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 13,000 abstracts. 

Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas of stress, health & wellbeing) and then filter them into three narrower, more specific mailings.  One is to the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) communal email list.  This set of abstracts focuses particularly on cognitive therapy in its many applications (anxiety, depression, psychotic disorders, etc).  Click on BABCP mailing to see the 26 papers (mostly from June journals) that I recently sent out.

The June edition of the journal "Clinical psychology: science and practice"  focused on bipolar disorder.  This is very valuable and the fact that all the articles are freely viewable in full text makes the publication even more helpful.  As Youngstrom & Kendall write in their introductory article (see below) "Knowledge about bipolar disorder is rapidly advancing. One consequence is that current evidence about the diagnostic definitions, prevalence, phenomenology, associated features and underlying processes, risk factors and predictors, and assessment or treatment strategies for bipolar disorder is often markedly different than the conventional wisdom reflected even in recent textbooks and clinical training."  Karam & Fayyad (see below for all articles mentioned, with abstracts and links) discuss diagnosis and the boundaries of the bipolar spectrum.  Merikangas & Pato review recent research on bipolar epidemiology and write "During the past decade, there has been increasing recognition of the dramatic personal and societal impact of bipolar disorder I and II (DSM-IV).

Here are six recently published research papers.  Barnhofer and colleagues report on encouraging results using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for sufferers from chronic-recurrent depression while they are still depressed.  The three major studies published already have used MBCT for recurrent depression while the sufferers are reasonably well.  The next step will clearly be a fuller randomized controlled trial.  Heeren and colleagues report on the how MBCT acts to reduce overgeneral autobiographical memoriy in formerly depressed patients. 

Archer and colleagues describe the successful development and assessment of a group-based cognitive behavioural intervention for sleep problems.  Participants' satisfaction ratings with the training were very high and there were very encouraging reductions in their sleep problems and depressive symptoms.  Morin and coworkers also report on CBT for sleep problems, this time singly or combined with sleep medication.  They concluded that "In patients with persistent insomnia, the addition of medication to CBT produced added benefits during acute therapy, but long-term outcome was optimized when medication is discontinued during maintenance CBT."

We have fifty to sixty people due for lunch today.  I better not hang around writing blog postings for too long.  There's still lots of preparation work to do.  It's great.  I love these midsummer potluck lunches that we've been hosting for many years now.  It's such fun to invite most of our local social network and see them all mixing up together in a chaotic "soup".  Hard work.  Heart warming.  If we invite ninety or so people we normally reckon that about half of them will be able to make it, so today's "catch" is a pretty good one.  Nearly all our closest local friends will be here and mixed up with them will be other friends, acquaintances, new partners, a couple of children.  Fantastic.  There's plenty of preparation and dear Catero has done a lot of cooking but, since it's potluck, we're not trying to feed them all just from our own efforts.