Applications are now open for the 2008 'Personality: people and pathology' course. Click here for a brochure, here for the application form.

If you work for OBMH Trust, the Training needs analysis can be found on this page in the bottom right ------->>>>>

Click PD training -> PD agents to read about PD agents and the successful Thames Valley PD Initiative bid for national funding

Here is an account of the recent residential weekend, a 'Living learning experience' in Kent in January 2006, part of the last PPP course.

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To be told in advance that the residential part of the course would be experiential does little to prepare students for a weekend at Bore Place. For me it was challenging and educational in a way that no amount of lectures and seminars can hope to achieve, because the weekend reaches beyond the intellectual, beyond the 'normal'   professional expectations of what training can encompass. It gives members a taste of the emotional impact of being at a therapeutic community.

On the subject of silences, a topic which arose more than once on the course, I was reminded of these (abridged) lines by Suzanne Vega:

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be

I won't use words again
They don't mean what I meant
They don't say what I said
They're just the crust of the meaning
With realms underneath
Never touched
Never stirred
Never even moved through

OK, so I'm not promising never to open my mouth again (sorry folks!), but I think the above conveys some of what I felt.

Oh, and above all, the weekend at Bore Place was FUN!

Catherine Ashley-Boulton