Explore the CPD on the go® library
**NEW** Mainstreaming the manosphere's misogyny: Exploring how teen boys navigate the Andrew tate effect
This article explores how teenage boys engage with manosphere content, particularly through the lens of Andrew Tate’s influence, and how this engagement functions as a form of emotional and social currency among peers. Drawing on focus groups with 13–14-year-old boys and a critical analysis of Tate’s media presence, the study unpacks how young people use this content to bond, joke, and affirm group identities, often without full awareness of its underlying misogyny.
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**NEW** Impact of a brief compassion intervention on everyday experiences of autistic adults
Using a combination of self-report measures, heart rate variability (HRV) assessments, and daily experience sampling, the authors investigated changes in self-compassion, emotional regulation, and physiological responses, this activity explores the feasibility and effects of a brief, self-guided, online compassion-focused intervention for autistic adults.
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Effective peer employment with multidisciplinary organisations: Model for best practice
Understanding the barriers to the development and implementation of a lived experience workforce, specifically, the difficulties in engaging and collaborating with lived experience workers, particularly in the context of multidisciplinary teams, is crucial within the mental health sector. Explore the factors that contribute to successful employment of peer workers and organisational change in mental health and substance use recovery services. As psychologists interacting with and working within multidisciplinary teams, it is crucial that we understand approaches that will facilitate meaningful involvement and genuine reform.
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Interparental Coercive Control and child and family outcomes: a systematic review
Coercive control is a pervasive and insidious form of domestic abuse that involves a pattern of manipulative behaviours, aimed at establishing and maintaining power and control within an intimate relationship. This form of abuse employs tactics such as emotional manipulation, gaslighting, financial control, and isolation from support networks, ultimately eroding the victim's autonomy, independence, and sense of self-worth. The adverse effects of coercive control are far-reaching and potentially long-lasting, and there has been substantial focus placed on adult victim-survivors. However, there is growing recognition that children are not just passive witnesses of interparental coercive control; rather, the research is indicating that children can be profoundly impacted by exposure to coercive control.
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Mattering at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and politics
Mattering captures the synergistic balance between feeling valued by, and adding value to, self and others. A multidimensional construct that spans various life domains, including intrapersonal, relational, occupational and community domains, and as a fundamental human need, it fosters wellbeing both at an individual and community level. The relationship between mattering and wellbeing can be explored through its components including a sense of belonging, secure attachment, autonomy, self-determination, and self-efficacy. Mattering is a unifying value which helps to strike a balance between self and others, between rights and responsibility, and offers a pathway to avoid the dichotomy between diversity and sense of community. Mattering, at both individual and community levels, represents an indispensable element of our collective wellbeing.
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Ten misconceptions about trauma-focussed CBT for PTSD. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist
Evidence-based treatments include Trauma-Focused CBT, yet common misconceptions have led practitioners, at all levels of experience, to modify or omit critical elements, potentially reducing the effectiveness of treatment. This is particularly true for experiential elements, such as work on trauma memories, out-of-office behavioural experiments, and trauma site visits. Murray et al (2022) provides an overview of this gold standard approach, and how each element targets specific aspects of PTSD that are resistant to change. This activity presents an opportunity to enhance your understanding of trauma-focused CBT and reflect on your own practice, for optimal outcomes.
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Responding to the impacts of the climate crisis on children and youth
Climate change exposes many children and young adults to traumatic, extreme weather events, resource shortages, political unrest, and a growing refugee crisis. Indirectly, climate change engenders fear that our planet’s viability to sustain life is threatened: the future that young people might imagine for themselves is in jeopardy. The psychological impact of climate change through these direct and indirect effects is significant.
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Suicidality and suicide prevention in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities: A systemic review
Suicide, with its complex causes, profound impacts, and unacceptable rates, deserves significant and intense focus. A substantial body of research indicates that risk factors vary across different populations, with clear implications that universal prevention programs are less likely to be accessed or effective across the range of at-risk groups.
For this reason, a number of suicide prevention programs have been developed, built on empirical foundations and specifically designed to address the variations unique to the target groups.
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse people (CALD) form a core and valued community in Australia, but there is limited research investigating suicide and suicidality in this population, and only a handful of culturally-appropriate prevention programs exist in Australia.
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Best evidence for the rehabilitation of chronic pain. Part 1: Paediatric pain
Children with chronic pain will often experience significant problems with functioning, such as school absenteeism and lower participation in daily, after-school and family activities. This contributes to a lower quality of life, less physical fitness and eventually, more entrenched chronic pain. Australia has an escalating crisis of chronic pain, with the availability of services offering contemporary, best-practice care falling far short of existing need. This is especially true for children and adolescents. This article presents an up-to-date review of evidence-based interventions for children and adolescents with chronic pain, as well as innovative and emerging treatments that warrant consideration.
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Understanding trauma as a system of psycho-social harm
Trauma has long been considered from a biopsychosocial perspective, with many studies exploring the at-times devastating, disruptive, and often long-lasting effects of the trauma experience. Within the therapeutic context, a focus on trauma-informed care has resulted in treatment that can honour the client’s experiences, interpretations, and paths to healing. Whilst an understanding of the lifelong impact of trauma is critical, expanding that understanding to capture trauma as a systemic form of harm, is key to developing a trauma-informed culture. This activity offers an overview of some key historical issues and theory, and highlights five key areas in which the Royal Commission engaged with trauma theory, including a social-structural and political account of trauma, trauma-informed evidence gathering processes, bearing witness and the moral injury of trauma, a culture of care, and interdisciplinarity and unclassified.
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Workplace mental health: developing an integrated intervention approach
Mental health problems in the workplace can have significant, serious, and far-reaching effects that impact the individual, families, workplaces, and the broader community. This article reviews the prevalence and risk factors for mental health problems in the workplace, and offers a model for an integrated approach to workplace mental health.
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Breaking free of social anxiety
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) will be experienced by an estimated 8% of Australians at some point in their lives (Andrews et al., 2018). This disorder has profound and far-reaching implications, with individuals more likely to be single, unemployed and attaining a lower level of education (Madigan, 2020). As such, it is one of the few mental health disorders for which the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) does not recommend stepped care, but instead, that clients are immediately offered face-to-face, high-intensity therapy. (Warnock-Parkes et al, 2020). This activity discusses a best practice approach to treating social anxiety disorder.
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Be quiet and man up: Fathers and birth trauma
Birth trauma can lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), unless identified and treated early. Research has focused on the mother’s experience, highlighting the need to assess risk and protective factors. However, what of fathers who witness the birth? Despite experiencing high levels of fear, particularly where a partner or child’s life is perceived to be at risk, fathers’ post-birth trauma is rarely considered, let alone treated. Yet attendance at birth by fathers is increasingly common and is one of the most life-changing events a man can experience.
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Eating disorders - the latest evidence
Eating disorders take an intense physical and psychological toll on the individual and are the most lethal of all mental illnesses, with a higher risk of heart failure, other medical complications, and suicide. Complex, and often prolonged eating disorders, have treatment requirements that differ from other types of mental illness. An evidence-based response by medical and allied health professionals is therefore paramount.
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The long-term co-occurrence of psychiatric illness and behavioural problems following child sexual abuse
Victims of child sexual abuse (CSA) can experience a range of serious adverse outcomes that impact them across the lifespan. Research into these effects often focuses on a single factor (e.g., re victimisation), and a significant body of literature has established relationships between CSA and individual outcomes. However, to gain insight into the severity of CSA impact on victims, it is important to understanding the co-occurrence of long-term outcomes, both psychiatric and behavioural.
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Living with dementia
As with all terminal illnesses, quality of life becomes of the focus of support when a person receives a diagnosis of dementia. Dementia affects the individual who gradually loses their ability to engage and function independently, as well as impacting on family and friends who observe the decline, often while increasingly providing supportive care. Psychologists have an important role to play in understanding grief, facilitating community connection and collaborating towards end-of-life planning.
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Transgender experience of mental healthcare in Australia
‘Transgender’ refers to the spectrum of individuals who identify with a gender different from the gender assigned at birth. Transgender people continue to experience physical, emotional, financial and legal discrimination in Australia, including in the provision of healthcare. This is reflected in less-than-optimal therapeutic outcomes, and so the need for support by informed practitioners is critical.
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