“ Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine. ” - Leo Tolstoy

                                                               Therapists, mentors & coaches: an introduction

key points: 

1.)  what makes some psychotherapists, counsellors, mentors & coaches more helpful than others? 

2.)  links are provided to five ways of increasing therapist helpfulness - feedback, therapeutic alliance, expectancy & hope, deliberate practice & therapist resilience.

"The secret of patient care is caring for the patient."  William Osler

I've already written a couple of posts about this trip to Sweden - "Achieving clinical excellence (ACE): the 'Becoming a more effective practitioner' conference in Sweden" and yesterday's Achieving clinical excellence: pre-conference workshop 'What is FIT?

I wrote yesterday about arriving in Sweden.  Howevery I'm primarily here for the ACE Conference, so how was yesterday's pre-conference workshop with Scott Miller & Bruce Wampold - "What is FIT, the research behind it and how to do it"?   Well, my initial response was one of some disappointment.  It felt to me that the combination of these two fine researchers/presenters was probably less than the sum of their parts ...

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?).

I'm due to give a talk at the "Cosca Ethics Seminar" in a few hours.  The title is "Do therapists get wiser with experience - or just repeat the same old mistakes?".  The 52 slides make quite a large file to download.  I've put them on Dropbox, so here's the Dropbox link to them as a downloadable Powerpoint presentation and here they are as a PDF file.  There should also be three handouts provided at the seminar - the "Situated wise reasoning scale (SWIS) event", "SWIS questionnaire &am

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:

                      (this blog post is freely downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

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.