Dialogical Practice

“Studies show that self-help books can resolve readers’ depressed moods, change ingrained thought patterns, and instill a renewed zest for life – as long as the advice within is scientifically sound,” Elizabeth Svoboda writes for Aeon. “The literature we choose to guide us should supply proven advice we can trust. But it should also, as Franz Kafka wrote, be ‘the axe for the frozen sea within us’, bludgeoning us in ways that awaken us to the extraordinary.”

A new study in press in the Journal of Schizophrenia Research finds that patients who actively resist the negative stigma associated with mental health...

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.

Individualist psychological models of poverty pathologize poor communities, decolonial approaches that emphasize context and interdependence may be more sustainable.

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

Researchers explore the effects of augmented treatment at various points in interpersonal psychotherapy for adolescents diagnosed with depression, highlighting previously unidentified critical decision points (i.e., relatively early in the treatment sequence).

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

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

A new study finds self-coldness predicts depressive symptoms and supports self-compassion as a buffer.

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

A new pro-recovery manualized intervention – called the REFOCUS intervention – has been developed and will now be evaluated in a multisite randomized control trials. The strengths-based intervention, which focuses on promoting relationships, is outlined in the latest issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

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...

In a commentary piece, Ben Alderson-Day and Nev Jones discuss the AVATAR therapy research for psychosis and propose further questions.

A new study finds that emotions may be represented by 27 categories, with each category relating to others in a more complex and continuous fashion than previously understood.

Pilot study finds school-based humanistic counseling reduces emotional symptoms in students.

Research investigates clinicians’ perspectives on best care practices and the complicated realities of providing care in the face of agency limitations and mechanized interventions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A new study explores the impact of a Mindfulness-Based intervention on stress-related biomarkers in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).