Psychosis from a psychological perspective

I recently sat in on a presentation about psychological interventions for serious mental illness at an international conference , where the audience was mostly made up of US health professionals working in psychiatric settings.

What was interesting (or to be more accurate, disconcerting) for me were the number of comments from the audience expressing surprise that [...]

Acceptance…. like learning to ride a bike

I found a nice little video on youtube recently of Kevin Polk describing the contingency-shaped nature of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or Acceptance & Commitment Training, as they call it in the program at the regional centre of the Veteran Affairs in Togus, Maine USA). A nice metaphor that ACT is like learning to ride [...]

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Early Psychosis

Recently, with my colleague Joe Oliver, we presented our work (at the ACT Summer Institute IV) on developing acceptance and commitment therapy to help young people recovering from a first episode of psychosis. We titled our presentation “ACT Early”, and described the work we have been doing in developing groups and individual therapy for this [...]

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the United Kingdom

For the past 6 months or so I have been working on a committee to set up a Special Interest Branch of the BABCP that focuses on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It has been good to get involved again in organising training and the promotion of evidence-based psychological therapy, something that I used to [...]

Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder

The latest podcast from “All in the Mind” (the excellent ABC Radio National program about the mind, brain and behaviour) concerns borderline personality disorder (BPD) and is really worth a listen if you want to understand BPD in a sympathetic and informed way. The program explores the histories and motivations of people who attract this diagnosis, as well [...]

Contextual Cognitive-Behavioural Therapies

I have a terrible confession to make about my background as a clinical psychologist: I trained as a behaviourist.
Why is this “terrible”? Well, because I now work in the UK, where it seems that behaviourally-oriented clinical psychologists are scarce (at least in my field), and I am a member of the British Association for Behavioural [...]

The “do as I do, not as I say” approach to therapy supervision

The other week I participated in a training workshop for supervision in cognitive behavioural therapy, which was well-attended by the psychologists in my Trust. It was a useful workshop - with some theory in the morning, going through the (albeit limited) evidence for CBT supervision, and then the afternoon spent doing roleplays of supervision issues [...]

The psychology of paranoia

Recent reports on the study of paranoid thinking have supported the view that suspiciousness and anxiety of harm from others are common experiences, with possibly up to a third of the population being regularly bothered by suspicious or paranoid thoughts.
Daniel Freeman, Jason Freeman, and Philippa Garety have written a self-help guide to “Overcoming Paranoid [...]

Using virtual reality to treat PTSD

Of interest this week are reports of an innovative exposure-based treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder using virtual reality. The Guardian describes the work of Professor Skip Rizzo at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in developing a “virtual Iraq” simulation to assist treatment of soldiers experiencing PTSD. This simulation involves exposure to visual, [...]

Writing therapeutic letters

Lately in my clinical psychology work I have been writing an increased number of therapeutic letters to my clients (”therapeutic letters” are not in a report format but more like a personal letter, and part of the process of therapy, such as a description of a case formulation or a summary of the work we [...]