I'm off to Sweden this weekend, seizing the chance for some 'touristing' in Stockholm before taking a train north to the 'Achieving clinical excellence (ACE)' conference in Ostersund.  If becoming a more effective practitioner interests you and you can't get to Sweden this May, then there is plenty of opportunity to participate in the conference online.

And now in Ostersund, on the morning of the pre-conference workshop day, I look back very fondly on my brief stay in Stockholm.  What a really lovely city it is ... and I felt surprisingly at home (maybe some Viking genes?).

This blog post is downloadable as a Word doc.

Ali, S., L. Rhodes, et al. (2017). "How durable is the effect of low intensity CBT for depression and anxiety? Remission and relapse in a longitudinal cohort study." Behaviour Research and Therapy 94: 1-8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796717300840

Complicated grief is ...

More to follow ...

This is the third in a sequence of blog posts - "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring - maybe not so important?", "Psychotherapy is helpful but has developed shockingly poorly over the last 30 years" and now this one "Some counsellors & psychotherapists are more effective than others."  As you can see from the slide below, identification and study of highly successful therapists' methods and characteristics is an obvious area to explore much more fully, as it is almost certain to give leads on how we might make general improvements in psychotherapy's helpfulness.

I wrote a blog post recently on "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?" where I argued that current research evidence does not suggest that "therapist drift" is of much significance for either increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy.  As you can see from the slide below though, I felt that the whole debate about therapist drift is something of a red herring when one considers the huge challenges faced by psychotherapy as a whole:

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 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 wrote a post recently called "Truly excellent therapists have 'grace under interpersonal pressure - Fascinating new research".

Hemingway wrote "Courage is grace under pressure".  New research underlines that "grace under interpersonal pressure" is a key ability of truly excellent therapists.  Study after study has shown that psychotherapists vary considerably in how helpful they are for their clients.  The slide below shows a typical set of findings:

                                       (downloadable as a Powerpoint slide and as a PDF file)

I've already written a couple of blog posts during my "retreat" at this Study Centre - "Setting the scene" and "Settling & questioning".