I woke gently bubbling with excitement.  I'm off in a couple of hours or so to Glasgow to join a course entitled "Emotion-focused psychotherapy: Level 2 workshop series".  Sadly I missed the first day of this seven seminar sequence - I was at the October Scottish Mixed Group peer residential.  Hopefully I'll get to all of the next six.  There's a seminar scheduled for today and then one a month from January through until May.  I believe there will be about 20 participants, presumably all pretty experienced psychotherapists/counsellors.  What fun!

Yesterday I wrote a post "Meeting at relational depth: what intrigued me most".  I described how, in this one day workshop, I paired up with someone I'd never met before and acted as client in a 20 minute role-played counselling session.  Every minute we independently estimated how deeply we felt connected (on a 0-10 scale).  When we looked at our estimates at the end of the session, they almost exactly matched.  I felt as connected to my "counsellor" as she did to me, even though she had said only a few words.  What's going on?

This post describes the "Needs, beliefs & behaviours" diagrams, best viewable on screen in PDF format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4), but also downloadable in Powerpoint format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4).  The post below is downloadable as a Word format handout. 

This is the 7^th blog post in a series reviewing the recent Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network's (SIGN) draft guideline for "Non-pharmacological management of depression".  I gave more background details in the first post of the series.  This post covers the third session of the guideline presentation seminar.  The session was entitled "Effectiveness of psychological therapies in depression 2" and there were three speakers.  Professor Kevin Power, Area Head of Psychological Therapies, NHS Tayside, talked about "Counselling, marital, family and reminiscence therapy".  Kevin said there were comparatively few good randomized controlled trials on counselling interventions specifically for patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder.  SIGN gave a Grade