Psycho Filler - qu'est ce que c'est?

Spotted some interesting stuff recently. Not person-centred, per se - but definitely blog-worthy.

1. Do Humans Have A Daily Requirement For Certain Kinds Of Emotions, Like The Body Does For Certain Nutrients?



A Web-based psychology experiment is investigating whether human beings have a daily requirement for certain kinds of emotions, in the same way that the body has a proven requirement for certain nutrients. Based on animal studies and human research, Dr. Imam Saqib of the National Institute of Psychology at Quaid-i-Azam University in Pakistan is interested in finding out if there is an optimum state of emotional health describable by regular experiencing of certain feeling states. Is it optimally healthy for a person to experience a certain amount of love every day? Of creativity? Of connection with others? Of competition, or even aggression?

We are all the products of long periods of evolutionary adaptation. Presumably, if the same emotions exist in most people, they must be there for a reason. Even the so-called negative feelings may have their place.

Researchers are studying whether hormones which are characteristically released in response to certain emotional states, like oxytocin, cortisol, and adrenaline, have an optimum level of release which makes the individual healthiest.

There is a discussion group which the public is welcome to join. The study is sponsored by the World Mind Network and is co-moderated by Irina Higgins of the Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence and Melissa Mendoza of the University of La Verne.

The website is here.

[Source: World Mind Network, 3170 Bonita Rd., Bonita, California 91910]

2. Hoarding

Hoarding can cause many personal and social problems but psychologists are only just beginning to understand what causes it and how to help sufferers.

Here's an interesting item on the subject.

Resilience key to LMU flagship conference

Leeds Metropolitan University CONFERENCE 2010
Friday 18 June 2010

Resilience: Counselling and Coaching for Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Wellbeing
Resilience is often referred to as ‘the ability to bounce back’ from adverse life experiences. What does ‘Resilience’ means to you? How important is it to the way we live our lives? How might we find it for ourselves and what can we do to enable others to develop it?

Through lively and stimulating keynote presentations and by getting ‘up close and personal’ with the speakers in a workshop setting later in the day, this conference will give delegates a ringside seat with 3 of the leading experts in the field.

John Allen – “Physical Resiliance … From Surviving to Thriving”
John Allan is Senior Lecturer in Adventure Education and Psychology in the Carnegie Faculty of Leeds Metropolitan University. His published interests focus on adventure and personal growth with emphasis upon the development of psychological resilience through adventure programming. He has just joint authored two chapters in this area within a new Human Kinetics book on Mountaineering. As an outdoor educationalist and practitioner, he has been instrumental in developing arguably the world’s largest data base investigating the impact of adventure residential programmes on student inductees’ transition into Higher Education. Being a member of the sports science research team supporting Everest West Ridge 2006, he undertook two trips to the Himalayas. He was also Deputy Expedition Leader on a recent staff and student visit to Everest Base Camp.

Elie Godsi – “Emotional Resilience … Out of the Mists of Time”
Elie Godsi is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, therapist, broadcaster and author. The son of Sudanese and Israeli parents, he was born in Nigeria where he spent the first few years of his life before coming to live in Britain as a young child. In the course of a career spanning over two decades he has worked extensively with violent men and women as well as their victims. He has also spent many years working in community based mental health and forensic services, in various hospital and prison settings and with young offenders in residential units. He currently works as a freelance expert witness for civil, criminal and family courts and also carries out assessments for social services child protection proceedings. His second book, Violence and Society – Making Sense of Madness and Badness was published in 2004 by PCCS books.

William West – “Spiritual Resilience … Getting By through What We Believe In”
William West PhD is a Reader in Counselling Studies at the University of Manchester in Britain where he is Director of the Counselling Studies Programme and where he delights in supervising doctoral students. William’s key areas interest include: counselling and spirituality, culture, traditional healing, supervision and qualitative research methods. William has written: two authored books – Psychotherapy and Spirituality (Sage 2000), Spiritual Issues in Therapy (Palgrave 2004), one edited book Exploring Counselling Spirituality and Healing (Palgrave 2010), one co-edited book with Roy Moodley, Integrating Traditional Healing Practices into Counseling and Psychotherapy (Sage 2005), 26 academic papers, 15 book chapters and 29 professional journal papers. William is a keen cyclist, amateur poet and beginner piano player.

£110 Organisation fee
£90 Community Groups/ Individuals

Booking deadline: Friday 28 May

All enquiries to Jenny Partington
T: 0113 812 5974
E: j.e.partington@leedsmet.ac.uk

For more details: click here

Regulation Round-up - Judicial Review

Just arrived in the PCAyorks inbox is the following, from Darian Leader, updating us all on progress with the judicial review.

You know - the judicial review that is challenging the HPC's fitness to regulate those of us who use the title counsellor or psychotherapist.

Read on:

The judicial review of HPC is now in its first stage. Documents prepared by Dinah Rose QC and John Halford of Bindmans have been sent to the High Court which point to problems with the HPC's actions to date. It had been charged with assessing the regulatory needs of counselling and psychotherapy and whether its own system was capable of accommodating this field, yet proceeded as if this was a foregone conclusion. Despite stating several times unequivocally that it had not made any attempt to study these questions, HPC could then write to the Department of Health in December 2009 claiming that it had in fact done so. Attempts to query this contradiction proved fruitless.

The JR papers discuss and document this, as well as other major failures in the process, which indicate that the HPC did not approach its work in a rational or fair way. Alternative models of regulation were not given proper consideration despite being repeatedly brought to HPC's attention. Key questions about the nature of the talking therapies were ignored, and hardly any of the HPC's criteria for regulating professions, such as homogeneity of knowledge base or practice, are applicable to our highly diverse field.

The first set of documents will now be scrutinised by the courts. The instructing organisations are The Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, The Association of Independent Psychotherapists, The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, The College of Psychoanalysts-UK, The Guild of Psychotherapists and The Philadelphia Association. Funding of the review has been made possible by contributions from thousands of therapists and members of the public who feel strongly about the issue.

Significantly, the Department of Health has now said that it will await the outcome of the judicial review before acting on the HPC's recommendations and that it is exploring alternative models of regulation. This is an important decision, as until now the DoH has simply stated that it will regulate the talking therapies via HPC, and the HPC itself has refused to discuss alternative models of regulation. The fact that other models will now be studied is real progress, and we hope that the DoH will work with our organisations and examine the models used in other countries, where regulatory arrangements have been arrived at that are satisfactory to both government and the field itself.

WAPCEPC, PCEP & all that

Taking advantage of the discounted rates for BAPCA members (see Why Join BAPCA?), I decided to take out a year's sub to WAPCEPC (the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy & Counseling).

Then - demonstrating conclusively that I need to get a life - I decided to have a go at producing my own desktop index to the full collection of PCEP Journals (2002-09).

What I've done is to save the link page for every paper in every issue of the journals as an html file, and then I've combined all those files into a single pdf - which is obviously searchable by keywords and handy in itself.

But I've also activated all the links in the document and, if you click on the title of any of the papers, it will take you to the actual download page for that paper. If you are logged in you can read or download the paper in question. If you don't have a membership / login, at least you can read the abstracts and remind yourself of where to find the paper in your hard copy (if you're a BAPCA member) - or simply drool at the collection and/or save up your pennies (if you're not).

You can download my index from:
PCEP Desktop Index Beta

Don't be put off by the truncated titles on the first couple of pages - that's something that WAPCEPC sorted out after the first (short) Volume - the rest of the index shows the full titles of all the papers.

Hope you find it useful!

If you desperately need sight of any of the papers, why not join PCAyorks and we’ll see what we can do to help?

Some (generous) comments on my little innovation:

Wow! Impressive.
[Janet Tolan / Liverpool John Moores University / BACP Fellow / author]

I feel this is potentially pretty useful, particularly when I am doing a lit review at the moment! Maybe you want to talk to the WA people and see about them offering it on their website [...] I feel this is a quick and easy way through for PCEP readers to find that lost article that they know is there somewhere. [Mark Harrison, MBACP / BAPCA trustee]

WOW Paul very impressive indeed, and so fast!
[Linda Heavon, Knowsley Council / BAPCA trustee / President-elect of Bootle Club of Soroptimist International / Therapist]

I've just visited your index, must have taken you ages! Thanks very much, I'm sure it will be a useful resource.
[Paula Newman, GQHP, UKRC, BACP (Accred) / Counsellor and Hypnotherapist]

Wow!
[Jackie Taylor MBACP, UKCP registered psychotherapist]

Oh, that's brill, many thanks! I'll need to study how to get to the info for a while, but look forward to getting there!
[Shirley Jolley / BACP / BAPCA / occasional author]

Thanks for sharing this - it's a fantastic quick resource. I'd like to share it with students on the course I work on.
[David Murphy Nottingham University]

Amazing!
[Ralph Wallin, BAPCA]

Carl Rogers & the CIA

Carl Rogers was a pioneer and leader in the humanistic psychology movement. Although his many professional activities and accomplishments are well known, the story of his association with the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology - a front organisation for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - is barely known and has never been explored in any depth...until this article by Stephen P. Demanchick and Howard Kirschenbaum, which attempts to tell that story in the context of America during the 1950s, Rogers' academic career, and the mission of the CIA.

Download: Carl Rogers & the CIA

Launde Abbey Encounter Weekend

PCAN - see Kendal Encounter post, below - are running another event at their regular haunt, Launde Abbey, from Friday 9-Sunday 11 April 2010. Some places remain. The cost will be £195 for the weekend.

For further details, contact Bernard Mooney, T: 020 8504 3675.

Launde Abbey is an Elizabethan manor house, set in a partly wooded valley among the rolling hills of Leicestershire. It has gardens of several acres, and is a place of tranquility. It is the site of an Augustinian priory founded in 1119.

PCAN (established over 30 years ago) has met here for more than 20 years.

See the website for more details of how to get there.

“In a group where control is shared by all… where every person is empowered, a new type of community becomes possible, an organic kind of flow… if we can find even one partial truth about the processes by which… people live together…. Without destroying one another… can live together with a caring concern for the full development for each person… can live together in the richness of diversity, instead of the sterility of conformity, then we may have found a truth with many, many implications”
[Carl Rogers, On Personal Power, 1978]

PCA Encounter Group in Kendal

Encounter Group in Kendal
Friday 9 April (7.30pm) to Sunday 11 April (4pm)
Facilitated by Will Stillwell from the La Jolla Program in California.

About the Encounter and the person centred approach
An Encounter Group provides an opportunity for people to experience a temporary Person-Centred Community. Such gatherings can be facilitated or have no formal structure except for conditions required by the venue. There is a commitment to creating an environment of the Core Conditions: where individuals are accepted and valued, where we each strive for empathy and authenticity. Since there is no-one "directing", each member of the group is able to take personal responsibility. It is an opportunity for self-exploration of, for example, your relationship with personal power. The gatherings can be challenging, exciting and deeply moving.

Reflecting on his experiences in both large and small community groups, Carl Rogers wrote: "I realise that of all the ventures in which I have ever been involved, this was the most thoroughly person-centred".

* Group numbers are between 10 and 25.
* The cost is £95 (there may be reduced fee places available, on request) for the facilitation and administration fee. Food and accommodation is not included.
* This group requires payment in advance for each booking.
* No food is provided except a limited variety of coffee, tea and biscuits. Please state special requirements. There are places to eat nearby.
* We include your contact details on a participant list, unless you ask us not to.
* Each gathering will determine its own confidentiality with regard to sharing of personal information, photographs from the event etc.
* Our meetings are unstructured, taking encounter form.
* The gatherings can be exciting, energising and risky. This offers a rare opportunity to experience an undirected temporary community. The facilitator has some responsibility for ensuring that arrangements go smoothly.
* We ask each for each person to be responsible for her/himself. We also ask each member of the community to contribute as far as they are able towards the 'duty of care'.

La Jolla Program
Will Stillwell is facilitating the 8 day Program in the south of England and has agreed to facilitate an Encounter Group in Kendal. He knew Carl Rogers. La Jolla Program uses a method of facilitating human potential and interpersonal effectiveness that grew out of client-centred therapy and known today as the person-centred approach. To help someone else “grow as a person” is no easier than to “grow oneself as a person.” But it can be done, and we have some hope – based on over 40 years of observation and practice – that it may be guided and encouraged by what one learns at the La Jolla Program. Take this weekend for yourself! You may decide to do the 8 day La Jolla Program at a later date (Phone 01539 720647 for more information).

Many, many people tell us this experience is still extremely useful, many years later. You can think of the Encounter Group as part of your journey of self discovery and professional advancement. You will learn methods for being effective in your associations with other people both personally and professionally. You will probably interact with people who bring different customs, thoughts, values and aspirations to the program. You may become a more effective listener. You may increase your acceptance of others and yourself. You will learn more about yourself at levels that are invigorating and may be surprising.

For more information on the British Person Centred Approach Network, go to: www.pcan.info

For more information on La Jolla Program go to:
www.lajollaprogram.com

For bookings and further information on the Kendal Encounter, contact:
Ian Fallows on (01539) 720647 or email ianfallows@hotmail.com

Psychotherapy & Politics event

Psychotherapy and Politics: Contributing to a Sustainable Society
Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 May 2010
Weetwood Hall, Leeds

Co-sponsored by the Psycho-Social Academic Unit, School of Healthcare, University of Leeds; the Centre for Psychological Therapies, Leeds Metropolitan University; and Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility

What are the characteristics of a sustainable society, and what can counselling and psychotherapy contribute to its creation? Like 'freedom' or 'justice', 'sustainability' is a complex and flexible term, but its key meaning could be rendered as improving the quality of current human life without damaging either future generations or present ecosystems. It includes such concepts as emotional sustainability and economic sustainability. There are many ways in which and levels on which the idea of sustainability interacts with the theory and practice of counselling and psychotherapy.

Following on from the successful conferences in London in 2008 and Glasgow in 2009, a diverse group of counsellors and psychotherapists, with representatives from the humanistic and psychodynamic communities and from Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, are organising a major conference hosted by Leeds University to explore the interface between psychological therapies and progressive social-political-environmental perspectives.

For more details: Download Conference Brochure

Click here for booking details and click on bookings

Carl Rogers' Transcripts

Transcripts of Carl Rogers' Therapy Sessions
Edited by Barbara T. Brodley and Germain Lietaer
[Completed in December, 2006]

To facilitate psychotherapy research and the education of students in client-centred therapy, the editors have compiled as complete a record as possible of transcripts of Carl R. Rogers' sessions with actual and demonstration clients.

A full description of this project is available in an article by Germain Lietaer and Barbara T. Brodley, "Carl Rogers in the Therapy Room: A Listing of Session Transcripts and a Survey of Publications Referring to Rogers’ Sessions," published 2004 in Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 2(4), pp. 274-291.

A supplemental list of more recent publications referring to Rogers’ sessions is included with the collected transcripts.

To facilitate access to this collection, PCAyorks – the regional network for the Person-Centred Approach in Yorkshire & the Humber (UK) – has, since 2007, provided webhosting for this resource. Prior to that, the 17 documents were being emailed as separate attachments, in response to individual requests only.

From correspondence with the principal editorial assistant to the project, we were informed that: “…Barbara and Germain are not in favor of "posting" them publicly on the web. But if what you are doing is more a personal thing to be followed up upon only by word of mouth I think that is fine. Thank you for your kind offer [...] “That is really fantastic. It worked in seconds when I clicked on it directly from your email message. I am quite overwhelmed.”

Whilst she was still working on the transcripts, Barbara Brodley informed us that she fully supported the efforts we were making to promote the Person Centred Approach through the private distribution of such key papers: “… especially Rogers' transcripts which I think belong to the world” [5 July 2006].

If you would like to receive the download link to the full transcript collection, please contact us at pcayorks@yahoo.co.uk, stating that you understand and accept that they are being made freely available as Microsoft Word documents for purposes of research, study and teaching and may not be sold.

The Person Centred Approach / CCT has always been at the forefront of evidence based practice and the availability of this collection will enable students, teachers, practitioners and researchers to study in detail the work of Rogers with his own clients. We at PCAyorks are delighted to play a small, but significant part in promoting and facilitating the Approach in this way.

We look forward to hearing from you if you would like to take advantage of this offer.

BAPCA AGM, Regulation, Links

A bit of a round-up, this post.

BAPCA AGM
This year's AGM will take place on 27 March 2010 at the Letchworth Settlement, 229 Nevells Road, Letchworth Garden City, Herts SG6 4UB.

It's an exciting time for BAPCA, and the Co-ordinating Group (trustees) have issued a recent statement in response to the Open Letter on Statutory Regulation that signals a potential shift towards a more robust - or at least multi-stranded - response to the unpopular HPC would-be regulator.

Their website is a bit wonky at times (who are we to throw stones?), but you can find out a bit more at:

BAPCA 2010 AGM

Coordinating Group's Response to the Open Letter:
The Future of the Person-Centred Approach in the UK and the Case against HPC and State Regulation

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REGULATION RESOURCES
Statutory Regulation and the Future of Professional Practice in Psychotherapy & Counselling: Evidence from the field

October 2009 / King’s College London – Department of Management
Dr Gerry McGivern, Dr Michael Fischer, Prof Ewan Ferlie, Dr Mark Exworthy

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/06/35/90/StatutoryRegulation1.pdf

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LINKS
We've done a fairly major update of the links section - have a click around and see what you can find.

Remember, you can always leave a comment and let us know you are out there.