Dialogical Practice

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

Dr. Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, discusses the importance of personal narratives and service-user activism in the context of the global mental health movement.

Brief psychodynamic and psychosocial interventions help maintain reduced depressive symptoms

Practitioners and public leaders identify methods and barriers for integrating those diagnosed with mental health issues into community life.

A new paper explores how the disputed nature of psychiatric knowledge influences public perceptions and debates within the field of mental health.

Psychologists and people with experience of psychotic symptoms publish a report on new ways of understanding psychosis.

In an article for Psychiatric Services, psychiatrist Christopher Gordon and his colleagues report on the results of a one-year feasibility study attempting to implement...

This result calls into question popular notions about the correlations between personality and later-life achievement and health outcomes.

Over the past seven years, I have been teaching open dialogue principles and practices in a variety of settings. This blog will focus on the development of a training program, now based in Manhattan, and what I’ve learned from running this program and teaching this approach in the US.

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

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.

Meta-analytic study detects upsurge in patterns of perfectionism in young adults and explores how neoliberalism contributes to this trend.

A review of CBT research findings raises questions about its status as the “evidence-based” psychotherapy of choice.

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

According to Lifshitz and Thompson, mindfulness is best understood as “complex orchestration of cognitive skills embodied in a particular social context.”

Individuals with long-term mental health conditions identify pets as valuable supports in their daily lives.

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

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.

New research examines factors that make mindfulness interventions in school most effective for adolescent’s mental health outcomes.

Researchers examine the transformation of work, life, and identity in India as a result of Western corporate and psychological culture.

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

Sociocultural context, language, and sense-making process are among concepts that can help hearers and providers better understand the phenomenon of hearing voices

Qualitative research examines the experiences of psychoanalytic therapists in their work with patients whose symptoms either failed to improve or worsened.

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.

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