While the polemical debates over the new DSM have received widespread coverage, the reactions of ordinary clinicians have yet to receive much scrutiny.

Using humor to help clients reconstruct their problems, even to the point of making parodies of their own dilemmas, can help some them get distance from their woes, learn to take themselves less seriously, and perhaps even gain a bit of wisdom.

From small insignificant beginnings in 1952, when almost nobody read it, DSM has become a kind of sacred literary monster. Today, it’s the most detested and certainly the most debated mental health classification scheme ever devised.

Labeling clients with DSM diagnoses is a ritual most of us perform to get reimbursed and pay our mortgages, but few of us actually believe in. Has the time finally come for us to take our dissatisfaction with the DSM seriously and turn it into something more than a bitter complaint?

The vice chair of the DSM-5 Task Force is bemused that the release of what was intended to be a more accurate and rigorously researched manual has raised such an uproar.

As the man responsible for the previous edition, the foremost critic of DSM-5 is perhaps the last person you’d expect to trash this latest, biggest version.

If therapists are going to bring genuine insights—not just soundbites—from neuroscience into the practice of therapy, they need the nuanced, sophisticated understanding of the brain that gifted explicators like Stephen Porges and Norman Doidge offer.

With his enormous success, Malcolm Gladwell has morphed from a darling underdog to a publishing juggernaut at whom it’s now trendy to sling insults.

Therapists must offer abused children a different felt experience of who they are.

More and more therapists have begun wondering how far all our impressive-sounding talk about the brain has gone in improving therapy’s effectiveness. After all, dropping stray neuroscience factoids into therapy sessions doesn’t equal “brain-based” therapy. So we’ve decided to ask some challenging questions about our profession’s infatuation with the brain: when all is said and done, has brain science actually lived up to its promise for psychotherapy? What specific clinical advances, if any, have been guided or encouraged by knowing more about neuroscience?

A Bruce Springsteen song helps crack the unspoken code of father–son communication.

Learning even a little about nutrition and diet can greatly enhance therapists’ ability to help clients with mood problems.

In Emotional First Aid, Manhattan psychologist Guy Winch provides an instructional manual for handling the bumps and bruises of life.

Most of us put much too much faith in the power of our conscious minds to bring about lasting change. Instead of looking up the higher branches of consciousness, we should be looking down into the nervous system settings that generate impulses and inclinations.

Labeling behavior in fancy neurophysiological terms can make what we do sound more scientifically rigorous than the notoriously fuzzy language of psychotherapy, but how clinically useful is this brain language anyway?

More than any other positive emotion, love resides within connections. It extends beyond personal boundaries to characterize the vibe that pulsates between and among people. It can even energize whole social networks or inspire a crowd to get up and dance.

Changes in the habitual attitudes and behaviors that shape our lives rarely happen as the result of psychological epiphanies or emotional catharsis. Most therapeutic progress comes from the painstaking process of continual practice that reinforces some behaviors while actively discouraging others.

Pilgrim's Wilderness

A new book examines how one man, under the guise of religious faith, kept his family isolated in a world of abuse and brutality, and how another family broke boundaries to help them escape.

Raising the issue of race in therapy can help African American clients connect their personal struggles to an enduring cultural legacy that many insist isn’t supposed to matter anymore.

Garry Cooper and Kathleen Smith

When routines and habits become as lifeless as the manner in which one brushes one’s teeth, when the choreography of one’s existence resembles a blindfolded slog through quicksand—rather than the Jets and Sharks leaping across the streets of the Upper West Side—something must be done.

A woman discovers that giving someone permission to sleep can be a deep expression of love.