I wrote yesterday about "Emotional avoidance, emotion driven behaviours & physical sensation tolerance (fifth post)".  Today's is the last post in this series of six on David Barlow & colleagues' new unified protocol for treating anxiety, depression & other related psychogical disorders.  It covers the last two modules in their eight module treatment - "Interoceptive & situational emotion exposures" (4 to 6 sessions) and "Maintenance & relapse prevention" (1 session). 

So yesterday was the first (workshop) day of the two day British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) Spring Workshops and Conference.  Between arriving from Edinburgh on the sleeper and starting the day, I hunkered down in a cafe for breakfast and wrote some introductory thoughts about the workshop I was due to go to.  The publicity material said we would "review recent evidence supporting and discuss applications of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (UP), an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioural treatment designed to be applicable across the anxiety, mood, and related disorders."  I wrote pre-workshop "My current understanding of the field is 1.) It looks like these more unif

Just off the sleeper.  Slept like a baby - well maybe better, knowing some babies.  Now it's two days of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) Spring Workshops and Conference.  Today it's workshops and we have a choice of half a dozen or so.  I've plumped for David Barlow's "Unified protocol for the treatment of emotional disorders".  The publicity reads:

This workshop will review recent evidence supporting and discuss applications of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (UP), an emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioural treatment designed to be applicable across the anxiety, mood, and related disorders. 

Fear is the mind-killer ... I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.  Bene Gesserit "Litany against Fear" from "Dune" by Frank Herbert

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here  .

Here are half a dozen papers on helping kids and adolescents.  The Fuligni et al paper found that adolescents experiencing frequent interpersonal stresses tended to have increased levels of C-reactive protein, " ... an inflammatory marker that is a key indicator of cardiovascular risk ... ".  Jackson et al showed that in preschool kids each extra hour of regular TV viewing is associated with an extra 1 kg of body fat.  This appeared to be due to increases in calorie intake rather than reduction in physical activity.  Decreased family accommodation is associated with improved outcome in paediatric OCD, Merlo et al found.  Naylor et al found that a six lesson teaching block on mental health benefitted young teenagers.  Proctor et al provide a free full text overview of teenage life satisfaction assessment measures, while Wilkinson and colleagues report on 28 week follow-up in a treatment trial for depressed adolescents.  The authors found "Depression at 28 weeks was predicted by the additive effects of severity, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicidal ideation at entry together with presence of at least one disappointing life event over the follow-up period.

Just as there were research papers on depression that stood out and got me thinking last month, so too there were particular papers on psychotherapy that I found more interesting than others. 

Here are a collection of downloadable forms, questionnaires and handouts that I use when working with people struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder.

Normal intrusions - a list of 52 "normal intrusive thoughts" with the percentage of 293 students (none of whom had been diagnosed with a mental health problem) who reported that they had experienced this thought.  I often hand out this leaflet to help people realize that experiencing occasional disturbing intrusive thoughts is totally normal.

OCD diagnosis & prevalence - leaflet giving DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder and some details of prevalence rates.

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.

Here are half a dozen recent studies involving cognitive therapy (CBT).  The first by Craigie et al explores the use of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) to treat generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).  Although, as one would expect, MBCT helped GAD sufferers, it was noteworthy that results "fall well short of outcomes achieved by past research".  This adds to my concern that mindfulness training may at times be being over-hyped - see a blog I wrote in September for for more on this.  The next study by Cuijpers et al also suggests limitations to the march of CBT with interpersonal psychotherapy looking a somewhat better candidate for prevention of depression onset.  I guess one could argue that CBT can - and probably more often should - include  behavioural interventions to promote improved relationships.  Click here for tools that can help this approach.   The third piece of research by Grey et al is exciting.  It challenges the Alice in Wonderland dodo bird suggestion that "everyone has won, and all must have prizes"