We’re not trained monkeys!

One time I was carrying out some work for a large organisation that wanted to train a lot of people to do some assessment work. It annoyed me for some reason, and I’ve finally hit on the problem (OK, several years too late, but never mind!). The problem was that instead of teaching principles, [...]

When you need to change tack…

There are some times when things just don’t go the way you plan…Therapists don’t very often publicise when things don’t work out, but I think we can learn a lot from these situations - and the reflection process models one of the ways that we can help patients learn from every situation too. As [...]

Why CBT? How do patients feel about it?

There are many different therapies out there - why is CBT (or one of the newer variants) the Chosen One?
I gave a few reasons yesterday -
* that people are capable of change,
* can accept self responsibility for their actions,
* that what we think and believe about a situation can affect our emotions and responses, [...]

Some theory - and how we can put it into practice

Before we start on cognitive behavioural therapy, we need to know what we’re on about - for me in pain management, CBT assumes:

that people are capable of change,
can accept self responsibility for their actions,
that what we think and believe about a situation can affect our emotions and responses, and
that we can implement a whole [...]

Working with cognitive behavioural therapy - Introducing CBT to a client

For a therapy that has great empirical support and can be used by any and all members of the interdisciplinary team, you can’t really go far from cognitive behavioural therapy. Waaaay back in the olden days when I was originally trained as an occupational therapist, CBT was the province of psychologists only - and [...]

I wonder if this applies to any pain management ‘cures’?

Why can he go surfing but can’t do the vacuuming?

Social contract theory is a theory drawn from evolutionary psychology - a ‘cheater detection’ system if you like. Following on from yesterdays post about detecting faking in pain, this study examines the judgements observers (in this case, friends and relatives of people with pain) in a study where four vignettes were presented. Each [...]

Faking and malingering (again!)

One of the most popular posts I’ve written on this blog concerns ‘faking’ or ‘malingering’. I’m curious about this, because even though I have been asked many times whether I have had patients that are ‘faking’, I don’t think about it very often myself. I suppose it is a subject that is dear [...]

Things patients wish we would say…

Exposure therapy - not so fast buddy!

From what I’ve posted so far this week, you might think that I would propose exposure therapy be something for all therapists to use with people, but no! I think it’s something that only some people will adopt, and it’s only useful for some people. Although all of us can incorporate some aspects of [...]