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There is a lot of loss around.  And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of  a loved person.  When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning.  It is natural and understandable.  But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in mourning - though few of them would understand their feelings and turmoil as ‘grief’.  We somehow want to preserve that label for ‘the big one’. (And some people, of course, would include the death of a pet in that category).

The unacknowledged feelings of grief that people experience surround the many losses that often do not involve the literal death of a body.  There is sometimes shock, and anger, and depression surrounding the loss of a job,  the ending of a significant relationship, or the onset of a debilitating illness.  These are all accompanied by the ending of a particular status and a whole host of expectations and dreams about the future - about what might have been.  I sometimes work with people who arrive at my office in a state of shock having  recently learned that their partner of 20 or 30 years is leaving.  They are almost literally sick with grief - what they thought was the goodness of the past feels destroyed at the time, the present is unbearable, and the future has just evaporated before their eyes.
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Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: Distinctive Features

Frank Wills

Routledge 2009

ISBN 978-0415439527 £9.99

This book sets out to provide a concise account of Beck’s work against a background of his personal and professional history. It is divided into two parts. There are 15 short chapters which examine Beck’s contribution to explaining psychopathology, and then 15 more looking at Beck’s suggestions for the best methods of treatment. Within each chapter the author also attempts to view each topic in the light of current research and of other relevant theoretical or pragmatic positions. He attempts a lot in a mere 166 pages.

I enjoyed this book. The author communicates well, and the combination of the lightness of his style, and the corset imposed by the series editor, mean that the chapters deliver substance without crushing with impenetrable weight. I found the first half of the book to be the most rewarding. Wills gives a clear account of Beck’s contribution to the evolution of CBT theory. Throughout this section there is a definite sense of an empirical pragmatist at work, slowly moving away from psychoanalysis, using patient statements to build hypotheses, then testing these hypotheses and refining theory, starting with depression and then moving into other areas of psychopathology. Amongst other things Wills explains the use of imagery, the development of the different levels and types of cognition, the role played by emotion (the ‘Royal Road to cognition’) and the interaction with behaviour.

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Despite some £4m a year being spent on homeopathy, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that using public money on the highly diluted remedies could not be justified.  The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

It seems reasonable that people should have the freedom to buy these remedies and pay for these alleged treatments if they wish to.  However, it also seems right that any government should examine the science behind any medical claims, direct limited funding towards remedies that have credible theory and demonstrated effectiveness, and that they should remove any government-backed badge of respectability from those that don’t.

On the World at One on Radio 4 today, Phil Willis MP (Chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee) and Dr Michael Dixon (a homeopathic practitioner) were debating the Committee’s findings, which can best be summed up in the words of Phil Willis:

“This was a challenging inquiry which provoked strong reactions. We were seeking to determine whether the Government’s policies on homeopathy are evidence based on current evidence. They are not.

“It sets an unfortunate precedent for the Department of Health to consider that the existence of a community which believes that homeopathy works is ‘evidence’ enough to continue spending public money on it. This also sends out a confused message, and has potentially harmful consequences. We await the Government’s response to our report with interest.”

I was interested in the two points that Dr Dixon made in response to the above devastating conclusions.
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Here’s something. Imagine you live in a community where you are expected to pay into a fund that is used to meet various needs in the community - the upkeep of roads, salaries for nurses and teachers, and community hospitality, for example. Then it transpires that you are about to receive a visit from a dignitary, and custom dictates that you will be expected to meet his considerable costs - the travel and accommodation of his party, and his considerable security expenses, not to mention the disruption and strain on usual community services.

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem too bad.  After all, custom is custom.  However, when you start to realize that the estimated cost of the visit runs into a number of millions - around 20, in fact - you do begin to wonder if that is the best use of community money, especially when the home for senior citizens near you was clearly having to make tough decisions about restricting care.

And then you start to think about it, and various problems start to emerge: Continue Reading »

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In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.  In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900.  And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated the collapse of religious faith.  To the delight of the faithful, and to the chagrin of the faithless, they have all been wrong.

It is interesting to contemplate why religion hasn’t disappeared.  Why, in roughly 10,000 years of history, have humans created roughly 10,000 different religions and 1000 gods?  It is well known that religion leads people to fly planes into sky scrapers, to shoot staff at abortion clinics, to fracture governments in Northern Ireland, and that it has caused endless wars. Religious societies have higher crime rates than secular ones and pay a huge economic price for their faith.  And religion in its fundamentalist form has held back cognitive evolution for thousands of year - we can only guess how much further science and technology would have advanced worldwide today without it.  (We can only dread what will happen if the current attempts to prevent the teaching of evolution in various parts of the world are successful.  See here, for example.) Why do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system that is so evidently false and self-contradictory?
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Although it is nearly 24 hours since I watched the first in Channel 4’s new series, The Bible: A History, I still find myself annoyed at the mere memory of it.  It ended up being more of the aspirational wishful thinking of a romantic presenter than the history deceptively portrayed in the title.

The first quarter of the programme started to fulfil the expectations of the title - some attempt at giving information on the history of the bible.  In this programme the subject was the creation account.  Various archaeologists and biblical scholars were wheeled out to explain the similarities between the biblical story and the Babylonian creation myths.  They then present the reasoning behind the hypothesis that the creation account was almost certainly not dictated to Moses by god, but was written by Jews in Babylon in an attempt to come to terms with their disastrous defeat and exile 500 years after the death of Moses. But at this point the discussion of history ended and the presenter,  Continue Reading »

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It is now over 18 months since I first got her - ‘it’ seems way too impersonal for an object which has become an almost indispensable part of my life.  I have blogged before about the first love, about speaking to her so that she never forgets (ReQall), about the app that enables me to broadcast live from my phone (iPadio), and about the app which enables the phone to store and organise everything (Evernote), including the kitchen sink (well pictures of it, descriptions of  it, and songs and videos).  I decided that the time had come again to review some of my most recent favourite iPhone applications. Continue Reading »

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Praise Be

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When you stand back and think about it, it’s really strange.  I mean, it may have some side benefits, but the primary activity is odd.

What got me thinking was a wonderful essay (A Deal-Breaker by Ophelia Benson in 50 Voices of Disbelief) in which the author points out that some of the supposed characteristics of god seem very strange if we applied them to normal relationships. For example, it would seem strange to talk about having a meaningful, loving relationship with a person who is continually hiding:

What business would God have hiding? What’s that about? What kind of silly game is that? God is all-powerful and benevolent but at the same time it’s hiding? Please.  We wouldn’t give that the time of day in any other context. Nobody would buy the idea of ideal, loving, concerned parents who permanently hide from their children, so why buy it of a loving God?

When you apply that kind of reasoning, several things about religious belief and practice start to appear slightly odd. Continue Reading »

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There is a sick theme running through all of this - or at least a clear attempt to involve some form of mental illness, and an attempt to bring in the people in white coats - well, at least psychologists if not psychiatrists.

Hey, I really, really don’t want to jump on the bandwagon and pour self-righteous scorn onto Iris Robinson.  The woman has confessed to a recent affair within a 40 year marriage.  Many commentators have been exercised by the apparent hypocrisy of the situation.  She is a Protestant Christian who has been quite outspoken on the alleged sexual immorality of others - in particular of the gay community, calling homosexuality ‘vile’.  It is not my place to judge - I, like her, am a fallible human being, capable of making big mistakes, and capable of not living up to my own standards at times.  I can empathise with the shock, anger, and pain that her family, her friends, and she are going through at the moment.  I have seen it enough in my life experience, and see it almost weekly in my work.

No, it is not the affair as such, or the apparent hypocrisy that has prompted me to write. Continue Reading »

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Apologies for my absence.  I’ve been pre-occupied over the ‘holidays’ with a couple of other writing tasks that I needed to complete.  Having finished them today I found myself with a few idle hours before returning to work tomorrow and started amusing myself with dreadful similes to tweet.

For those of us who have forgotten, a simile is a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced with the word “like” or “as”. Even though similes and metaphors are both forms of comparison, similes allow the two ideas to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas metaphors compare two things without using “like” or “as”.

Famous examples of similes in poetry would include:

Burns: My love is like a red, red rose …

Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out across the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table …

Similes have two particular associations for me.   Continue Reading »

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