EQUINE THERAPY TREATING DEPRESSION
with the most qualified mental health professionalsHow does equine therapy work?
Equine therapy is an incredibly effective form of psychotherapy that is assisted with the use of horses in a controlled arena environment. Your sessions are conducted by two specialists, which follows the EAGALA protocol, and ensures that the therapy is guided by trained and qualified mental health professionals.
This is essential and a requirement as you need qualified mental health professionals to guide you in and out of successful therapy. Our specialist were the first equine qualified mental health professionals in Australis and have been practising for decades.
Video courtesy of EAGALA
Why use horses for psychotherapy?
Horses are incredibly sensitive to their surroundings and their environment so any subtle changes in your body language and non-verbal markers will be analysed by the horse and its reaction gives us response and feedback to problems in our own lives.
Using Equine therapy to treat depression in a GOODSKY programme.
In all of the depression treatment programmes that we have managed each of our clients have experienced incredible results with equine (EAGALA) assisted psychotherapy. Experiences have ranged from absolute life changing to complete physical change (colour, posture, confidence, self-worth and more) when completing only a few sessions during a programme. We see such effective change in our clients that we include it in every programme we build, even if you are a horse owner or rider.
Equine therapy is integrated into our lifestyle medicine psychotherapy/trauma team so when you attend a session your team has already come together to discuss your needs and what methods will ensure you get the best treatment possible. They will monitor your progress and work together to get the best outcome, for not only equine, but for all therapies in the your programme.
For the first time ever, you will be able to experience EAGALA equine therapy with the backing, support and treatment of your complete lifestyle medicine team.
Equine Studies and Publications
- Morgan, B. M. (2017). Stress management for college students: An experiential multi-modal approach.
Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 12 (3), 276-288.
The study followed a quasi experimental design (N = 42), comparing students in one class who received stress management activities (experimental group) with students in another class who did not receive any stress management programming (control group).
Activities were carried out either with Eagala -Model EAL or another experiential modality (e.g., yoga, mindfulness, hiking). Results showed that student stress decreased from pretest to post test in the experimental group. The EAL modality performed as well as the other modalities.
Nurenberg, J.R. etal (2014). Animal-assisted therapy with chronic psychiatric inpatients:
Equineassisted psychotherapy and aggressive behavior.
Psychiatric Services in Advance, Oct. 1-7.
Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 12 (3), 276-288.
Eagala Model: Study included 90 hospitalised psychiatric patients who had recent violent or regressed behaviors. Participants were randomly selected to one of the following groups for 10 weeks: Eagala Model EAP, canine group, social skills group or routine hospital activities (control group). Found that those in the Eagala group showed largest decrease in violent behavior as measured by incidents of violent behavior (hospital tracking system).
Kemp, K., Signal, T., Botros, H., Taylor, N., Prentice, K. (2013). Equine facilitated therapy with children and adolescents who have been sexually abused: A program evaluation study. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 23, 558-566.
Eagala Model. Eagala Model EAP intervention for adolescents who experienced sexual abuse & trauma -measured psychological distress and found significant improvements in functioning after the equine intervention. view PDF
Studies courtesy of EAGALA