Great to have this paper (the first from my PhD) out in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry: Psychological flexibility and nonjudgemental acceptance in voice hearers: relationships with omnipotence and distress Eric MJ Morris1,2 Philippa Garety1,2 Emmanuelle Peters1,2 1Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, Department of Psychology, London, UK 2NIHR Biomedical Research Centre …
Last Friday I was fortunate to hear Louise McHugh speak at UCL about the bottom-up approach of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) to understanding mindfulness and the self. Louise’s excellent talk, hosted by the BABCP ACT Special Interest Group, demonstrated how the contextual behavioural science approach is making progress in identifying the building blocks for skills …
A challenge for UK therapists learning to do Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is access to supervision. Outside of working at the specialist clinical and research centres that focus on ACT or accessing supervision online from international trainers, there are currently very limited options to get supervision from an experienced ACT therapist. One option is to …
Continue reading ‘Starting your own ACT peer supervision group’ »
One of the best things to happen last year was seeing the UK and Ireland ACT/CBS conference take shape, and then finally run in November 2013. With over 200 delegates attending each day over the four days of the conference, it was gratifying to see the months of hard work by the conference committee pay …
Continue reading ‘Behind the Scenes: the UK & Ireland ACT/ CBS conference 2013’ »
At the 2008 BABCP National Conference held in Edinburgh, Amy McArthur, Gordon Mitchell and I led a half-day workshop on “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Psychosis”. The workshop represented a distillation of our understanding of the field currently, and some of the clinical methods that we use for running groups and doing individual therapy in …
I recently sat in on a presentation about psychological interventions for serious mental illness at an international conference, where the audience was mostly made up of US health professionals working in psychiatric settings. What was interesting (or to be more accurate, disconcerting) for me were the number of comments from the audience expressing surprise that …
Continue reading ‘Psychosis from a psychological perspective’ »
Recently, with my colleague Joe Oliver, we presented our work (at the ACT Summer Institute IV) on developing acceptance and commitment therapy to help young people recovering from a first episode of psychosis. We titled our presentation “ACT Early”, and described the work we have been doing in developing groups and individual therapy for this …
Continue reading ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Early Psychosis’ »
I have a terrible confession to make about my background as a clinical psychologist: I trained as a behaviourist. Why is this “terrible”? Well, because I now work in the UK, where it seems that behaviourally-oriented clinical psychologists are scarce (at least in my field), and I am a member of the British Association for …
Continue reading ‘Contextual Cognitive-Behavioural Therapies’ »
The other week I participated in a training workshop for supervision in cognitive behavioural therapy, which was well-attended by the psychologists in my Trust. It was a useful workshop – with some theory in the morning, going through the (albeit limited) evidence for CBT supervision, and then the afternoon spent doing roleplays of supervision issues …
Continue reading ‘The “do as I do, not as I say” approach to therapy supervision’ »
Recent reports on the study of paranoid thinking have supported the view that suspiciousness and anxiety of harm from others are common experiences, with possibly up to a third of the population being regularly bothered by suspicious or paranoid thoughts. Daniel Freeman, Jason Freeman, and Philippa Garety have written a self-help guide to “Overcoming Paranoid …
