Dialogical Practice

Study finds that traditional healers in South Africa, whose services are widely used by the country’s population, perform important suicide prevention work.

Hearing Voices Network self-help groups are an important resource for coping with voice hearing, study finds.

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

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

Researcher examines the impact of client feedback and progress assessment on improvement in outcomes.

Psychiatrist outlines varying roles in Open Dialogue model, fostering service-user and family agency through meaningful conversations with a team of providers.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) may be more effective at reducing the risk of depressive relapse compared to current standard treatments with antidepressant drugs. A...

Researchers distinguish between two different forms of perspective taking and examine their impact on helpers’ wellbeing.

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic explosion of interest in the Open Dialogue Therapy practiced in Tornio, Finland. It is a humanistic “treatment” that has produced five-year outcomes for psychotic patients that are, by far, the best in the developed world, and there are now groups in the United States, Europe and beyond that are seeking to “import” this care. However, the challenges for doing so are many and, last month, Open Dialogue UK - on the occasion of the first-ever fully recognized Open Dialogue training outside of Tornio - organized a conference in London to hold an open dialogue about Open Dialogue.

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

Men who report being self-reliant may be at greater risk of suicidal thinking.

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.

Kev Harding argues against conceptualizations of therapy as a ‘cure’ to an ‘illness’ and instead offers alternative approaches.

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

New data fails to support the promotion of manualized psychotherapy as superior to non-manualized forms of psychotherapy.

Meta-analytic study finds that psychodynamic therapy outcomes are equivalent to those of CBT and other empirically supported treatments.