I've talked a lot on this blog about the tremendously worthwhile gains we can make for our physical health by exercising regularly.  See for example the posts "Does healthy lifestyle really make a difference?" and "Common sense isn't common".  Now the recent national depression guidelines "Updated NICE guidelines on treating depression" and "SIGN guidance on non-pharmaceutical management of depression" underline the importance of exercise for psychological health too.

For quite some time, I've used Katherine Shear's "Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS)" as my main way of assessing and monitoring the severity of panic disorder.  I've recently woken up to the fact that there is a specifically designed "Self Report" version of this scale.  It is copyrighted, but Dr Shear has given permission for clinicians to use the scale freely in their practice and for researchers to use it in non-industry settings.  For other uses of the scale, Dr Shear should be contacted.  Click on "Panic Disorder Severity Scale - Self Report (PDSS-SR)"  to download a PDF of this excellent assessment measure 

Well, well, well ... what a lot of amazing information there is out there on the internet.  I was trawling to try to find the copyright position of the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (more on this soon in a future post) when I tumbled into Mark Zimmerman's "Outcome Tracker" website.  Mark is "Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, the Director of Outpatient Psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, and Principal Investigator of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services (MIDAS) project."

Berlin, Saturday morning.  We flew in from Edinburgh pretty early yesterday.  Direct flight.  Easy.  Guilt over air travel a little allayed by buying carbon offsets through ClimateCare.  We're staying in a Miniloft, one of the really nice set of self-catering apartments designed by Matthew Griffin & Brita Jurgens, an architect couple whose practice is up at the top of the building.

Here are a couple of good psychology websites that I've come across recently.  One is the British Psychological Society's Research Digest Blog with its tag line "Bringing you reports on the latest psychology research."  The site provides an almost daily, brief description of a particularly interesting recent psychology research paper.  Examples in November include "Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity", "How to increase altruism in toddlers", and "Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific".  The site also provides "taster pages" from the monthly magazine "The Psychologist", a list advertising jobs for psychologists, links to a variety of other psychology websites, a whole variety of learning resources, and a bunch of other fun things like "What is the mos

What we've seen in our work is that most people don't give themselves permission to live until they've been given a terminal diagnosis.                 
Stephen Levine

I'm a doctor and psychotherapist who's interested in using attachment ideas to improve how helpful I can be for clients.  Awareness of attachment issues informs therapy, it doesn't dictate it.  An obvious question is whether it's sometimes worth assessing attachment in a "formal" way.  I'm no expert in this area.  I'm an "informed amateur" and, after reading and exploring a good deal around the subject, my impression is that it can be pretty useful at times to assess attachment.  The Wikipedia article on Attachment measures provides an excellent overview of the field while, for much more in depth information, the two attachment books and the various websites that I've described in previous blog post