Dialogical Practice

Study reports on the less-examined findings of difficult and painful meditation-related experiences.

MIA’s Micah Ingle interviews Mary Watkins about reorienting psychology toward liberation and social justice.

Researchers explore neoliberal influences on interactions in psychotherapy and question whether the radical potential of psychotherapy can counter prevailing social systems.

Researchers find that nearly half of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) patients experience treatment side effects.

A new meta-analysis finds that DBT reduces self-harm, suicide attempts, and reduces the frequency of psychiatric crisis service utilization.

Confronting existential anxiety through “Basal Exposure Therapy” shows promising results in people withdrawing from psychotropic drugs.

CBT forwards a hyper-rational perspective of human suffering that complements a managerialist culture of efficiency and institutionalization in the Western world.

A new study, published in Psychotherapy Research, explores how having a career in psychotherapy affects therapists’ personal lives.

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

Criticisms of the DSM-5 spark alternative proposals and calls to reform diagnostic systems in the mental health field.

A leading US journal published an extensive literature review and analysis of currently available research on Open Dialogue. An accompanying commentary concludes, “The present data on Open Dialogue are insufficient to warrant calls for further research on the program other than those projects that are currently under way.”

Jürgen Margraf and Silvia Schneider, both well-known psychologists at the University of Bochum in Germany, claim that psychotropic drugs are no solution to mental...

An article on contributory injustice describes the clinical and ethical imperative that clinicians listen to service users experiences.

In-depth interviews find that those who screened positive for depression did not explain their experience in terms of diagnostic symptoms.

An updated meta-analysis reveals that therapist empathy is a predictor of better psychotherapy outcomes.

A year after my twin’s death, I stood in a supermarket and felt my body disintegrating into a thousand pieces. My soul knew it needed the right teacher and helper. Fortunately, I found Open Dialogue. It helped me expose the real childhood trauma, and gradually rebuild my shattered, grief-stricken psyche.

Study finds that 74% of patients with a psychotic disorder off antipsychotics at end of 10 years are in remission.

Results of a large government-funded study call into question current drug heavy approaches to treating people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study, which the New York Times called “by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States,” found that patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic drugs with individual talk therapy, family training, and support for employment and education had a greater reduction in symptoms as well as increases in quality of life, and participation in work and school than those receiving the current standard of care.

A new study explores how mindfulness impacts self-compassion and meaning in life to increase mental health and wellbeing.

Trauma-informed approaches have the potential to promote recovery but must involve survivors and service-users to prevent the experience of retraumatization within psychiatric and mental health services.

We are profoundly social beings living not as isolated individuals but as integral members of interdependent social systems—our nuclear family system, and the broader social systems of extended family, peers, our community and the broader society. Therefore, psychosis and other forms of human distress often deemed “mental illness” are best seen not so much as something intrinsically “wrong” or “diseased” within the particular individual who is most exhibiting that distress, but rather as systemic problems that are merely being channeled through this individual.

Can a renewed biopsychosocial approach, grounded in an updated philosophy, foster person-centered medicine, and psychiatry?

As the Global Mental Health Movement attempts to address cross-cultural mental health disparities, a new article encourages integrating traditional healing practices with psychotherapy.

It has been five years since I traveled to Western Lapland in Finland to film my documentary “Open Dialogue” on their Open Dialogue Project—the program, as I stated in the film, presently getting the best long-term statistical results in the world for the treatment of first-episode psychosis. My film came out four years ago, and since then I have been screening it around the world, giving lectures about Open Dialogue and my experience in Finland, participating in regular conferences and Q&A sessions about it, receiving daily emails, Facebook messages, blog and Youtube comments about it (as it’s now been free on Youtube for a year), and keeping in regular contact with some of the folks who work there. But I haven’t shared many of my updated opinions in writing, so I wish to do so now.

Psychotherapy is dominated by contradicting schools of thought, exhibits a gap between research and practice, and repackages old ideas rather than finding clinical consensus.