Improving low mood using Islam

Are you a Muslim struggling with sadness, low motivation and depression?

Our team of therapists and wellbeing practitioners are delivering a course to support you to improve these feelings using principles of CBT alongside Islamic teachings from the Quran and Hadith. This course uses ‘Culturally Adapted Behavioural Activation’ developed at the University of Leeds.

The 8-week course will provide you with therapy techniques and a self-help booklet to support you to gradually start doing more activities in line with your faith and help with managing the common symptoms of depression.

Course outline

Week 1: Introduction, first steps and sleep

In the first session, we will cover the most common symptoms of depression, look at some case studies and introduce CBT techniques. We will introduce the self-help booklet ‘one step at a time’ that contains the Islamic teachings to help throughout the course.

Week 2: Depression and behaviour

We will start to look at how your behaviour may have changed since becoming depressed, and how avoidance and putting things off can then keep the depression and keep it going. We introduce ‘behavioural activation’ and discuss how it can help us break this cycle.

Week 3: Depression and behaviour

This week focuses on how we can keep behavioural activation going and introduces two new techniques: a practical problem-solving approach, and refocussing which can help us to stop ruminating and fully engage activities.

Week 4: Depression and behaviour

This week we will look at behavioural techniques called trap and trac which will help you change your behavioural response to depression triggers.

Week 5: Depression and emotions

This week we will look at difficulties with change and how to overcome these by monitoring your emotions. Learn a self- sooth technique to help cope with tricky situations.

Week 6: Depression and thoughts

We turn our attention to the role of our thoughts this week, gaining an understanding of the role they can play in maintaining our depression. We introduce a technique to help us to identify these negative thoughts and discuss a number of common thinking errors.

Week 7: Depression and thoughts

Now we have learnt to identify our negative automatic thoughts, we introduce a technique which helps us to challenge these thoughts and change the way we think about situations.

Week 8: Maintaining progress

In the final session, we will make a plan about how we can maintain and build upon the progress we have made so far, re-capping the of the interventions covered in the course and discussing next steps. You can reflect on which Islamic teachings helped you most make the changes you needed and how you are going to keep reminding yourself of those.

Course details

Start date: Wednesday 23 September 2026
End date: Wednesday 11 November  2026

Time: 10am – 12pm

Venue: Bangladesh Centre,  Roundhay Rd, Harehills, Leeds LS8 5AN

Click here to register for free.

Information session

For more information, ring us on 0113 843 4388 or email us at: lcht.adaptedtherapy@nhs.net.