Posts tagged with 'scotland'
Jon Kabat-Zinn in Glasgow: honour, confusion, sadness, interest
21st June 2012
I wrote a blog post yesterday just before heading out to what was billed as an international conference on "Mindfulness, health and wellbeing" with Jon Kabat-Zinn. I described the structure of the day - with a variety of interesting speakers billed - and sounded a note of caution about possible …
Jon Kabat-Zinn in Glasgow: has mindfulness got too "sexy"?
20th June 2012
I'm off to Glasgow a little later this morning to what is billed as "Mindfulness, health and wellbeing" An international conference with Jon Kabat-Zinn, co-hosted by Mindfulness Scotland and University of Glasgow. The programme looks very interesting - Harry Burns, chief medical officer for Scotland, is scheduled to kick off …
How good is your GP or hospital? Listening to patient experience.
13th June 2010
"Better together: Scotland's patient experience programme" works to use the public's experience of NHS Scotland to improve health services. At the end of April they published provisional results for GP Practices throughout Scotland, and pilot results for a few initial hospitals are beginning to come through as well. I find …
Exercise 6: where can I do what?
8th February 2010
Last month I blogged about exercise safety in "Exercise 1: checking it's safe to start", about the helpful GPPAQ - General Practice Physical Activity Questionnaire - described in "Exercise 2: UK Department of Health, resources for assessment & advice", about the excellent advice on how to exercise in "Exercise 3: …
Getting help for depression in Scotland – support groups, online & face-to-face courses, newsletter, telephone service, and more
20th December 2009
The e-newsletter from Depression Alliance Scotland (DAS) popped into my inbox last week. What good work they do. The new information that particularly caught my eye was access to an online facilitated self-help course. The description runs: "We have a new service offering support for people to use Living Life …
Recent research: five papers on depression, stigma, biology, & extending the reach of psychotherapy
2nd April 2009
This set of five papers documents, in part, our mixed viewpoints on depression. Worryingly, Mehta & colleagues show deteriorating public attitudes towards mental illness in England (and to a lesser extent Scotland) between 1994 and 2003. Meanwhile Blumner et al demonstrate a shift towards a more biological view on causes …
Recent research: five papers on adolescent psychological difficulties
5th March 2009
Here are five papers on difficulties experienced by adolescents. A couple of the papers are follow-up studies. Colman et al looked at the multiple negative personal & relationship outcomes in a UK national cohort of adolescents with conduct problems followed over 40 years. Wentz et al studied the somewhat more …
Vitamin D - time to take action!
1st October 2008
I final got round to visiting Oliver Gillie's campaigning website "Health Research Forum" yesterday. It's well worth having a look at. At first glance I thought he might just be a bit of a cranky campaigner using the internet to have a louder shout about his pet subject. Not so. …
Draft SIGN non-pharmacological depression treatments guideline, 9th post: self help, guided, and complementary therapies
27th September 2008
The fourth and final session of the "Non-pharmacological management of depression" SIGN seminar was entitled "Self help, guided and alternative/complementary therapies". Dr George Deans, Consultant Clinical Psychologist at Aberdeen's Royal Cornhill Hospital, gave the first presentation of this session on "Alternative/complementary therapies 2". I've already discussed the lack of good …
Draft SIGN non-pharmacological depression treatments guideline, 8th post: therapeutic alliance in the treatment of depression
25th September 2008
There was some discussion at the SIGN "Non-pharmacological management of depression" seminar about the possible importance of the therapeutic alliance in depression treatment. Professor Kevin Power said that SIGN had not found any good research that threw light on this issue. This is somewhat surprising because there is a fair …