This is a common example of a Training Challenge (a less off-putting term for 'homework') set in a Cognitive Behavioural approach.

THE PURPOSE OF DIARY KEEPING IN CBT
Sometimes diary keeping is carried out without being clear what the purpose of diary keeping is. As an approach CBT is concerned with trying to enable the young person to make changes in their daily life and is less focussed on changes that take place in the therapy itself. Diary keeping is a method of trying to connect the therapy sessions with real events in the young person's life. One of the ways that the young person's life is kept at a distance from the therapy is by the young person providng vague, general statements about themselves and the events of their week. For example atypical enquiry can go as follows. 'How are you?' 'Okay'. 'How has your week been? 'Okay'. 'Been out much?' 'A bit' 'Had any good days?' 'Not sure'. etc Such general evaluative statemetns are of little value in CBT. It can be similar when the statements are negative e.g 'How has your week been?' 'Shit'. The purpose of diary keeping is rarely to obtain a comprehensive picture of the whole week's events but more to locate one specific event that can then be explored in more detail as a way of getting these general statements.

Most young people find keeping a diary record of what happens during the week very hard to do. Do not be discouraged by this but be extremely practical about how to encourage young person to begin to keep very simple records of what has happened in between sessions.

Start with a simple frequency diary. This simply asks the young person to notice whether a certain thing happneded on a particular day. For example, having a row with a parent. Getting the young person to notice if this happened each day. In practice, at the following session, the young person may turn up without any record etc and you may need to go through the week asking for each day. What may be very helpful is to get interested in the days that NO ROWS took place.

Nowadays, young people can use mobile phones or other IT equipment to keep records of things. For some young people I have suggested they write a quick text message to themselves as a reminder of something that happened. There may be circumstances that it is appropriate to have an arrangement for the young person to text the therapist as a record keeping task. This can be excellent but needs to be set up with very clear task boundaries so that young people do not expect a therapist response to all such messages.

if you have suggested a diary task, it is CRUCIAL that you are very interested in what the young person has done around this at the following session. If you minimise or forget, you model the very behaviour which you are trying to change.

If the young person is able to do some frequency diary work, it may be possible to move on to doing more complex diary work using an ABC format (see below). This allows for a close analysis of the possible Reinforcement of particular behvaiours, and the design of new Contingencies that might help to reduce the reinforcement of undesired behaviours, and increase the reinforcement of desired behaviours. The purpose of this is twofold. Firstly, it may provide some ideas about how negative behaviours are being encouraged by their consequences. Secondly, it may help the young person to see 'patterns of interactions' rather than just being dominated by own feelings and thoughts.

• Ask the young person to keep a diary sheet, either simply recording daily drug/alcohol consumption (or any other behaviour that is targetted, such as self-injury) or, preferably, (as it gathers more information to work with) recording A, B, C;

A = Antecedents

What came just before the target behaviour (e.g. smoking the joint/the aggressive outburst/etc) - "Where were you? Who else was there? What were you thinking? What do you remember feeling?/etc." (It is easy to see that thinking about these things is getting close to Mentalizing.)

B = Behaviours

What actually happened? (e.g. smoked 1, 2, 3 joints...)

C = Consequences

What happened afterwards? Think of short term effects (fun? paranoia? fights? Police?) and longer term effects (parental arguments, trouble at school...) - see Weighing Pros and Cons for more ideas on this.