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."

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

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

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.

Here's a method that's exceptionally likely to both boost our overall level of wellbeing and move us towards the goals we feel our most important in our lives.  It will take a bit of effort and commitment - so don't fall into the trap highlighted by Thomas Edison's comment: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

The June edition of the journal "Clinical psychology: science and practice"  focused on bipolar disorder.  This is very valuable and the fact that all the articles are freely viewable in full text makes the publication even more helpful.  As Youngstrom & Kendall write in their introductory article (see below) "Knowledge about bipolar disorder is rapidly advancing. One consequence is that current evidence about the diagnostic definitions, prevalence, phenomenology, associated features and underlying processes, risk factors and predictors, and assessment or treatment strategies for bipolar disorder is often markedly different than the conventional wisdom reflected even in recent textbooks and clinical training."  Karam & Fayyad (see below for all articles mentioned, with abstracts and links) discuss diagnosis and the boundaries of the bipolar spectrum.  Merikangas & Pato review recent research on bipolar epidemiology and write "During the past decade, there has been increasing recognition of the dramatic personal and societal impact of bipolar disorder I and II (DSM-IV).

Here are half a dozen papers on helping kids and adolescents.  The Fuligni et al paper found that adolescents experiencing frequent interpersonal stresses tended to have increased levels of C-reactive protein, " ... an inflammatory marker that is a key indicator of cardiovascular risk ... ".  Jackson et al showed that in preschool kids each extra hour of regular TV viewing is associated with an extra 1 kg of body fat.  This appeared to be due to increases in calorie intake rather than reduction in physical activity.  Decreased family accommodation is associated with improved outcome in paediatric OCD, Merlo et al found.  Naylor et al found that a six lesson teaching block on mental health benefitted young teenagers.  Proctor et al provide a free full text overview of teenage life satisfaction assessment measures, while Wilkinson and colleagues report on 28 week follow-up in a treatment trial for depressed adolescents.  The authors found "Depression at 28 weeks was predicted by the additive effects of severity, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicidal ideation at entry together with presence of at least one disappointing life event over the follow-up period.