You understand your problem perfectly. You know when it happens, how it happens, and you can have a pretty good stab at why it’s happening. You even, theoretically, know what needs to change, for it to stop happening. But all this knowledge is absolutely useless to you when the problem arises. Nothing changes.

The Mental Health Foundation has welcomed the UK Department of Health’s announcement that it will make computer-based cognitive behavioural therapy available to patients with common mental health problems such as anxiety or mild to moderate depression.

Echoing the experience of researchers involved in other types of distance therapies, such as online therapy, a new study indicates that people receiving brief telephone-based psychotherapy soon after starting on antidepressant medication experienced strongly positive effects up to 18 months after their first session.

Frequently a target of criticism over its practitioner accreditation requirements, the BACP recently attempted to clarify its supervision hours guidelines, only to muddy the picture even further. Despite attempts to market it all as ‘quite clear’, the basic mathematics of BACP guidelines lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions.

How long does it take to complete one million words of online counselling and online therapy? If you’re Managing Editor Greg Mulhauser, it apparently takes a little less than 3 years. A few weeks ago, the total volume of counselling emails between Mulhauser and his clients surpassed one million words — apparently making Mulhauser the first online practitioner in the history of the field to document this volume of individual online therapeutic work.

The BBC’s Radio 4 Saturday morning reported on NHS plans for a pilot project in Staffordshire which would allow patients engaging in self-harm to continue to do so under medical supervision. With the radio interviewers seemingly intent on ferreting out whatever controversy they could discover, it seemed to me that important points were missed about the role of self-harming as a coping mechanism.

In the largest ‘real world’ trial ever conducted, a $35 million US government study has concluded that antidepressants cure (or fail to cure) the symptoms of major depression in half of all sufferers, even when individuals are receiving the best possible care. The drugs used in the study, including Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor, work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression.