I have already written a couple of posts on sleep apnea -"Sleep apnea - what is it, how common is it and how does it affect mortality & physical health?" and "Sleep apnea - how does it affect psychological health?".  In this third & last post of the sequence, I'll explore how we can recognise sleep apnea and what we can do about it.

I have already written a first post "Sleep apnea - what is it, how common is it and how does it affect mortality & physical health?" which highlights that sleep apnea is a common, regularly unrecognised disorder, occurring in approaching 1 in 5 adults and that, particularly as it becomes more severe - probably approximately 1 in 10 sufferers (Li et al, 2015) - sleep apnea is linked with a wide range of serious diseases and with significantly increased death rates.  In this second post, I'll look at the relevance of sleep apnea for psychiatric disorders.

“ Education should be "not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." ” - William Butler Yeats

Here are a series of forms that I use almost every session with clients, or for screening and orientation at the start of therapy:

In September, the National Institute for Health & Clinical Evidence (NICE) published a guideline offering "evidence-based advice on the diagnosis and management of tension-type headache, migraine (including migraine with aura and menstrual-related migraine), cluster headache and medication overuse headache in young people (aged 12 years and older) and adults."

I only recently came across the important article "European consensus statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD: The European Network Adult ADHD" published in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry last autumn.  I suspect that most mental health professionals working with adults are poor at recognising and treating Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) - and I certainly include myself in this company! 

Yesterday, in "BABCP spring meeting, first post", I described my initial thoughts arriving at the "Collaborative case conceptualization" workshop.  Well, now it's Friday morning.  A very social time yesterday evening after the workshop.  Slept on a friend's couch.  It's fairly bright and early now and their kids haven't yet emerged.  How was yesterday's workshop?

So here I am sitting in a cafe at Euston station.  I came in on the sleeper half an hour or so ago.  I slept well, which was a blessing.  I love it.  A full day's work yesterday, travel while asleep, well set up for a full day today.  Sleepers don't always work out so well, but my old tricks of aiming to be pretty tired when I get on board and using earplugs seemed effective this time.  I didn't even resort to the further favourite of having a good slug of whisky before tucking in to the rather narrow bunk.

Here are three websites that I have recently found interesting.  The first two are possibly more for therapists, while the third can be very helpful for therapists and general public alike.

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).