Rennie

I read your blogs with interest. It helps me to know what people elsewhere have available for free help. It appears to be little in the UK. Not so in this part of Canada. Talk therapy can go on for years every week. And it is free. You don't hear us quoting books because we have no need for them. There are a few good books, but they are outweighed by therapies that are outdated, don't fit todays lifestyle or take forever page after page to give you nothing but another coping skill and nothing cognitive. My grandmother could lecture me on just do it, but she is from a different era. Back then you could bull through things because there was only a fraction of the stressors there are today. I'm 64 and badly physically disabled. I could not get to a course or sit through it although My Therapist wanted me too. So I have been using the internet, but not blindly. And that takes a lot of reading to sift the wheat from the chaff. You can say anything on the internet. But also there is some very good information. A large part of my information came by way of my therapist over five years. Some of it as recommended sites. Some very technical. Some was very eye opening and some was too close to home and needed days to absorb. I found a connection to how the brain works and mental conditions. I also found it does not malfunction, it can not. But it can use the wrong information to function. Garbage in, garbage out in a way. The exception is schizophrenia and bipolar and psychopaths. There the brain is wired different from normal. The first two can have relatively normal lives on medication.
These no help outdated books are not making what I am trying to do any easier. They lie about only one thing. CBT, coping is not CBT it is only behavioural. It is only a small part of CBT. It cures nothing.
I write but find little time to. At the request of a friend I put all she needed to know in a book and sent it to her. 47 pages, 25000 words but it covers anxiety and panic pretty thorough. It has information that is not on the net too.

I like what I am doing but often get frustrated and feel I should give up. It is hard to get people past coping, since so much of life is coping. But then I remember how I was and how I am now and push CBT, real CBT, some more.