This book seems to contain all of human life, from the scientific details through the full range of emotions, including the extremes of love and hate. And it emanates a sense that although we all get shaken sometimes, and life is dangerous, every feeling is expressible and every situation is workable.

Tags: eating disorder, therapy

The basic conceptualisation of human experience offered by this book is that distress arises from our relationship with our own internal experience. The remedy goes beyond (and could be seen as contrary to) the traditional cognitive therapy approach of disentangling the client from the thoughts, questioning them and replacing them with more realistic and helpful ones.

Tags: acceptance, cbt, mindfulness, Research

Written by four luminaries of the mindfulness movement in psychotherapy and counselling, The Mindful Way through Depression is a self-help book in the best sense of the term, and you don't need to suffer from depression to find it useful.

Tags: cbt, depression, mindfulness, philosophy, Research

This is a rigorous scholarly text dedicated to a very real social problem, and it does try to identify successful and unsuccessful community and state-wide attempts to prevent or reduce youth problems. It doesn't pretend to be a self-help book or parenting manual, or indeed a profound philosophical or political analysis.

Tags: adolescents, children, parents, Research

At a time when Complementary and Alternative Therapies have (again) been under fire from some university scientists for falsely claiming scientific status, and in an era of evidence-based psychotherapy, this book is a key text. It should have a place on all postgraduate counselling and psychotherapy courses, but I suspect it will not be so readily accommodated.

Tags: effectiveness, Psychology, Research, therapy

Aimed at practising cognitive behavioural therapists, 'Cognitive Behaviour Therapy' offers eleven chapters of the newest developments in applying CBT to work with particular client populations.

Tags: anxiety, bipolar disorder, cbt, depression, eating disorder, personality disorder

Regarded as the textbook of research on the effectiveness of counselling and psychotherapy, this volume is a favourite of practitioners who approach their work in an empirical spirit. While tracing research developments gradually as individual papers appear remains an important part of being well-informed about the field, the reviews and meta-analyses offered in this massive volume provide a very efficient entree into the research literature and a simple way of understanding the primary themes and tentative conclusions emerging from empirical research across the world. (Review originally published in 2003.)

Tags: effectiveness, Psychology, Research, therapy

For over four decades, the message from psychotherapy outcome research has been getting clearer: the theories and techniques of professional therapy have very little to do with therapeutic success. (Review originally published in 2003.)

Tags: effectiveness, Research, therapy