Psychoeducation is a vital building block to successful, collaborative, client-centered therapy. But effective treatment isn’t just about informing clients passively, it’s about empowering them with possibilities so that they can play an engaged, proactive role in their own wellbeing.
Whether you want to craft a standalone activity or a versatile treatment template, this article will show you how to build and share unique psychoeducation interventions in a few simple steps.
Before you dive in, we think you’ll enjoy our 30 day, $1 trial of Quenza’s tools. Our teletherapy tools will help you craft professional custom interventions quickly and easily, so that you can inform, educate, and empower your clients with your own unique solutions.
What is Psychoeducation in Therapy?
Psychoeducation is the professional process of educating clients and other important therapy stakeholders about:
- The conditions they are managing or hoping to manage
- The treatments options available to them, and how they work
- The emotional, practical, and motivational aspects of therapy, and
- The therapeutic relationship itself – not least the active role that they can play in their own recovery.
Psychological interventions are a way for therapists and e-mental health practitioners to empower patients, invite their collaboration, and open up possibilities at the same time.
While they have frequently been delivered as more passive, uni-directional learning content in the past, therapists today are increasingly more aware of their valuable role in patient engagement.
As a result, psychoeducation today often involves the use of more interactive, involved interventions, with a range of tools, multimedia, exercises, and more.
How To Design Digital Psychoeducation Interventions
Psychological interventions are a way for therapists and e-mental health practitioners to empower patients, invite their collaboration, and open up possibilities at the same time.
Creating virtual content isn’t just a quick, effective way to share your psychoeducational interventions, it also makes them more convenient for clients to engage with securely on the move.
You’ll first need to consider:
- What concepts you’d like to introduce or discuss
- The role your psychoeducation will play in your client’s mental health treatment, and
- The best way for your patient to interact with your materials, based on their competencies, needs, preferences, and interests.
These will help you decide how to structure your intervention using various frameworks or formats, the multimedia you’ll include, and the channels that you’ll use to share your interventions.
A little further on, we’ll provide some useful ideas and psychoeducation examples to help you get started.
Creating Psychoeducation Tools: 6 Examples
Ready to build your own psychoeducation interventions?
Whether you’re sharing them through a CBT app of your own or building up a treatment plan to maximize engagement, you’ll find some useful formats to consider in the table below.
| Intervention | Example |
|---|---|
| Assessments/b> | Self-awareness exercises, behavioral ratings, and more can all encourage patients to reflect on their strengths, weaknesses, and priorities – and are easy to include at any point in the therapeutic process. |
| Exercises | Practical, multimedia-rich interventions such as decision-making frameworks, goal-setting activities, and specific techniques help clients develop skills and discover information for themselves |
| Lessons | Making complex psychological concepts simple through diagrams, videos, and worksheets builds up client informedness while inviting them to play a more active role in their therapy |
| Meditations | Some common examples include guided mindfulness meditations, deep breathing exercises, and progressive muscle relaxation exercises. |
| Metaphors | Across a range of fields, metaphors invite deeper understanding and new perspectives on key concepts. Examples include ACT metaphors, cognitive restructuring metaphors, and vignettes. |
| Reflections | Daily journals, behavior diaries, and more can give patients more insight into their needs, interests, and progress. |
Choosing the right psychoeducation interventions for your client – or a particular course of therapy – means taking the time to think about their particular needs.
For clients who prefer quick-to-complete modules, you might consider quiz- or survey-style exercises; for visual learners, video therapy interventions might work better as shown:
Similarly, by combining various tools, you can create relevant, personalized psychoeducation programs for clients in a way that aligns with their learning needs and preferences.
6 Templates & Topics For Psychoeducation Modules
Psychoeducation plays a huge part in all kinds of strengths-oriented treatments, so online interventions are by no means limited to clinical settings.
Wherever your goal is to empower clients, encourage proactive behavior, and enhance collaboration, making relevant learning content and interventions available is an effective way to boost patient engagement.
Some example topics might include:
- CBT Psychoeducation Modules – covering concepts such as cognitive distortions, restructuring, challenging thoughts, or cognitive defusion. Quenza’s Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion Exercise is a good example.
- ACT Psychoeducation modules – informing clients about the goals of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, helping them set goals, overcome obstacles, challenge thinking with metaphors, or visualize.
- Solution-Focused Guided Imagery is another free Quenza Expansion activity that can quickly be personalized with client names, and which guides them step by step through the process of goal visualization.
- Mindfulness Modules – meditations, breathing exercises, and other MBSR/MBCT exercises all work excellently as videos and audio tracks, as well as assessments and quizzes like Quenza’s A Mindful Goal Focus.
- Mindset Modules – introducing concepts like the Growth and Static mindset, e.g. 20 Guidelines for Developing a Growth Mindset in a lesson format
- Emotional Intelligence Modules – covering Emotional Regulation, Awareness, and more, like the reflection exercise Distinguishing Physical from Emotional Hunger.
Building Psychoeducation Worksheets with Quenza
With the right software, designing personal, bespoke interventions from scratch can be simple.
Quenza’s therapy tools are a great example of how a psychoeducation worksheet can be designed, shared, and delivered in three easy steps.
1. Crafting Original Activities
Designing psychoeducational interventions from scratch gives you complete control over the fields, videos, text, questions, and interactive elements you want to include. With Quenza’s Activity builder, these can be dragged and dropped into different worksheet sections from the right-hand menu into your intervention.
This way, the same basic tools can be used to create tutorials, exercises, meditations, surveys, quizzes, scales, diaries, and other psychoeducation worksheets:
As this screenshot shows, the Activity builder’s versatility means that exercises and more practical activities can easily be accompanied by walkthrough instructions, such as in an audio guide.
2. Customizing Expansion Activities
Not every intervention needs to be crafted from scratch – to avoid you reinventing the wheel, Quenza Activities can be saved as modifiable templates, then adapted before sending with a few tweaks.
Alternatively, the Expansion Library is full of validated scales, psychological assessments, and commonly used therapy activities, such as the psychoeducation examples we just described:
Adapting Expansion interventions from templates is as straightforward as adding the worksheet to your library before amending a copy of it.
As above, these can be personalized with fields such as client name or title, as well as your practice logo.
3. Designing Psychoeducation Programs
Regardless of whether you choose to design or adapt your interventions, all activities can be saved and assembled into psychoeducation programs using the Pathway tool.
Designed to simplify treatment planning, the Pathway tool allows you to search for, integrate, and schedule the delivery of pre-made activities from your library:
As the screenshot shows, psychoeducation worksheets from a completed Pathway can be shared with clients with a click, or they can be scheduled for automatic sending at custom intervals.
Client results are tracked in real-time in your Dashboard so that you can see which worksheets have been received, completed, or opened.
Final Thoughts
With the modern therapy tech available today, it’s easier than ever to inform, involve, and engage your clients in therapy. Simply by designing your own interventions, you can give solutions a unique touch that encourages even more learning and positive outcomes.
Use these psychoeducation topics, worksheets, and examples to inspire you, and pretty soon you’ll be sharing your professional content in a few simple clicks. Let us know how you go in a comment.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. With Quenza’s user-friendly online tools, you can design your own psychoeducational interventions for $1 and share unique, engaging content under your own brand.
Our blended care tools will help you involve your patients in therapy, and give you everything you need to help them play an active, informed role in their own wellbeing.
