I run an annual five day training for counselling psychology students on facilitating groups. I'm using this blog post to upload some of the slides. For example here's a collection on the current state of psychotherapy & some suggestions on potentially helpful ways of moving forward.
More to follow! ...
I'm running a workshop today on "Biological treatments for psychological disorders: an overview & update for therapists". You can download the 100 plus slides by clicking here. The overall outline of the day is illustrated in this slide:
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - Endnote - which currently contains well over 24,000 abstracts. I also regularly tweet about emerging research, so following me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ (click on the relevant icon at the top of this web page) will keep you up to speed with some of what I'm finding interesting. Additionally you can view this highlighted research by visiting Scoop.it (click on the "it!" icon at the top of the page). At Scoop.it, I stream publications into five overlapping topic areas: Cognitive & General Psychotherapy, Depression, Compassion & Mindfulness, Healthy Living & Healthy Aging, and Positive Psychology.
I recently wrote a blog post "Kidney donation: why it's well worth considering". I commented that most blog posts on this website are primarily written for fellow health professionals & others interested in an evidence-based approach to stress, health & wellbeing. However this sequence of posts about kidney donation are different in that they are written mainly for other potential kidney donors and their friends & families. I hope a personal story about a fellow donor's experience will be helpful, especially as my background in medicine & psychology may colour these posts usefully.
Note: I actually had the kidney operation in December 2016 but, when initiatlly writing this blog, the hospital asked me to change the dates so it was less likely that the recipient would be able to identify me 'by mistake'. Since I and the dear man who received the kidney ... and who is now very well ... have been in fairly regular contact, it's OK to confirm that the actual donation was in December 2016.
I recently gave a talk entitled "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?" where I began by arguing that therapist drift isn't of great importance and rapidly segued into a series of rather more fundamental issues - see the blog posts "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring - maybe not so important?", "Psychotherapy is helpful but has developed shockingly poorly over the last 30 years" and "Some counsellors & psychotherapists are more effective than others&qu
This is the third in a sequence of blog posts - "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring - maybe not so important?", "Psychotherapy is helpful but has developed shockingly poorly over the last 30 years" and now this one "Some counsellors & psychotherapists are more effective than others." As you can see from the slide below, identification and study of highly successful therapists' methods and characteristics is an obvious area to explore much more fully, as it is almost certain to give leads on how we might make general improvements in psychotherapy's helpfulness.
I wrote a blog post recently on "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?" where I argued that current research evidence does not suggest that "therapist drift" is of much significance for either increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. As you can see from the slide below though, I felt that the whole debate about therapist drift is something of a red herring when one considers the huge challenges faced by psychotherapy as a whole:
(this blog post is freely downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)
I'm scheduled to give a talk at the Psychologists Protection Society AGM entitled "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?". It seems the society has a Continuing Professional Development arm. They invite people to give lectures (there are a couple at this AGM) and then post them onto their Professional Practitioner online resource. I was approached to talk and given a list of eight potential topics to choose from.