In yesterday's post, I described the pre-workshop publicity for this day on treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome.  How did I find the workshop in actual practice? Well, I enjoyed meeting Trudie Chalder. She came across as very alive, friendly, bright, knowledgeable. Great.  And her two decades or so of dedicated exploration of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is so impressive ... one of those research journeys that I find it heart-warming to look at.  For me the workshop itself was a bit of a funny mix. In the morning session we were given an overview/update on chronic fatigue syndrome and its standard CBT treatment.

The 40th British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) conference is at Leeds University.  As usual it's preceded by a choice of pre-conference workshops. Three of the nineteen initially on offer have been cancelled, but there's still a wealth of options. I'm due to go to Trudie Chalder, from the London Institute of Psychiatry, speaking on "Emotional Processing in the Context of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Implications for Persistent Physical Symptoms in General".  The pre-workshop publicity states: "More than half of people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have co-morbid depression or anxiety.

(A printable copy of this blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file)  

I was struck by a paper published this month in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry - "Effect of purpose in life on the relation between Alzheimer disease pathologic changes on cognitive function in advanced age".  The authors wrote "In recent years, systematic examination has shown that purpose in life is associated with a substantially reduced risk of incident AD (Alzheimer disease), mild cognitive impairment, disability, and death.