I am guessing you mean a goodbye letter in the tradition of narrative therapy, and I agree that if it is going to be helpful to your client, it needs to address the difficult issues that have come up in the therapy. So if you want to make a difficult message easier for your client to hear, you need ...

The best grounding resource I have found is the chapter on "detaching from emotional pain" that is in Najavits' Seeking Safety protocol for comorbid PTSD/substance misuse. There is a 10 minute "taster" script in the book which takes the client through lots of different kinds of g...

interesting follow up interview to vaughan's article in the guardian

http://mindhacks.com/2013/04/24/deeper- ... /#comments

Nice article suggesting that the strongest arguments against diagnostic constructs like schizophrenia are ironically coming from neurobiology and genetics, ratherthan social constructionism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/ ... ughan-bell

It is not quite true that UK clinical psychologists don't do diagnosis. In routine practice it is very common to carry out diagnostic assessments, not least because all the evidence-based treatments we have are specific treatments for specific diagnostic categories. There is no general evidence base...

His website has a lot of good stuff on it http://www.nightmaretreatment.com/ There are also a couple of books mentioned on the website including "Turning nightmares into dreams" It is a form of rescripting treatment and as such sits well conceptually with other imagery based treatments inc...

I'm sorry but this line about the BPS being unable to take any kind of principled stand because it is a charity is just rubbish. What are Amnesty International, Freedom from Torture and the World Wildlife fund all doing if not commenting on political issues? The simple fact is that the BPS chooses n...

There is a some useful stuff on this in the oxford behavioural experiments book (bennet levy et al), specifically, experiment 5.12 - inappropriate critieria - waiting until it feel s right (p115) Also in the difficulties subsection - unclear feared consequences (p.117) Basically suggests doing exper...

Discrimination training in PTSD was initally derived from behavioural models of PTSD, that describe the role of stimulus discrimination and generalisation in the failure of extinction of the fear response following trauma. A good summary of this is: Rothbaum (2003)Applying Learning Principles to the...

In terms of fiction Batman Begins has some good examples of having "flashbacks" to his parents' murder. Also good military examples are Born on the Fourth of July, the Deer Hunter and Jacobs Ladder. In terms of documentaries there was a really good one on Channel 4 recently called Forgotte...

I think it is important to distinguigh between "old school" behavioural activation, which basically involved filling the day with activities and rating pleasure and mastery for each one; and "new school" which does not aim to fill the day, but to make activities meaningful in ter...

Two useful documents:

http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/pros ... adult.html

http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/pros ... child.html

The IES (or rather the IES-R) is a good clinical measure but cannot be used to confirm a diagnosis as it does not corredspond to the DSM-IV criteria. The industry standard diagnostic questionnaire is probably the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS, Foa et al 1997) The best screening instrument is p...

and as I've argued before there are some very good reasons NOT to join the BPS, http://www.clinpsy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1511&highlight= ...including most recently that they appear to have convinced a lot of psychologists to join at no small expense, with the promise of being transferred ...

Hi Miriam,

Is the letter from the HPC that you linked to in the public domain, because I couldnt find a copy either on the BPS site or the HPC?

If it is, are you happy for it to be more widely distributed?