Fife Employment Access Trust (FEAT) support young people (15-18) and adults (18+) with moderate to severe and/or enduring mental health problems, providing a range of self-management and employability programmes to people with mental health conditions to better manage their conditions to improve daily living and develop their employability skills to prepare for, enter and sustain paid work, or access other meaningful activities such as volunteering and further education.
The grant from the Pixel Trust is for the licences we require to deliver cognitive remediation therapy (CRT). CRT is an evidence-based therapy that utilises computer games to help participants develop strategies to defeat the computer games and ultimately transfer these strategies into daily life to overcome real-life challenges.
We embed self-management and capacity building into all of our employability programmes, using CRT as the key element to teach people how to self-manage their cognitive deficits such as concentration, memory, attention, information processing and planning. CRT improves social functioning, information processing and helps with learning skills that can be deployed in multiple areas of life. The initial CRT assessment is often conducted by Clinical Psychologists and/or Occupational Therapists to highlight the particular cognitive deficits that are to be targeted to maximise improvement, and the assessment looks at what is most valued by the individual to ensure their own recovery goals are included, which in turn increases motivation to participate.