I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains nearly 13,500 abstracts.
Last week I wrote about "A couple of fine books on attachment". Today I want to highlight what a fantastic resource the internet is - below are details of half a dozen websites that offer lots of attachment information, and also details of further websites that are helpful but more limited.
NICE is the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health." Although their guidance applies particularly to England and Wales, the opinions they come up with are very carefully weighed and can be of use to health (and education) professionals wherever they work.
I wrote earlier this month on "Attachment, compassion & relationships". I've been aware of John Bowlby's work on adult-child attachment for many years but, when I've approached it for insights that might help in my work as a psychotherapist, I've been put off by the complexity of assessment methods and variety of reported attachment styles, as well as by the rapidly growing size of the relevant academic literature. As Jude Cassidy and Phillip Shaver write in their preface to the 2008 meister work "Handbook of attachment (2nd ed)" - see more details at the end of this blog post - "Anybody who conducts a literature search on the topic of 'attachment' will turn up more than 10,000 entries since 1975, and the entries will be spread across scores of physiological, clinical, developmental, and social psychology journals, will include numerous
A few days ago a client lent me a DVD of the film Groundhog Day. It's a whimsical comedy about a guy who finds himself in a weird time loop where he has to repeat the same day again, and again, and again. Luckily for him, he isn't condemned to act the same way every time. He has choice. A bit like each of us, he can experiment with trying different responses - and he gradually shifts from being a self-centred, unkind, impatient prima donna to someone much more caring, fun and worth being around. My client talked about how much the film had helped him, and this led me to thinking again about the use of film as "therapy".
Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting). The first by Fournier et al is about whether to choose antidepressants or psychotherapy to treat depression. They found that marriage, unemployment and having experienced a greater number of recent life events all predicted a better response to cognitive therapy than to antidepressants. In the second study Luby et al looked at depression in children aged between 3 and 6 years old. Worryingly they found forms of depression even in kids this young. They also found over two years of follow-up that "Preschool depression, similar to childhood depression, is not a developmentally transient syndrome but rather shows chronicity and/or recurrence." Hopefully this kind of research will mean these troubled children have a bit more chance of being identified and helped.
Here are the handouts, recordings, and reflection/record sheets for the sixth Autogenic training session. There are four overlapping themes to this 'lesson'. Obviously a key issue is the next Autogenic Training step - the focus on the abdominal area. I usually initially get trainees to put a hand or both hands on their abdomen when they are learning this exercise. The hand(s) are positioned a little below the belly button, unless the trainee has specific abdominal symptoms - when positioning the hand(s) over the troublesome area may be more appropriate. The hand(s) don't have to be in direct contact with the skin. A sense of gentle, warm contact through clothing is fine. This typically helps one focus on the abdominal area and the hand contact also merges easily with the feeling of belly relaxation and warmth that one begins to allow.
Here are half a dozen studies on weight, bite size, vitamin D, dietary supplements, and ways of avoiding dementia. Andrew et al report on the "Incident cancer burden attributable to excess body mass index in 30 European countries" estimating that about 6% of cancers could be avoided if we could maintain healthier weights (abstracts & links for all six articles mentioned appear further down this page). Zijlstra and colleagues suggest a possible response! They randomized subjects to eating with different bite (mouthful) sizes and different chewing times. They found that " ... greater oral sensory exposure to a product, by eating with small bite sizes rather than with large bite sizes and increasing OPT (oral processing time), significantly decreases food intake." As Mum might put it "Don't wolf your food!"
Relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, imagery and other associated methods form a complex, loosely interlinked field. The "Four aspects of helpful inner focus" model, that I've put together to help me make more sense of this territory, looks like this:
For a downloadable copy of this diagram click here. There is a fair amount of data supporting most of these methods. To give some examples:
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,000 abstracts.