Facing Our Fears - Why We Avoid Doing Couples Therapy, by Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson

Removing the Masks, by David Schnarch

A Matter of Choice - Deciding Whether to Be Right or Be Married, by Terry Real

In or Out? - Treating the Mixed-Agenda Couple, by William Doherty

West Meets East

As mindfulness practices work their way into the therapy mainstream, we’re asking more clinically sophisticated questions: Who needs what practice when? What are the downsides?

Suggesting Mindfulness

As a clinical intervention, mindfulness is best understood by stripping away its aura of mystical spirituality and understanding the crucial role suggestion plays in the change process.

When Meditation Isn’t Enough

 A psychotherapist discusses how to help clients transform the disruptive feelings and thoughts that they’ve learned to simply observe during meditation.

Shadow Side of Meditation

 A Zen teacher describes the benefits and limitations of traditional meditation practice.

Relational Meditation

Being anti-Pharma is hardly edgy business; it’s now the established intellectual position of most academics, not to mention everyone.  Insurances are refusing to pay for the branded psych drugs, doctors are being forbidden from consulting; and, simultaneously, Big Pharma is abandoning psychiatry.  Pfizer has all but closed its CNS division, temporarily pretending to still care about something called Pristiq that no one takes.  By next year, all of your love-to-hate drugs– Zyprexa, Geodon, Seroquel– will be generic.  There are no new blockbusters coming, no innovative treatments, no Big Pharma research money.  By 2013, you’ll have gotten what you were not careful to wish for.

UPDATE:  Another response in the NYT: In Defense of Antidepressants.

AND:  Psychiatrists respond at NYRB.

The Road to Mastery
By Scott Miller and Mark Hubble
Therapists usually enter the field because they’re drawn to the work. But whether they excel depends largely on their professional community.

Building a Culture of Excellence
By Bob Bertolino
We all have stories about the bureaucracies that stifle clinical creativity and seem to exist primarily to generate meaningless paperwork. Here’s a tale about a community agency that actually works, and how it got that way.

What Therapists Want
By Barry Duncan
A close-up look at a 20-year, multinational study that captures the heart of therapists’ aspirations—and perhaps the soul of our professional identity.

Opening the Path
By Barry Duncan
Down for the count, a therapist again discovers that even the most hopeless sessions can have a positive outcome if you stay with the process.

From Isolation to Connection
By Peter Fraenkel
A modest proposal about how to get out of your cubbyhole, enliven your conversations with others in the field, and experience a new kind of professional community.

Mapping the Future
By Mary Sykes Wylie
Emerging from their monastic little cells, 3,000 psychotherapists had a
schmooze-fest celebrating the power of face-to-face

Experiencing Presence – Some Thoughts

Saving the Game: The Use of Gaming within Psychotherapy

Technology Enhanced Coaching

Cutting Edge Technology to Aid People with Mental Health Issues

Certificate Programme Services: Certificate in the Therapeutic Use of Technology

 

The Attuned Therapist By Mary Sykes Wylie and Lynn Turner In recent years, attachment theory, with its emphasis on early bonding, connection and relationship, has exerted as much influence over the field of psychotherapy as any other perspective. Why then do some critics believe that it’s sending therapists off on the wrong track? Bringing Up Baby By Jerome Kagan While therapists may consider some intuitively appealing ideas about human development—like attachment theory—beyond dispute, the researcher’s job is to challenge unproven explanations shaped more by our biases and preconceptions than by hard evidence. The Verdict Is In By Alan Sroufe and Daniel Siegel Fifty years of research has confirmed that the emotional quality of our earliest attachment relationships is central to our well-being as adults. The Nightgown By Bruce Jay Friedman A determined patient searches for therapeutic insight from an unlikely source.

 

Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.

Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate. There is no evidence that psychiatrists provide higher quality talk therapy than psychologists or social workers.

Chew Wisely
By Fred Wistow
Remember as a kid being scrupulously taught that eating was a serious business that brooked no nonsense? A lifetime later, this author discovered that—as with so many other life lessons—his mother was totally wrong.

I Think, Therefore I Eat
By Judith Beck
From the viewpoint of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the reason that dieters so frequently fail to stick to their healthy eating plans is simple: knowing what to do and knowing how to get yourself to do it are two entirely different skills.

It’s Not about the Food
By Lisa Ferentz
The key to working effectively with eating disorders is understanding that starving, bingeing, and purging aren’t simply bad habits. For treatment to work, it must get beyond the focus on negative behavior to grasp the emotional cycle of disordered eating.

Cyberspaced
By Mary Sykes Wylie and Rich Simon
MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent the last 30 years studying what our machines have come to mean to us, and how they’re altering—sometimes radically—our experience of intimacy, privacy, personal identity, and human connection.

The Puzzle of PTSD
By Roy Clymer
Does the diagnosis of PTSD actually hamper therapists’ ability to help combat veterans do the hard work of coming to terms with their war experiences.

It Takes a Community
By Laurie Leitch and Elaine Miller-Karas
Our standard psychotherapeutic paradigm is unequal to the mammoth challenge of serving the troops who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s needed is a public health perspective that taps into the power of community healing.

The Language of the Nervous System
By Laurie Leitch and Elaine Miller-Karas

The Rules of Engagement
By Alison Lighthall
What civilian therapists need to know about military culture and life in a combat zone to best serve veterans struggling with war trauma

The Case for Energy Psychology
By David Feinstein
A wizened, seen-it-all psychologist describes how he came to embrace an approach that much of the orthodox psychotherapy world considers the latest incarnation of snake oil.

A Smile after the Storm
By Caroline Sakai
A young orphan in Rwanda learns to get beyond an experience of unimaginable horror.

Deconstructing Depression
By Margaret Wehrenberg
Depression is an ill-defined diagnosis encompassing conditions with a variety of underlying causes. Recognizing different forms of depression is the key to initiating effective treatment.

It seems that everywhere you turn these days, someone is promoting social media as the lowest cost, highest impact marketing channel available for small business owners. And that right there is a problem. Far too many people ARE promoting this idea — many of whom are those likely to benefit if you make use of their media channel, enroll in their social media class, or hire them to manage your social media for you.

But what is the reality? A recent study reported by eMarketer (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007956 ) shows that only 42% of small business owners who use social media marketing are receiving sales leads from Facebook, 36% from LinkedIn, and 16% from Twitter. That’s a pretty poor showing from a marketing channel that’s being touted as so effective.

Her conclusion:

There is still no “silver bullet” solution for marketing your professional services at zero cost in your spare time. You still have to invest time and money to identify likely prospects, follow up with them to deepen relationships, and have sales conversations that expose you to rejection. And that will be true no matter what new technology for marketing is invented next month or next year.