I'm due to donate a kidney soon, and I have been writing about what's involved - see "Kidney donation: why it's well worth considering", "Kidney donation: what are the risks?" and "Kidney donation: preoperative preparation & facing challenges generally - values are central".  Primarily these posts are for other donors, but aspects of what I write are also relevant for facing challenges more generally as well.

I'm soon due to have an operation on my left kidney.  I'm donating it anonymously to someone else who needs it pretty desperately.  I have already written about this process - see "Kidney donation: why it's well worth considering" and "Kidney donation: what are the risks?".  Primarily these kidney-focused blog posts are to help other donors and their families & friends.  However, some aspects of the posts are likely to be of interest more generally.  For example, these ones on pre-operative preparation have some relevance to many situations where one is facing a potentially daunting challenge.

I'm scheduled to give a talk at the Psychologists Protection Society AGM entitled "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?".  It seems the society has a Continuing Professional Development arm. They invite people to give lectures (there are a couple at this AGM) and then post them onto their Professional Practitioner online resource.  I was approached to talk and given a list of eight potential topics to choose from.

I have just given a talk on "Recent research on non-drug treatments for bipolar disorder" to the Lothian branch of "Bipolar Scotland".  There is a description of the first part of the talk at "Non-drug treatments for bipolar disorder (1st post) - the value of psychotherapy" and you can download the full sequence of slides here.  Points touched on in the second part of the talk are illustrated below:

I am due to give a talk for the Lothian branch of "Bipolar Scotland" on "Recent research on non-drug treatments for bipolar disorder".  Here is the downloadable Powerpoint presentation (with pictures removed to reduce the size of the file) and here is a slide illustrating the main points that I touch on:

I have already written a blog post ... "Warwick BABCP conference: 3rd day - even more evidence that therapists themselves are central to improving outcome (5th post)" ... about the great last morning symposium "The singer and not the song? Evidencing therapist effects across the IAPT stepped care model".  I have described in some detail the first two symposium presentations ... Nick Firth's "Therapist effects and moderators of effectiveness and efficiency in psychological wellbeing practitioners: a multilevel modelling analysis" and Dave Saxon's "Variability in practice: therapist effects in an IAPT service delivering CBT and counselling".

Yesterday was the third & last morning of this year's BABCP summer conference in Warwick.  I have already written about the second day in "Warwick BABCP conference: 2nd day - behavioural activation, Kyrios OCD, 'mind the gap', & DeRubeis on personalization (4th post)".  Overall, there were two particular presentations I was especially looking forward to coming to this conference and they have both delivered in spades.

Yesterday was the second full day of the BABCP summer conference in Warwick.

I have already written about the pre-conference workshop I went to on "Anger dysregulation" and the presentations on the first morning of this year's summer CBT conference in "Warwick BABCP conference: 1st morning - trauma memories & a master presentation on four decades of outcome research (2nd post)".  In the afternoon I attended a symposium on "Improving treatment of anxiety and depression in adolescence" and then went on to a keynote by the Australian professor Michelle Moulds entitled "Rumination and memory in depression".

Yesterday I blogged about the pre-conference workshop I attended on "Anger dysregulation". Today was the first full day of the conference proper.  Breakfast illustrated the kind of helpful, fun conversation that can emerge at this kind of event.  I talked to Fiona McFarlene & Tara Murphy who were going on to run a skills class on "Exposure and response prevention: adapting skills you already have to the treatment of tics".