In a blustery rainy Toronto, speaking at the joint Canadian and American Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry annual meeting. First workshop we (Efrain Bleiberg, Trudie Rossouw and I) did on mentalizing approaches to affectively unstable adolescents seemed well received. A symposium on mentalizing approaches to treatment next, on Saturday, with Peter Fonagy, Efrain, Trudie and Carla Sharp. I will be talking about AMBIT, MBT-F (Mentalization based treatment for families) and will include material on the tiddlymanual. Increasingly I like the notion of AMBIT as an 'open source therapy'... This is very much true to the nature of mentalizing in practice... Just like the programmers who throw open their source code for others to examine and help improve upon, so the mentalizing therapist takes a chance on 'throwing open' his or her thoughts, all the while marking them tentatively as 'just my best theory about what is going on here'. I love the open source 'mantra' - "Release early. Release often"... Really good match to mentalizing work, and draws a marked contrast between the stance that a mentalizing therapist takes and those of more 'knowing' or 'expert' schools of therapy, who may be perceived as withholding, or secretive, by their patients in ways that arouse emotional responses that then paradoxically block mentalizing...
Anyway, the other news is that a third generation of the user interface for tiddlymanuals is in development thanks to Jon and Josh at Withjandj and funded through the Comic Relief grant - the effort is all directed at smoothing (and soothing!) the user experience (once you adopt the frame of mentalizing it is like a benign virus that infects everything - web design is of course all about mentalizing the user!)..
The new design will aim for a crisper typeface, and will further emphasize the notion of tiddlers as paper on a desk (think wood, like the beautiful walnut2 theme for Firefox!) but we are working to make the 'meta-data' attached to each tiddler note even more intuitive, and to make it clearer for the user whether she is browsing or editing...
Should be released in a couple of weeks or less.
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