"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”    Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a young poet".

I wrote a blog post in the autumn - "Improving therapeutic success rates: UK IAPT data gives us a clearer set of targets" - highlighting that, if we want to improve how effective we are at an activity, it's likely to be crucially important that we monitor how well we're actually doing and whether or not our outcomes are getting better.

This is an extended, online, hyperlinked version of a regular quarterly column - "Keeping up with the literature" - that I write for "CBT Today, the official magazine of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies".  In October's column, I commented that new CBT-relevant research flows past constantly like a great river.  I track forty to fifty different journals - many more than most sensible health professionals try to monitor - but this is still just a small subsection of the multitude of potentially relevant publications.  And if I get behind with my reading, a wave of literature rapidly builds up - I've already spent fifteen hours this week alone in a catch up blitz.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple"   Oscar Wilde