Michelle Craske & colleagues from the Anxiety Disorders Research Center of UCLA have, for many years, been publishing careful, challenging research on underlying mechanisms & on ways of boosting the effectiveness of exposure therapies for different forms of anxiety.  Craske's list of publications & research presentations runs to 31 pages and begins with a study on musical performance anxiety published in 1984.  As the presentation titles on her list show, for some years the majority of her many lectures at prestigious conferences all over the world have revolved around the theme of how to take evolving scientific findings about fear learning and use them to optimize exposure treatments for anxiety disorders.

A high percentage of chronic pain sufferers seem to be affected by recurrent imagery that is linked to and aggravates their pain.  Often the imagery's occurrence only emerges with careful questioning.  "Rescripting" these images is associated with impressive short term improvements in pain and distress.  What's exciting is the potential for longer term benefits from this kind of rescripting approach ... not only for chronic pain sufferers but also for people suffering from other persistent distressing states like depression and anxiety.

In January, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published their new evidence-based clinical guideline on the care and treatment of adults with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) or panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia).  This guideline updates and replaces their 2004 one (which was itself amended in 2007).  The full 56 page guideline is available as a PDF and in Word format.  It also comes as a 24 page "Quick reference guide" for health professionals, and as a 16 page "Treating generalised anxiety disorder and pan

I recently looked again at Professor Michel Dugas's interesting work on Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) at Concordia University, Montreal.  On his Anxiety Disorders Lab website he writes: "Over the past 17 years, I have conducted clinical research on the psychological processes involved in the etiology of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This line of research has led to the development of a cognitive-behavioural treatment for GAD ... which targets the four model components (intolerance of uncertainty, positive beliefs about worry, negative problem orientation, and cognitive avoidance), has now been validated in four randomized controlled trials ...

Fear is the mind-killer ... I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.  Bene Gesserit "Litany against Fear" from "Dune" by Frank Herbert

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here  .

Here are a mixed bag of six recent research papers on diet, vitamin D, IBS and yoga (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post).  The first three papers highlight the toxic effects on psychological health, physical health, and society of our processed, high sugar diets.  Sanchez-Villegas et al map a bit more clearly the potential link between diet and depression.  They conclude "Our results suggest a potential protective role of the MDP (Mediterranean dietary pattern) with regard to the prevention of depressive disorders; additional longitudinal studies and trials are needed to confirm these findings."  Fiorito et al show that intake of sweetened drinks in 5 year old girls predicts overweight over subsequent childhood and adolescence, and - rather scarily - Moore & colleagues show a link between confectionary consumption at age 10 and subsequent violence in adulthood.  They concluded "Children who ate confectio