“ Hope is the dream of a soul awake. ” - French proverb
Here are many of the handouts and questionnaires I use currently (autumn '09) when working with people suffering from panic disorder, agoraphobia, OCD or depersonalization/derealization disorder.
“"These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions" ... we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
” - Aristotle/Durant
In May 2013, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published a new evidence-based clinical guideline on "Social anxiety disorder: recognition, assessment and treatment". They state: "This clinical guideline offers evidence-based advice on the recognition, assessment and treatment of social anxiety disorder in children and young people (from school age to 17 years) and adults (aged 18 years and older).
“ A man is as happy as his mind allows him to be ” - Abraham Lincoln
Here are a series of assessment questionnaires and handouts for Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Health Anxiety Disorder. Note that the 2010 Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies "IAPT Data Handbook" recommends using the GAD-7 to monitor progress in Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the short 18-item version of the Health Anxiety Questionnaire to monitor Health Anxiety progress.
GAD, 2 question screen - answering "yes" to either of the two screening questions on this sheet suggests it's worth checking for a diagnosis of full Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) - for example by using the GADQ (see below).
“What gets managed, gets done.
” - Tom Peters
Here is a mixed bag of handouts and questionnaires. Most are spin-offs from CBASP (pronounced 'seebasp') - the awkwardly named cognitive behavioral analysis system of psychotherapy. There are also a few handouts which are adapted downloads from the neurosciences site "The brain from top to bottom". When in 2000, Keller et al reported on the very impressive results obtained by treating chronic depression with a mixture of CBASP and antidepressants, it seemed likely that a big step forward had been taken in improving the lot of chronic depression sufferers. The "CBASP research results" handout (below) gives the abstracts for 14 research papers that are both relevant to CBASP and also highlight other important related themes like th
“The self may be said to be made up of reflected appraisals.
” - Harry Stack Sullivan
Here are a series of forms, questionnaires and handouts that I use regularly in my work. The problem solving diagram is a recurring theme - both at the start of therapy and as a sheet to return to when reviewing and considering additional therapeutic options. Other sheets are classic variants on the tools used by many cognitive behavioural therapists - with occasional alternatives and additions, that I've come up with over the years, thrown in as well.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
” - Annie Dillard
Depression assessment scales come in two basic forms - interviewer/clinician rated and sufferer/patient rated. As stated in the background information on the IDS/QIDS questionnaires (see below) "There are several accepted clinician rated and patient self report measures of depressive symptoms. The most commonly used clinician rated scales are the 17, 21, 24, 28, and 31 item versions of the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) (Hamilton 1960, 1967), and the 10-item Montgomery-Asberg Scale (Montgomery and Asberg 1979). The most frequently used self-reports include the 13, and 21 item version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck et al. 1961), the BDI-II (Beck et al. 1996), the Zung Depression Rating Scale (Zung 1965), the Carroll Rating Scale (CRS) (Carroll et al. 1981), and the Patient Health Questionnaire - 9 (PHQ-9) (Kroenke et al.
“ Greatness is achieved through the discipline of attending to detail. ” - Twickenham Fitness Room Poster
Here are a few handouts that I've put together over the years to provide background information about depression. The development/maintenance diagram is probably the handout here that I use most - both to explain issues about depression and also for many other psychological disorders as well.
“The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self ... I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me I had no self to transcend ... Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering - fear, anger, shame - in an instant.
” - Sam Harris
Here are a series of forms that I use almost every session with clients, or for screening and orientation at the start of therapy:
“ Tell me what company you keep, and I'll tell you what you are. ” - Don Quixote/Miguel De Cervantes
Making a formal psychological diagnosis can be a mixed blessing. It has several potential advantages. If many of my symptoms can be accurately grouped under a specific psychological diagnosis, it may well help to understand what is happening, to clarify the likely time course of my symptoms, and to choose treatments that have the best chance of being effective. It's worth noting that often people suffer from more than one psychological disorder at the same time - this is called comorbidity and it is common.
I wrote in a blog posting on February 12th that Depersonalizati
