Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Bipolar Disorder: The Balancing ACT Group

This chapter introduces an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach for engaging people with bipolar affective disorder to promote well-being and recovery. We first introduce the basic concepts of ACT, illustrated with a composite case study. We then discuss the rationale for using ACT for treating bipolar disorder (BD). Finally, we describe our ACT-based bipolar psychoeducation group (Balancing ACT; O’Donoghue et al., 2018), and briefly detail the quantitative and qualitative research findings from our evaluation of the group in community mental health settings.