I wrote yesterday about a pre-conference workshop I attended on "Reimagining CBT for depression" with Keith Dobson.  Today is the first of the three full days of the '9th World Congress of Behavioural & Cognitive Therapies' conference proper.  They aren't taking any prisoners ... each day runs from 8.30am to 6.00pm.  My Airbnb is about a 40 minute walk from the CityCube conference centre, so the day pretty much runs from 7.30am to 7.00pm ... not a holiday!

"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement.  First they ignore you.  Then they ridicule you.  And then they attack you and want to burn you.  And then they build monuments to you."   Nicholas Klein

"Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, reexperience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts."   Salman Rushdie

Yesterday was the first full day of the two & a half day (plus one day of pre-conference workshops) BABCP summer conference in Glasgow.  It feels like I've been going to these annual BABCP get-togethers for a thousand years.  In so many ways, I think they're great ... although, for a society that prides itself on being evidence-based (more on this later in this post), I do think that the way these conferences are delivered is pretty dusty & traditional.  Basically we sit in large tiered lecture halls and listen to major plenary lectures or we sit in smaller rooms for workshops that are very largely just lectures in more extended formats. 

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.

When we're badly physically injured, there may be horrible pain and loss of ability to function normally. Then though there is typically a gradual recovery.  Scars may be left; there may be some persisting vulnerability, but basically our bodies are wonderful at self-healing.  There are parallels between wounds due to physical injury and wounds due to emotional injury.  For example, when we are bereaved, there may be horrible pain and loss of ability to function normally.  Gradually, over time, our minds & hearts can heal.  Of course, if we have lost someone important to us, we will never be quite the same.  We may always miss them, and remember them with sadness, gratitude and love.  The grief resolves though and we can move on with our lives, even though we continue to carry our loved ones in our hearts ... and this resolution is what they would have wanted for us.

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

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."   James Hollingworth