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Social media grenade-launcher Matt Walsh recently posted the following on his FaceBook page: "Many people claim to know for a fact that the practice of psychotherapy has been deeply helpful to humanity. To those people, I ask: If therapy is generally so helpful, and more people than ever are doing it, then why are people less able to deal with hardship and cope with suffering than ever before? Is it because our lives are really so much more difficult?" It's a fair question. It's certainly hard to make the case that our lives are so much more difficult than, say,...

Virgina Satir was born 97 years ago on the 26th of June, 1916. She was a brilliant psychotherapist, whose pioneering work in helping families heal, earned her the title "Mother of Family Therapy". She wasn't a great poet, but her poem "I am me" is at least a little bit Whitmanesque to me. The first lines are: "My declaration of self-esteem I am me In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone chose it ......." How like Whitman is her capacity for vision that...

MDMA may mostly be known as an illicit party drug, but this psychoactive chemical looks to offer therapeutic applications far removed from the highs of the rave scene. In fact, MDMA-assisted therapy could soon become a legal and approved way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the United States. In the first phase III clinical trial for any psychedelic-assisted therapy, MDMA has shown more potential to help treat PTSD with therapy than possibly any other medicine we've got. After just three sessions, patients who were given MDMA during therapy were 35 percent less likely to meet the diagnosis for...

In the space of what feels like a breath, we went from the Greatest Generation to the legalization of infanticide, from a country with a singular and evolved moral code to the ripping down of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms across the country, from a rational acknowledgment of natural gender to drag-queen story hour at the public library. How in the world did this happen? I’m saddened to say that some of the biggest players in this cultural catastrophe have been psychotherapists. My generation was bottle fed with the nectar of psychotherapy and a philosophy that presented itself as secular...

Why People Troll By Philip Cottraux Imagine someone whose life never took off the way they wanted. For whatever reason, they are now stuck in a miserable situation; a dream career never came to be and they still live in mom’s basement. Their life is parasitic and they know it. The only thing that brings them any relief is tearing down others. Those who don’t create can only try to destroy. It’s a sad fact that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel. Abusive childhoods are breeding grounds for adult addictions. Traumatic events that occur while the brain...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Thomas Schmierer thought he was just a normal marriage and family therapist “flying under the radar” in Riverside, Calif. But Schmierer’s work with clients who seek him out for therapy for their unwanted same-sex attraction landed him in the crosshairs of homosexual-rights groups. The Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for same-sex “marriage” and homosexual causes, wrote a letter to Psychology Today in February demanding that the magazine remove Schmierer from its professional referral service. The magazine complied, and it no longer accepts advertising from Schmierer, who says the listing is essential for his private practice, Vatican Values...

Well, well, well, so Obama has embarked on his third war in little more than two years. You've got to admit that "flexibility" is his middle name. Or at least one of his middle names: Barack Barry Hussein "Flexibility" Soetoro Obama, Jr. Those are the names we know so far, but The Donald thinks there might be more. Whodda thunk? Here we are barely into the first week of what started out as a "No-Fly Zone" and it is now turning out to be Air Al Qaida. Ten years ago, AQ had a mere four civilian airplanes to crash into...

The benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) persist years after the first treatment with the drug (also known as ecstasy), according to a follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology1. The finding gives hope to people with PTSD who do not respond to conventional treatments. However, the results come from a small-scale pilot study, and the outcomes have not been so convincing in other recently published work. In the original trial, 20 patients with PTSD who had not responded to either psychotherapy or to conventional psychopharmacological drugs received MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) or a placebo during...

<p>AURORA, Colo. -- Dr. Lynne Fenton, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who was treating James E. Holmes, according to a court filing by his attorneys, was disciplined by the Colorado Medical Board in 2005.</p> <p>Fenton was also reprimanded for failing to maintain a medical chart or to enter appropriate entries for the charts relating to herself, her husband or the employee, 7News reported.</p>

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be...

Talking with liberals is frustrating, because you can't just talk about facts. That will only get them all upset, and all they will get out of the experience is never to listen to people like you. Most liberals live in their heads, or in little fluffy white clouds floating right above their scalps and resist efforts to engage them in rational conversation. Our media are perfect examples. They never learn. They never listen to any other points of view. They know they have nothing to learn. Intellectually they are stuck, stuck, stuck. (That's why the media are finally going bankrupt,...

The death of Libby Zion, an 18-year-old college student, in a New York hospital on March 5, 1984, led to a highly publicized court battle and created a cause célèbre over the lack of supervision of inexperienced and overworked young doctors. But only much later did experts zero in on the preventable disorder that apparently led to Ms. Zion’s death: a form of drug poisoning called serotonin syndrome. --snip-- In its classic form, serotonin syndrome involves three categories of symptoms: ¶Cognitive-behavioral symptoms like confusion, disorientation, agitation, irritability, unresponsiveness and anxiety. --snip-- Perhaps adding to the diagnostic challenge is the fact...

If the pursuit of happiness was once an ideal in American life, the entitlement to happiness may now have replaced it. Since the late 1980s, when psychotropic drugs first came on the market, grateful Americans have been lining up at the counter. Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin and a host of other antidepressants have been embraced as practical solutions to everyday unhappiness. More than 15% of Americans now use one of the above. Needless to say, they are not all clinically depressed. Whereas Sigmund Freud once described the goal of psychotherapy as "transforming hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness," many doctors now...

PRAGUE (AFP) - Psychotherapy can help restore fertility in women who become so stressed from managing their busy lives that they stop ovulating, a conference heard. Fertility experts have long wondered why women who are active, young and otherwise healthy suddenly become infertile, a condition called anovulation. The causes are sometimes attributed to hormone changes caused by too much exercise or undernutrition, and often the woman is given hormone treatment, such as oral contraception if immediate fertility is not desired, or ovulation induction if it is. But Sara Berga, a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University in Atlanta,...

Antidepressants work better than psychotherapy in preventing relapses in elderly men and women who have recovered from depression, a new study suggests. The government-financed study, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that a combination of drugs and therapy was the best way to restore well-being in seriously depressed patients 70 and older. Once the patients had recovered, however, drug treatment was more effective over the next two years than once-a-month psychotherapy. Experts said the results underscored the challenges of treating depression in people past retirement age who are buffeted by anxieties — about dying, losing friends,...

A PENRITH mum has appeared on national TV to explain why she is still breastfeeding her daughter who is nearly eight – and why she gave her older daughter breast milk as a ninth birthday present. Veronika Robinson appeared on the Channel 4 programme Extraordinary Breastfeeding as a passionate advocate of allowing children to decided when they give up breast milk. Mrs Robinson, a former journalist, her husband Paul, and their children, Bethany and Elizah, are all fans of organic food. Elizah is approaching her eighth birthday and is not happy at the prospect of giving up her daily feed....

ANAHEIM, Calif. - The small car careered toward a pile of barrels labeled "Danger TNT," then turned sharply, ramming through a mock brick wall and into a dark tunnel. A light appeared ahead, coming fast and head-on. A locomotive whistled. "Uh-oh," said one of the passengers, Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist and a pioneer in the study of positive emotions. But in a moment, the car scudded safely under the light, out through the swinging doors of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and into the warm, clear light that seemed to radiate from the Southern California pavement. "Well," Dr. Seligman said....

ARLINGTON, Virginia, DEC. 23, 2005 (Zenit.org).- A sound psychology must rekindle man's innate spirituality by taking sin seriously, contends a Catholic therapist. Andrew Sodergren is a therapist at the Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Services, and a doctoral candidate at the recently accredited Institute for the Psychological Sciences. In the second part of this interview with ZENIT he shares his views of an integrated psychology that is true to human nature and acknowledges human freedom. Part 1 appeared Thursday. Q: How can a sense of sin and vice contribute to the field of psychology? Sodergren: In 1995, Pope John Paul...

ARLINGTON, Virginia, DEC. 22, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Psychology needs to examine the role of sin in mental health, in the light of Christian anthropology, says a Catholic therapist. Andrew Sodergren is a therapist at the Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Services, and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences (IPS). The recently accredited institute is dedicated to the development of a psychology that is consistent with Church teachings while in constructive dialogue with the world. In this two-part interview with ZENIT, Sodergren shares his views on psychology's tendency to "medicalize" human behavior and the implication for society. Q:...

Prescription drugs are replacing, rather than complementing, ``talk therapy'' in the treatment of depressed children and adolescents, according to a major new study by Stanford doctors. The trend runs counter to guidelines that call for psychotherapy, which teaches problem-solving and examines negative thought patterns, as the first line of treatment for depressed youth. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry advises medication for only the most-serious forms of mental illness -- and then only in combination with psychotherapy.