Welcome to Upward Behavioral Health!

We are thrilled to officially open our new psychotherapy practice to all residents of Alabama! Upward Behavioral Health is based in Birmingham, Alabama. We are excited to serve any resident of Alabama experiencing insomnia, anxiety, depression, or PTSD who is ready to live a better life.

In this inaugural blog post, I’ll introduce a few key aspects of our new practice, beginning with our team. My colleagues and I were all born in Alabama and have spent our careers in federal service providing mental healthcare to America’s veterans. Our years spent in federal service have allowed us access to training in a wide array of state-of-the-art psychotherapy approaches, and we are excited to bring these gold-standard treatments to everyone in the state of Alabama. Our areas of expertise are insomnia, anxiety, depression, and PTSD. We also offer treatment for clients struggling with phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and personality disorders, and we offer adult evaluation for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We see clients aged 14 and up, and we offer both individual and group psychotherapy appointments.

We think that our approach to treatment is pretty special and I am proud to talk about it in this post. Our Upward team has identified 4 core values that define our approach to care:

• Relationship-focused.
• Evidence-based.
• Data-driven.
• Measurable results in a reasonable time frame.

Some of our blog posts over the next weeks and months will discuss each of these values in deeper detail, and I’ll give a brief introduction to each today–what they mean, and why we prioritize them.

Relationship-Focused

Our primary focus at Upward is our clients’ relationships with their providers. Time and again, research has proven the importance of this relationship. In fact, the quality of a client’s relationship with their provider–known as the therapeutic alliance– predicts as much as 50% of that client’s potential therapeutic outcome. Fifty percent! That is huge! We know that time spent developing this relationship is time well-spent for our clients. We want to know our clients and for them to feel valued and comfortable with us. Our clients will notice that we spend quite a bit of time learning a lot about them as we work together with them to define what changes they would like to make and how best to go about making them. Before we can get to the business of change, we must first spend the time to connect with our clients and build a foundation of trust and collaboration with them. Making meaningful change is difficult, but it is much more likely to be successful when clients are working with a provider they have faith in and know they can trust.

Evidence-Based

All members of our team are committed to providing evidence-based psychotherapies. What does this mean? Evidence-based psychotherapies are psychotherapy protocols that have been repeatedly tested and proven to yield superior results for clients when compared against other approaches to care. Scientific studies of these protocols have strict requirements, and providers who use them are trained through rigorous programming. Combined, this means two things at Upward: First, only gold-standard psychotherapies are used; and second, these gold-standard treatments are only delivered by providers who have been rigorously trained to deliver them. Upward providers have had years of access to this training; in fact, most of us also have spent a considerable amount of our careers also developing expertise in certain evidence-based psychotherapies and teaching other providers and trainees to use them. We believe that our clients deserve access to the best care that science has to offer, and we are proud to offer it to each and every one of our clients.

Data-Driven

At Upward, we are committed to measurement-based care: treatment that relies on frequent and consistent monitoring to ensure that our clients are making progress toward their goals. Just as you would expect your primary care physician to collect bloodwork to ensure that your new prescription is having the desired effect, providers at Upward consistently collect brief data measurements as one way of tracking our clients’ progress in treatment. This helps us be certain that the psychotherapy approach we are using is working for a particular client. If it is, then great! We continue with that useful technique. Conversely, if the client is not making progress, or if their progress is less robust than expected, then data collection will help us know that, as well, so we can work together to change direction as needed. Research has demonstrated that mental health providers who do not frequently collect this kind of data often overestimate the effectiveness of the treatment they are giving their clients. We do not want this to happen at Upward. Therefore, we take the time to constantly monitor our work with our clients. However, we know it is important that this type of monitoring not be a distraction in the flow of treatment, and we make sure to make this data collection brief, non-obstrusive, and–most importantly–relevant over the course of treatment.

Measurable Results in a Reasonable Timeframe

Sometimes, people can enter into psychotherapy and stay there for months or years without significant progress. We know this can be frustrating, and we want to approach care in a deliberately-different way. For many psychological conditions, meaningful change within a few months–sometimes even less–is extremely reasonable. This is what we want for our clients. We believe that by focusing on the values listed above, we can help our clients make meaningful progress in a matter of months–sometimes even weeks.

Are you ready for psychotherapy that works?

A 2023 survey indicated that Alabama has the nation’s 4th-highest prevalence of mental illness and lowest rates of access to care. We are excited to offer quality treatment to clients who live anywhere in the state of Alabama. We hope that you will look over our website and reach out to us if you have questions, would like to schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation with one of our providers, or would like to schedule an intake appointment. If you are experiencing insomnia, anxiety, depression, or PTSD and are ready to make meaningful change, please reach out to us.