NICE - the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - recently published guidance on "Depression in adults (update)" and on "Depression with a chronic physical health problem".  The "Depression in adults (update)"  replaces guidance originally published in 2004 and amended in 2007.  The 28 page Quick reference guide provides a helpful overview.  Interestingly NICE here use the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for depression rather than the ICD-10 criteria (used in their earlier publications).  A four step approach is charted - each step is described both by who the intervention is for (e.g.

I'm facilitating a group today on "Relationships & emotional intelligence".  When explaining why someone might want to come to the group, the initial publicity leaflet reads "It's worth taking the time to look at our relationships because they are such a huge part of our lives.  Past relationships deeply affect how we feel about ourselves and how we interact with others.  Current relationships can be a great source of joy, warmth and support, or of loneliness, frustration and unhappiness.  Human beings are social animals.  In many ways we are the sum of our relationships.  As adults, we don't have to just accept how we learned to relate when we were younger.  We can look at our interpersonal style and  how we connect with our emotions.  We can get feedback from others.  We can decide what patterns we are happy with

Here are the handouts and recordings for the eighth and final session of this basic Autogenic Training course.  The initial "Autogenic relaxation training" page introduces the method and gives access to the previous seven lessons in the training sequence. 

There are two main themes for this last session.  One is to encourage course participants to review what they have learned over the previous weeks of the training, and to become clearer what feels right for them to do now.  The second theme is to introduce some ideas about the importance of relationships and how this can overlap into Autogenic Training.

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in this study was " ... twice as large as the effect attributable to treatment group assignment."  Practitioners assigned to give warm, empathic consultations achieved considerably better outcomes than those assigned to neutral consultations, although the " ...