Seeing is believing: Adapting cognitive therapy for visual impairment

Abstract

Recent changes in legislation have contributed to a growing awareness of diversity and the importance of offering services that are genuinely inclusive and empowering. However, substantive guidelines for therapeutic practice are still lacking. This disadvantages both practitioners and clients in that practitioners may feel insufficiently skilled to work with diversity issues and clients may feel that they have been misunderstood or marginalised. In this paper, we consider visual impairment as one particular form of diversity, and explore the experience of working with visual impairment in the therapeutic setting. Specifically, using cognitive therapy as a case example, we offer some ideas on how to adapt particular ways of working to better accommodate the needs of visually impaired therapists and clients. In doing so, we hope to raise awareness of what is still, arguably, a much neglected issue and consider what it means to embrace diversity within therapeutic traditions that have evolved within a very different set of epistemological assumptions.