Here are a series of handouts,questionnaires and book suggestions for healthy sexuality, for sexual dysfunctions, and for abuse screening.
Touch, sex & caring - this two page Word handout is rather dated now, but still makes a series of very valid points.
On 26th January the BMJ reported on the new £18 million Time to Change campaign " ... to tackle the discrimination and stigma that surrounds mental health ... The Time to Change initiative is funded by Comic Relief and the National Lottery. Its aim is to tell the public that it is no longer acceptable to discriminate against people with a mental illness ... The campaign's website gives details of what can be done to help people with a mental illness and how to run a local campaign to support national initiatives ... The campaign says that mental illness is one of the last taboos and that shame and stigma can stop people seeking help. It highlights the fact that mental illness is far more common than people realise with one in four people experiencing a mental health problem at some time in their life. And it promotes the message that it is possible to help people with a mental heath problem by being there for them and not cutting them out of your life ... The campaign is based on similar national initiatives in New Zealand and Scotland.
I routinely scan quite a few journals every month. Sometimes it's disappointing and there's nothing in the issue of a particular journal that interests me much. Sometimes a particular journal contains a bunch of stimulating articles. January's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was a good find. Below are four papers from it. The DeWall et al study is on how social exclusion leads to hostility and aggression. It adds to the large body of research on the very powerful effects of being socially rejected. Putting "rejection (psychology)" into the top search bar of PubMed today and clicking on "Go" pulls out 2,741 paper
Here are a series of questionnaires and handouts on couples and also on parenting.
Yesterday NICE - the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England & Wales - published guidance on a diverse range of fifteen clinical, technology, interventional and public health subjects. Their clinical guidance on Medicines Adherence interested me, as too did their public health guidance on Promoting Physical Activity for Children and Young People. The subject of this post is the clinical guidance on Antisocial Personality Disorder and in my next post, I'll talk about their guidance on Borderline Personality Disorder. As Dr Tim Kendall, Joint Director, National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, states: "Approximately 2 million people in the UK have personality disorders, with antisocial and borderline disorders being the most common.
Here are a set of diverse handouts and questionnaires on emotions, schema and personality. The "triangle of emotions" is a model I put together to help guide work on the longer term dysfunctional personality patterns that we probably all experience to some extent. The "big five" is a very widely used way of assessing personality, and this "ten aspects" version I find particularly interesting. There are then a series of handouts from Arnoud Arntz's fine work on understanding and treatment of borderline personality disorder. I have found that Arntz's ideas seem more broadly helpful than just with borderline (which anyway is a poor descriptor for this emotional regulation disorder). There are also some sheets derived from Young's associated work on schema.
In blog postings earlier this month, I've talked about supporting my Mum after her recent couple of strokes. She's been shipped through three different hospitals and now is more peaceful in a nursing home. It's sad - very sad at times - and it's great that she seems more comfortable, better looked after, and more content. I definitely feel easier too. Less weight on my shoulders, less emotional aching.
Here are half a dozen papers relevant to psychotherapy. The first two throw some light on the question of whether it matters which form of established psychotherapy one uses to treat a particular depression sufferer - bearing in mind Cuijpers et al's recent meta-analysis suggesting that " ...
Here are a set of handouts and questionnaires about emotions. It seems helpful to understand emotions through an evolutionary perspective - we have emotions, to a large extent, because they had (and have) survival value. We are the descendants of people with adaptive emotional systems that helped them stay alive and function well. Typically unwelcome feelings that seem maladapitve are due to emotions that are firing off inappropriately. As a rule of thumb, if an emotion is an appropriate reaction to a situation it can help us respond successfully. If the emotion is inappropriate then it's likely to be more useful to work to change the emotional response - through therapy or other approaches.
Emotions are like a ‘radar system' - this pair of Powerpoint slides, that I print out as a two-slides-to-a-page handout, introduces the idea of emotions as an evolutionarily adaptive system. I use the metaphor of emotions as a 'radar & rapid response system' - normalising emotions and conceptualising emotional problems as inappropriate levels of activation in a basically adaptive system.
