Dialogical Practice

Clinicians play a key role in empowering adolescents and their parents to make decisions about their mental health treatment.

The American Psychological Association is hosting a two and half day interdisciplinary summit on November 3rd through 5th entitled Global Approaches to Integrated Care: Translating Science And Best Practices Into Patient-Centered Health Care Delivery. The summit features presentations and discussions on social determinants of health, demographics, culture and health disparities, and patients’ perspectives, among others. It can be livestreamed here.

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.

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...

Study reveals data suggesting yogic breathing may be helpful in treating depression for patients who have not respond to antidepressants

Writing for CounterPunch, Paris Williams writes that when an individual is experiencing what has been termed “psychosis,” it is important to recognize that this may also be the manifestation of a breakdown in their larger social groups, the family, society, and even the species.

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

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.”

A new study out of Kings College London found that twelve sessions of a group mindfulness-based therapy relieved distress associated with hearing voices while reducing depression over the long-term. The person-based cognitive therapy (PBCT) intervention had significant effects on depression, voice distress, voice controllability and overall recovery.

Acknowledging that current depression treatments are failing many people, researchers from Michigan State and MIT have developed a new model for understanding how multiple psychological, biological, social and environmental factors contribute to depression.

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

From Science of Us: There seems to be a growing interest in the concept of healthy voice-hearing. The idea that hearing voices may not be...

Training for conceptual competence in psychiatry provides a new way forward to address theoretical and philosophical issues in mental health research and practice.

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

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

Lynne Malcolm, for ABC’s All In the Mind program, interviews three psychoanalysts about how their field remains “relevant and useful in the contemporary therapeutic...

New research suggests that more frequent in-person contact lessens the risk of depression in older adults. The study, published in this month’s issue of the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, found that in Americans over fifty the more face-to-face contact they had with children, family and friends, the less likely they were to develop depressive symptoms.

For the Critical Psychiatry blog, Duncan Double writes that psychological formulation and psychosocial assessment may provide a way forward to a “new psychiatry” that moves on from modern concepts of mental illness as chemical imbalance or some other abnormality of the brain.

A new review finds preliminary evidence for yoga and mindfulness-based interventions for youth diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Researchers develop an initial framework for understanding metatherapeutic communication practices that may inform future integration of collaboration in psychotherapy.

Professionals across the Western world, from a range of disciplines, earn their livings by offering services to reduce the misery and suffering of the people who seek their help. Do these paid helpers represent a fundamental force for healing, facilitating the recovery journeys of people with mental health problems, or are they a substantial part of the problem by maintaining our modestly effective and often damaging system?

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.

Paper outlines recommendations for more thorough informed consent process in psychotherapy, which authors proclaim is an “ethical imperative."

Knowing the client’s history can help foster genuine empathic responding, a key component to child-centered play therapy.

In this piece for Psychiatric Services, Dr. Sandra Steingard comments on the implications of a recent meta-analysis demonstrating the positive effects of the therapeutic alliance on pharmacologic...