The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.   Eden Phillpotts

At the recent World Congress of Behavioural & Cognitive Therapies in Berlin, David Veale from King's College & the Maudsley reported on a randomised controlled trial of 'triple chronotherapy' for depression.

David pointed out that depression can come in all kinds of shapes & sizes, and this treatment probably works best in the subtype where circadian rhythms have become desynchronised.

I'm running a workshop today on "Biological treatments for psychological disorders: an overview & update for therapists".  You can download the 100 plus slides by clicking here.  The overall outline of the day is illustrated in this slide:

I have just given a talk on "Recent research on non-drug treatments for bipolar disorder" to the Lothian branch of "Bipolar Scotland".  There is a description of the first part of the talk at "Non-drug treatments for bipolar disorder (1st post) - the value of psychotherapy" and you can download the full sequence of slides here.  Points touched on in the second part of the talk are illustrated below:

Here are half a dozen recent research papers on depression (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Yonkers et al's publication is a very welcome one - "The management of depression during pregnancy: a report from the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."  At last here's a major review giving good advice on this extremely important subject.  To learn more it's worth getting hold of a copy of the complete text.  You may have access to this through your academic department.  If not, authors are usually happy to send a PDF via email when asked to - emails can be dug out via a little Google detective work.  Following the [Abstract/Full Text] link will also provide various access routes including a low-cost patient information option.  In further work looking at depression

The SIGN draft guideline day on "Non-pharmacological management of mild to moderate depression" last Wednesday continued with two further presentations in this first section on "Lifestyle and Alternative/Complementary Therapies 1".  After the "grade A" recommendations on exercise and St John's Wort given during the first two presentations (covered in the two previous blog posts), the rest of this section felt a bit of an anticlimax.

“ 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

This section links to resources for exercise and for using light therapy.  Exercise is an absolutely key component of what this website is primarily about - achieving improvements in our stress, health and wellbeing.  Try, for example, clicking on this exercise tag to see a series of relevant blog posts.  The gains from exercising more are so huge that they have major implications for government health budgets - unfit populations get sicker and cost much more to look after.  It's no surprise then to find that there are many excellent, nationally developed, internet sites giving high quality exercise information.