I had an interesting mix of experiences yesterday.  It's left me wondering - about the balance between passion and peacefulness, about whether vitality and craziness fit into a meditative life, about courage and risk and exploration.

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."

The e-newsletter from Depression Alliance Scotland (DAS)  popped into my inbox last week.  What good work they do.  The new information that particularly caught my eye was access to an online facilitated self-help course.  The description runs: "We have a new service offering support for people to use Living Life to the Full Interactive, a computerised online self-help programme based on cognitive behaviour therapy.  You will work through a six session course and a DAS staff member will be there to offer 4 - 6 short telephone contacts on an individual basis over 6 weeks to help you get the most out of it.  Interested? Email info@dascot.org or call 0845 123 23 20"

All day Friday and all day Saturday exploring Berlin.  Then on Saturday evening we went to a reasonable restaurant and this morning - Sunday - I woke with what seems to be a pretty good dose of food poisoning.  Humph.  Well it's been a peaceful day for me with my system gradually recovering.  Dear Catero has had a tourist time on her own, popping in now and again to see how I'm doing.  Gradually and steadily getting better is the answer.  By late morning I was up for reading again.  The book I have with me isn't as appealing as I'd hoped (rather jaundiced "realism"), so I've been enjoying looking at some research papers on self-affirmation!  Sad or what?! 

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 half a dozen recent research papers on depression (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post).  The first two are about the well-known Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS).  There have been a whole series of research papers published on this large multisite US National Institute of Mental Health funded study.  For more information click on the TADS home page.  The study compared CBT, fluoxetine, or their combination in treating moderate to severe depression in teenagers.  As March & Vitiello state in their overview "Findings revealed that 6 to 9 months of combined fluoxetine plus CBT should be the modal treatment from a public health perspective as well as to maximize benefits and minimize harms for individual patients ...