Common sense on improving outcomes:  It only takes a little reflection to realise that, if we want to become more successful at doing something, it’s likely to help immensely if we know where we’re starting and can track if we’re improving or not.  The research literature is very clear about the importance of this approach – see, for example, the major text book “Development of professional expertise: Toward measurement of expert performance and design of optimal learning environments” – but common sense already makes this pretty obvious.  Imagine that we are trying to improve our skills at playing darts.

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 20,400 abstracts.

The Scottish branch of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) organized a two day autumn conference over the 12th & 13th of September on "Current trends in CBT".  Interestingly what was on offer consisted almost entirely of workshops (apart from one brief symposium on the first evening).  On the first day Avinash Bansode gave a workshop on "MBCT" and John Swann taught on

I went to a workshop on the treatment of social anxiety disorder with David Clark in July.  It was very helpful.  I've listed assessment & monitoring questionnaires that he recommended below:

As a general measure to assess and track changes in social anxiety severity, the freely available Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) is the questionnaire recommended by the England & Wales NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) "outcomes toolkit".  Interestingly David seems to prefer the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) probably because it makes a pretty full job of assessing both anxiety and avoidance.  

Yesterday I wrote an introductory post on using self-practice & self-reflection (SP/SR) to improve my understanding of David Clark's treatment for social anxiety.  In today's post I want to look at assessment - of social anxiety disorder, of skill with Clark's CBT approach, and at SP/SR initiation.

Self-practice/Self-reflection (SP/SR) is an approach to training in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) that involves practising CBT methods on oneself (self-practice - SP) and then reflecting on what one can learn from this experience (self-reflection - SR).  SP/SR is at the interface between more standard training approaches (such as lectures, videos, role plays) and personal therapy (recommended as part of therapist training by many - particularly non CBT - psychotherapy schools).  In the current draft copy of their "Self-practice/self-reflection workbook", authors James Bennett-Levy, Richard Thwaites, Beverly Haarhoff & Helen Perry write "While the primary focus of personal therapy is on personal development, the rationale and purpose of SP/SR is to use your personal experience of CBT to develop better understanding and use of CBT with pati

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

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

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 20,000 abstracts.

At the weekend I went back to my old university and spent warm, precious time with half a dozen old friends.  I have already written a couple of blog posts about this experience ...