Here are a series of questionnaires and handouts on couples and also on parenting.  

Yesterday NICE - the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England & Wales - published guidance on a diverse range of fifteen clinical, technology, interventional and public health subjects.  Their clinical guidance on Medicines Adherence  interested me, as too did their public health guidance on Promoting Physical Activity for Children and Young People.  The subject of this post is the clinical guidance on Antisocial Personality Disorder and in my next post, I'll talk about their guidance on Borderline Personality Disorder.  As Dr Tim Kendall, Joint Director, National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, states: "Approximately 2 million people in the UK have personality disorders, with antisocial and borderline disorders being the most common.

In blog postings earlier this month, I've talked about supporting my Mum after her recent couple of strokes.  She's been shipped through three different hospitals and now is more peaceful in a nursing home.  It's sad - very sad at times - and it's great that she seems more comfortable, better looked after, and more content.  I definitely feel easier too.  Less weight on my shoulders, less emotional aching.

Here are a set of handouts and questionnaires about emotions.  It seems helpful to understand emotions through an evolutionary perspective - we have emotions, to a large extent, because they had (and have) survival value.  We are the descendants of people with adaptive emotional systems that helped them stay alive and function well.  Typically unwelcome feelings that seem maladapitve are due to emotions that are firing off inappropriately.  As a rule of thumb, if an emotion is an appropriate reaction to a situation it can help us respond successfully.  If the emotion is inappropriate then it's likely to be more useful to work to change the emotional response - through therapy or other approaches. 

Emotions are like a ‘radar system' - this pair of Powerpoint slides, that I print out as a two-slides-to-a-page handout, introduces the idea of emotions as an evolutionarily adaptive system.  I use the metaphor of emotions as a 'radar & rapid response system' - normalising emotions and conceptualising emotional problems as inappropriate levels of activation in a basically adaptive system.