Clinicians Digest May/June 2008 - Page 8


In McIntosh's study comparing the results of parents randomly assigned to child-inclusive mediation with parents in traditional mediation, the children who'd been included were more content with their living arrangements a year later and less inclined to want to change them than the children who hadn't been interviewed. Parents who hadn't included their children in mediation were more than twice as likely to have gone back into litigation over child-related issues. The children, mothers, and fathers of the inclusive group all reported better relationships with each other. Perhaps the most telling recommendation for child-inclusive mediation: families who reported a poor parental alliance at the beginning of mediation showed the most improvement in dealing with each other, and their children expressed the most satisfaction, whereas parents who hadn't included their children showed the greatest decline in satisfaction with custody and visitation arrangements.

Australia generally leads other countries in encouraging alternative dispute resolution programs, says Bethesda, Maryland, psychologist Carl Schneider, director of Mediation Matters. Schneider himself occasionally brings in children for the final mediation session, once everything has been decided. He says that helps strengthen the parents' commitment to implement the agreement, and serves as a ritual to mark the end of the current family constellation. It's a long way from the Australian model, he admits, but it may be the best we can do at the moment, without court and government support

Placebo Power

Placebos have always been considered the poor stepchild in the healing arts, even though when they're used as controls in clinical trials of other treatments, they work for about 30 percent of the people in the control groups. With our increasing understanding of how placebos create actual changes in our brains, it may be time to think about harnessing their power and deliberately using them in treatment.

Just how strong is the power of suggestion? The January 14 online edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes an experiment in which neuroscientists at Caltech and Stanford had subjects rate several bottles of cabernet sauvignon priced from $5 to $90. Every bottle contained the same wine, but tasters rated the "expensive" wines more highly. Mere wine snobbery doesn't account for this outcome because, when subjects tried the more expensive wines, the pleasure centers of their brains lit up before they even tasted the higher priced wine. They expected pleasure, and their brains delivered it.

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