Yesterday was the first full day of the two & a half day (plus one day of pre-conference workshops) BABCP summer conference in Glasgow.  It feels like I've been going to these annual BABCP get-togethers for a thousand years.  In so many ways, I think they're great ... although, for a society that prides itself on being evidence-based (more on this later in this post), I do think that the way these conferences are delivered is pretty dusty & traditional.  Basically we sit in large tiered lecture halls and listen to major plenary lectures or we sit in smaller rooms for workshops that are very largely just lectures in more extended formats. 

When assessing and monitoring progress with OCD sufferers, originally I used the Y-BOCS questionnaire.  Then some years ago I switched to using the OCI (distress scale).  This is fine ... it's the officially recommended OCD questionnaire by IAPT, the English Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies initiative (see pages 39-41 of their freely downloadable Appendices and helpful resources manual).  But a hassle about the 42-item OCI is that it's time consuming, taking about 12 minutes to complete and a fair amount of time to review & score.  I've now shifted to using the 18-item OCI-R (see Veale et al, 2016 below). 

I was intrigued to see the recent paper by Ghazizadeh-Hashemi et al - "Palmitoylethanolamide as adjunctive therapy in major depressive disorder: A double-blind, randomized and placebo-controlled trial" - with its abstract reading: "Experimental studies provide evidence for antidepressant effects of Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) in animal models of depression.  We aimed to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of PEA add-on therapy in treatment of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD).  Methods In a randomized double-blind, and placebo-controlled study, 58 patients with MDD (DSM-5) and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D) score ≥ 19 were randomized to receive either 600 mg twice daily Palmitoylethanolamide or placebo in addition to citalopram for six weeks ...

This "Initial background" post provides important information to support use of the brief 6-minute "Emotion colouring In exercise".  There is additional useful information in the companion post "Further background for the colouring in exercise: gratitude, expressive writing, emotion processing & taking it forward". 

Emotional intelligence:

Emotion differentiation:

More to follow ...