In the last couple of days I've written two posts on the possibility of developing "emotional chainmail" when faced with repeated experiences of suffering ... "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"?  Description of a possible problem" and "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"?

I wrote yesterday about how, at the weekend, I was involved in an hour and a half's deep emotional conflict resolution with an old friend that was witnessed in a group by another eight people.  As pretty much always, in the feedback that emerged over the next twenty four hours, different people reported very different reactions to what they had seen.  I still (after forty years involvement in a wide cross section of psychotherapy groups) find it jaw-dropping the sheer variety of what different people feel & think when observing absolutely the same event.  However, it seemed that most of those who spoke were deeply moved and respectful of what we'd done and how well it had worked out ...

I've been in a peer "psychotherapy group" residential retreat again recently and I was involved in an interaction that has crystalised a series of thoughts about potential "emotional armouring" in therapists that I've been aware of more vaguely for some time. And in fact these "suspicions" involve not just psychotherapists, but also doctors and leaders more generally as well. Happily there are great advantages of this emotional stability & resilience, but I believe there can also be very genuine personal & interpersonal costs. So what am I talking about here?

I wrote an initial post yesterday on the very interesting recent Lancet paper "Cognitive behavioural therapy as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy for primary care based patients with treatment resistant depression: Results of the CoBalT randomised controlled trial".  In today's post I want to give a little more context to this trial and a bit more detail about the patients treated and the treatment used.

I wrote an initial post on "New research suggests ... focus on strengths rather than weaknesses" a couple of days ago.  I discussed various reasons for thinking that better matching of patients to more personalized treatments could be helpful (although difficult) and looked as well at several research studies that have explored possible benefits of focusing treatment - particularly early in the course of therapy - on patient strengths rather than their weaknesses.

In 2010 Simon & Perlis highlighted the importance of being better able to match depression sufferers to treatment approaches that were more likely to benefit them.  In their paper "Personalized medicine for depression: Can we match patients with treatments?", they wrote: "Response to specific depression treatments varies widely among individuals. Understanding and predicting that variation could have great benefits for people living with depression ...

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

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!   It wad frae mony a blunder free us, an' foolish notion."   Rabbie Burns

"He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise."   Lao-tzu