ACT, RFT and Learning Disabilities

I am wondering if there is anybody out there who could help with a query.

I am a clinical psychologist in the UK. I currently work as a lecturer on a clinical psychology training course. being heavily influenced by the 'third wave' CBT theories in my clinical and academic work with adults/Eating Disorders, when approached to supervise work of colleagues and trainees, I tend to draw on these influences.

I have been approached by one of our trainees who wanted to do their major research project on a CBT group with Learning Difficulty clients (either Autistic spectrum clients or those referred with challanging behaviour). The original idea from the trainee was to do a skills based group or anger management group based on Beck ideas/Novaco, but then I immediately drew on ACT and RFT. It makes intuitive sense to me that RFT theory and ACT ideas can be generalised to this population and could make a more theoretically robust project.

However, not wanting to rely on intuition or potential generalisabilty, I was wondering if anybody out there knows of any work/research in applying ACT/RFT to this population? Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Saskia Keville
S.keville@herts.ac.uk