health issues. At the conclusion of this assessment we are able to identify and treat the cause and any subsequent symptoms of your condition. Further this is done in an integrated way all under the one roof, with every case being personally supervised by our principle practitioner, Dean Smith who is a Herbalist, Psychologist, Massage Therapist and Hypnotherapist.

What is a Holistic Assessment?

Our initial Holistic assessment includes a complete psychological assessment and naturopathic assessment that covers emotional, psychological, biochemical, historical, spiritual and social causes of mental health issues. Specifically this includes talking face to face with one of our caring and supportive practitioners, followed by iridology photographs (a photo of your eye), several questionnaire screening tools (please note this not always done at the same time) and some times pathology testing may also be required.

After the Holistic Assessment our team sit down and discuss the results confidentially and develop a treatment plan that will specifically target the cause of your mental health issues and if required treat problematic symptoms also. Treatment is tailored to individual needs and causes but can include one or a combination of the following treatments:

1. Various Counseling and Psychotherapy approaches (a Medicare rebate is now available for some types of Counseling and Psychotherapy)
2. Meditation
3. Various Body Therapies
4. Herbal Medicine
5. Hypnotherapy
6. Nutritional Medicine
7. Relationship or Family Therapy
8. Mind-Body Medicine

It is also worth noting that even though we believe drug therapy can be a useful strategy in a small number of cases, we believe it should be the last option due to the side effects of these treatments and not the first as it is so commonly used in mental health care. However most of our clients never need to go on medication or find they can come off existing medication during treatment at Active Mind and Body.

Some of the conditions that we have found respond very well to our approach include the following:

1. Anxiety
2. Depression
3. Panic Attacks
4. Developmental Trauma (past emotional, physical or sexual abuse)
5. Current Trauma (for example victims of crime or survivors of natural disasters)
6. Grief and Loss
7. Insomnia
8. Addictions (drugs, alcohol and food etc)
9. Medical conditions with a psychological / emotional cause or component
10. Stress and Burn out
11. Anger Issues
    

What now?
If you are interested in taking a holistic approach to your mental health issues we recommend you call Dean on 93842700 and he will spend approximately 20 to 30 minutes answering any further questions you may have and take a brief history over the phone to enable him to decide which of our practitioners is best suited to your needs.

Thanks, Dean Smith