"Alcohol is the third leading cause of disease burden in developed countries".  This month the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published the first two parts of a three-part guidance on alcohol-related problems.  The first section is "Alcohol-use disorders: preventing the development of hazardous and harmful drinking" which covers public health guidance on the price, advertising and availability of alcohol, how best to detect alcohol misuse in and outside primary care, and brief interventions to manage it in these settings.  The second part is "Alcohol-use disorders: diagnosis and clinical management of alcohol-related physi

So it was the second session of the group yesterday.  I blogged about the first session last week.  Sadly a couple of people couldn't get to this second meeting - due to a pre-planned holiday and to an unexpected crisis.  It's quite common for participants to miss one or two evenings across a twelve session course like this, but I want to be careful when people miss such an early meeting.  It's important that they don't lose their way and get left behind.  They will get copies of the handouts and the Autogenic CD, but I also make a note to contact them myself.   

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 14,500 abstracts. 

Yesterday we had the first evening of the Life Skills group.  I've written in the past about the background planning behind this group.  How did this first meeting go?  Well there were nine of us - eight participants and myself.  Rather demandingly I'm both running a new course and trying to get used to new technology at the same time.  For years, when running small group trainings here at our house, I've used an overhead projector to shine transparencies up onto the wall.  For a while I've wanted to upgrade to a laptop and data projector, and this evening I went ahead to put this into practice.

Here are half a dozen recent research studies on mindfulness, values & meaning - fuller details, links and abstracts for all studies are listed further down this page.  Hofmann and colleagues' meta-analysis on "The effect of mindfulness-based therapy on anxiety and depression" found encouraging effect sizes for mindfulness training and concluded "These results suggest that mindfulness-based therapy is a promising intervention for treating anxiety and mood problems in clinical populations".  Meanwhile Barnhofer & Chittka underlined the toxicity of ruminative brooding with their demonstration that the well-demonstrated link between neurotic temperament and depression is mediated by "Tendencies to respond to mild low mood with ruminative thinking".  They conclude that "The results suggest that neuroticism predisposes individuals to depression by generally increasing the likelihood of ruminative responses to low mood&quo

In yesterday's post "Targeting behavioural activation better both for decreasing depression and increasing wellbeing (first post)", I suggested that there are at least three (and probably many more) interesting ways that could make behavioural activation (BA) both more targeted and potentially more effective.  I wrote about aiming BA particularly to "problem solve" triggering factors (especially interpersonal ones) that seemed to have contributed to deterioration in a subject's psychological state.  I also mentioned the recent Mazzuchelli et al paper "Behavioral activation interventions for well-being: a meta-analysis"  showing how helpful BA can also be at building wellbeing as well as treating depression.

There are a series of meta-analyses showing that "behavioural activation" (BA) is a good treatment for depression and that it is as effective as best-established approaches like full cognitive behavioural therapy - see, for example, last year's paper by Trevor and colleagues "Behavioral activation treatments for depression in adults: a meta-analysis and review".  BA involves encouraging increased engagement in enjoyable activities.  Subjects may be asked to keep a record of their daily activities and associated feelings - for example, feelings of achievement and enjoyment.  The downloadable charts and handouts further down this website's "Problem solving and behavioural activation" page illustrate this well-known approach.

Here are six recent papers on CBT treatment for a variety of disorders - for fuller details, abstracts and links, see further down this page.  Lamb et al explored the value of "Group cognitive behavioural treatment for low-back pain in primary care".  That their results were reported in the Lancet, highlights the importance of their findings.  The active treatment group received an additional assessment and then six 1.5 hour group therapy sessions (average group size, eight participants).  Therapy focused on "guided discovery, identifying and countering negative automatic thoughts, pacing, graded activity, relaxation, and other skills."   Outcomes demonstrated that "Over 1 year, the cognitive behavioural intervention had a sustained effect on troublesome subacute and chronic low-back pain at a low cost to the health-care provider."