I'm running a one day workshop in Belfast this weekend entitled "Keeping up with research: does it make any difference to our practice?".  Here's a downloadable copy of the 50 or so slide initial Powerpoint presentation.  I'll also be giving the trainee cognitive therapists a series of exercises to try. Here are a set of these workshop slides.  They overlap considerably with the rather iconoclastic first presentation, but also provide a jumping off point for four major areas we focussed on ... 1.) how expertise is developed (Anders Ericsson's work).  2.) the importance of rapid feedback on how well things are going (balancing evidence-based practice with practice-based evidence).

WOOP is an acronym for Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan.  This sequence is based on the very impressive body of research on how to boost motivation, goal setting & goal achievement assembled over many years by professors Gabrielle Oettingen & Peter Gollwitzer.

Is this one question or many?  If you see a therapist, how many treatment sessions are you likely to need?  Sometimes that's a little like asking "If I go on a journey, how long should I travel for?"  Happily though, we do now have enough research evidence to be able to respond fairly helpfully to this "how many treatment sessions?" question.  To give useful answers though, it’s probably sensible to break the very general “how many sessions?” query into a number of more targeted sub-questions.

I was asked by a friend to write a short piece on research evidence backing up therapeutic uses of reading & writing to be used in a local initiative supporting health workers in a diverse range of settings.  Today's and tomorrow's post give the piece with hyperlinks to the various research studies that I mention.  A combination of the two posts is downloadable as a Word doc or as a PDF file.

A couple of recent research studies have underlined the value of specific forms of psychotherapy for complicated grief reactions: 

Michelle Craske & colleagues from the Anxiety Disorders Research Center of UCLA have, for many years, been publishing careful, challenging research on underlying mechanisms & on ways of boosting the effectiveness of exposure therapies for different forms of anxiety.  Craske's list of publications & research presentations runs to 31 pages and begins with a study on musical performance anxiety published in 1984.  As the presentation titles on her list show, for some years the majority of her many lectures at prestigious conferences all over the world have revolved around the theme of how to take evolving scientific findings about fear learning and use them to optimize exposure treatments for anxiety disorders.

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 over 21,000 abstracts.

I recently wrote a post on using video in the most effective treatment we have for social anxiety ... "Treating social anxiety disorder: video (and still) feedback (6th post)".  Typically with social anxiety there are several "layers" to a sufferer's fears about potential negative judgements from others. For example they might be anxious that 1.)  They will blush.  2.)  Other people will notice that they are blushing.  3.)  They will then be judged negatively for blushing.  CBT treatment aims to reduce this anxiety by showing sufferers that their fears are exaggerated and that the methods they have developed for managing their difficulties are mostly making the problem worse.

Back last autumn I wrote five detailed blog posts about CBT treatment of social anxiety disorder and also a further post giving access to a series of assessment & monitoring questionnaires - "Self-practice, Self-reflection (SP/SR) & David Clark's treatment for social anxiety: introduction (1st post)", "David Clark's treatment for social anxiety: assessment (2nd post)", "Treatment for social anxiety: personal aims (3rd post)"

The last morning of this excellent BABCP conference dawned bright & sunny ... as it has all week.  I have particularly enjoyed this year's BABCP get-together.  I think this has been due to a combination of factors including presentations that have been personally of real interest, the weather, the University of Birmingham accommodation, good wifi access(!) and the general friendliness.  Not bad considering I hurt my back in the train on the way here and it has only gradually been easing over the four days of the workshops & conference.