CBT for Bipolar Disorder Let's Talk About CBT

Note: This episode was recorded before government guidance on restricting travel due to coronavirus.
We all experience ups and downs in mood, but what happens when the highs are so high and the lows are so low that it really interferes with your life? In this episode we hear from Cate Catmore and Professor Steven Jones about CBT for bipolar disorder.
 
Show Notes and Transcript
For more resources check out these links below.
Books
Coping with bipolar disorder by Steve Jones, Peter Haywood and Dominic Lam
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coping-Bipolar-Disorder-CBT-Informed-Depression-ebook/dp/B07ZWQ877T/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=coping+with+bipolar+disorder&qid=1585237730&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
 
Overcoming Mood Swings by Jan Scott
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003GUBILQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
 
Online resources
NICE guidelines on bipolar are summarised here
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg185
 
Cate spoke about mindfulness. You can hear more about mindfulness-based cognitive therapies here
https://letstalkaboutcbt.libsyn.com/lets-talk-about-cbt-mindfulness-based-therapies
 
This BPS report is called Understanding Bipolar Disorder
https://shop.bps.org.uk/understanding-bipolar-disorder.html
 
Recovery toolkit for friends and relatives of someone with bipolar disorder based on research at Lancaster University
https://reacttoolkit.uk/
 
Guardian article on CBT for bipolar disorder by Lucy from a few years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/science/sifting-the-evidence/2016/feb/08/nice-critique-a-call-for-more-research-not-an-excuse-for-less-treatment-psychotherapy-cbt
 
If you’d like to read more academic journal articles this range of papers about bipolar disorder has been made free until 30th April 2020 from the BABCP journals 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-and-cognitive-psychotherapy/bipolar-articles-from-bcp-and-tcbt
 
The photo is by Claire Satera on Unsplash
This episode was produced by Lucy Maddox.
 
Transcript
Lucy: Hello and welcome to let's talk about CBT, with me, Dr Lucy Maddox. This podcast brought to you by the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies or BABCP is all about CBT. What it is, what it's not and how it can be useful. As an aside, if you listen regularly to this podcast and like it, please do consider rating and reviewing it, it helps other people to find it.  

And if you have ideas for other episodes that you'd like to listen to, just let me know at lucy.maddox@babcp.com. Right then, I thought I'd start this episode with a quote from Kaye Redfield Jamison, who's a clinical psychologist and writer. She writes, "When you're high it's tremendous, the ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. 

But somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast and there are far too many. You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind." That was about Kaye's experience of bipolar disorder which is the diagnosis that this episode concentrates on.  

For this podcast, I went to Lancaster and met Cate, who's experienced the highs and lows of bipolar disorder and what CBT can do to help. And Steve, whose research team works on a CBT-based intervention for bipolar disorder.  

Cate: I'm Cate Catmore, I'm 64, and I live with my husband, got two children, two sons and two granddaughters. I did CBT a while ago and then I had a course of recovery-based CBT recently.  

Steve: Hi, I'm Steve Jones, I'm co-director of the Spectrum Centre for mental health research at Lancaster University. The focus of our work is on trying to learn more about the psychological and social factors underpinning bipolar disorder and related conditions. And to use that information and learning to develop new interventions that are developed with the service user in m