Why do we have Halloween? It’s time to carve and light the pumpkins, don the fangs and liberally drizzle the fake blood! Halloween is the time to revel in the darkness and delight in savage, gruesome and thrilling. Of course, this is particularly exciting for many of us precisely because we feel under a certain amount of social pressure from society to hide the less palatable sides of ourselves – our anger, envy, jealousy, greed; our raw ‘animal’ sides. But for a long time, psychology has recognised that not only […]...
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is recommended by the government as the treatment of choice for a range of mental health problems including Depression, Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Eating Disorders (Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorder). In many cases the evidence has proven it to be more effective in alleviating symptoms and with longer lasting results than medication, the traditional way of treating mental health problems and the one often advocated by busy GPs with limited funding and resources. However, despite recent […]...
Encouraging competition and achievement is the cornerstone of capitalism and the foundation upon which western societies are built and as a result our fear of failure is frequently the biggest obstacle that we face when embarking upon new challenges. However, every psychological study of enhancing success says that if you want to help people gain confidence and succeed you need to focus on their efforts, not the results and that being prepared and equipped to fail or to make mistakes is the only way that we can learn, develop and […]...
Heralded as a ‘miracle cure’, EMDR has an almost cult like following amongst some practitioners. Maybe it our wish to believe in the existence of a quick fix magical solution to our problems or just our fascination with the Victorian parlour trickery but few psychological treatments have received such remarkable attention, especially in the absence of a solid evidence base of it’s effectiveness. Numerous controlled studies show that EMDR ameliorates symptoms of civilian PTSD better than doing nothing, but not a shred of good evidence exists that EMDR is superior […]...
