"The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices."      Irvin Yalom

"I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being,
let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again."        William Penn

In about a month's time I'm scheduled to go back to my old university for a reunion.  I've never been back for any kind of reunion before ... not to school, not to university, not to medical college.  Why not ... and why am I going back now?

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.)  

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you ..."   "If" by Rudyard Kipling 

There was a pretty startling paper published in last month's British Journal of Psychiatry:

Should group facilitators & would-be group facilitators have personal experience of the skills they're teaching?  Should swimming or driving instructors be able to swim or drive themselves?  I'm sure it's possible to help someone learn to swim without being a swimmer oneself, but if you're an instructor you're likely to do a better job and be more convincing in your suggestions if you yourself are pretty good at swimming. 

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in this study was " ... twice as large as the effect attributable to treatment group assignment."  Practitioners assigned to give warm, empathic consultations achieved considerably better outcomes than those assigned to neutral consultations, although the " ...

The autumn edition of the BABCP magazine CBT Today carries information about a wealth of courses & conferences.  Here are half a dozen that look interesting, including three - children & families and a couple of European conferences - that aren't mentioned in CBT Today:

ACAMH-BABCP Conference, Croydon, London.  Cognitive Behaviour Therapy with Children and Families: making CBT work for individuals, families, practitioners and services.  Wednesday, Thursday & Friday, 2nd-4th December, 2009. 

BABCP Spring Conferences & Workshops at the University of Westminster, London.  Relationships and Relating in CBT: Science and Practice.  Thursday & Friday, 8th & 9th April, 2010.

NICE is the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health." Although their guidance applies particularly to England and Wales, the opinions they come up with are very carefully weighed and can be of use to health (and education) professionals wherever they work.

Here are six studies relevant to improving psychotherapy outcomes.  Brewin et al report on using imagery-based interventions to help people with depressioin.  Lydiard et al highlight the importance of sleep-related disturbances as a treatment target in PTSD.  McCrady and colleagues show that working with couples rather than just individuals seems more effective when using behavioural therapy to help women with alcohol use disorders.  Geerts et al describe rather amazing research investigating "The role of parental bonding and nonverbal communication in the short-term treatment response was investigated in 104 depressed outpatients. At baseline patients completed the Parental Bonding Instrument. We registered the nonverbal involvement behaviour of patients and interviewers from video recordings of baseline clinical interviews and calculated the convergence between patient-interviewer behaviour over the interview ... As hypothesized, low maternal care and high paternal overprotection predicted a poor response to an 8-week treatment.  Maternal care was positively correlated with nonverbal convergence. Moreover, convergence moderated the relationship between maternal care and the response to treatment: Lack of convergence between patients and interviewers turned out to annul the positive effects of maternal care on the treatment response.