Today’s Video: Can Antidepressants Change Our Personalities?
Rich Simon • 8/6/2014
For decades, our field has debated the effectiveness of antidepressants in therapy: how much of recovery comes from the placebo effect? Do SSRIs help people achieve anything more than basic levels of functioning? Do they even work at all?
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Today’s Video: How to Treat Chronic Pain
Rich Simon • 8/5/2014
Psychotherapy for chronic pain? It’s not an obvious connection to many who live with persistent aches, pangs, and cramps that defy all the usual medical explanations and interventions. To be fair, it’s not a connection a lot of therapists are making either. Using talk therapy to treat chronic pain is still a developing area of our field, and Maggie Phillips is among those leading the way.
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How Being Calm and Collected Gets Us Connected
Rich Simon • 8/4/2014
According to Martha Straus, author of No-Talk Therapy for Children and Adolescents, time-outs don’t really nip misbehavior in the bud. Instead, they often exacerbate anxiety, making kids feel misunderstood and alone. Young kids can’t self-soothe and regulate emotion like adults can, Martha says. That’s why, in these sorts of situations, she says we need to turn to co-regulation, “loaning” our limbic brains and emotional stability to help kids feel attended to and comforted.
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Today’s Video: The Case for Hearing Anxiety Out
Rich Simon • 7/31/2014
As far as universal human experiences go, anxiety is usually seen as a heinous beast. Clients hate it and therapists offer ways to get rid of it—but not many take the approach that multisensory therapy expert Danie Beaulieu offers.
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Today’s Video: Getting Beyond Chemistry
Rich Simon • 7/30/2014
As both a prescriber and a therapist, Frank Anderson believes that therapists need to take a more active role in exploring clients’ relationships with their medications. After all, therapists know quite a bit about how to handle a troubled relationship when they see one, even if it’s between a person and a chemical agent.
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Today’s Video: Becoming Part of the Young Client’s Story
Rich Simon • 7/29/2014
When Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy developer Daniel Hughes first started working with children who struggled with serious behavioral and emotional problems, he knew something was missing in his approach. Daniel found the answers he was looking for in Attachment Theory—or at least most of them. Attachment Theory told him plenty about the symptoms and behaviors of his clients, but there were no instructions he could immediately apply to working with kids and families. He had to experiment and think outside the box to develop his own attachment-informed way of doing therapy.
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How to Keep Anxiety from Taking Charge
Rich Simon • 7/28/2014
It’s important to remember that parents of children in therapy often find their child’s problems just as anxiety-provoking as the child does, says Lynn Lyons, author of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents. Don’t be afraid to lead with a little humor when dealing with parents, she says, and then follow with your knowledge and advice.
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Today’s Video: How to Change the Rules
Rich Simon • 7/24/2014
There’s a reason agoraphobic people stay home and acrophobic people stay grounded. No one enjoys the way that panic feels. But the trouble with trying to avoid or get rid of panic altogether is that it can lead to a fear of panicking itself. What panicked clients need from therapy instead, says Reid Wilson, author of Don’t Panic, are skills for engaging with their distress, not new ways to keep avoiding it.
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Today’s Video: The difference between the gay and straight brain
Rich Simon • 7/23/2014
It’s a topic that has been at the center of countless debates, both rational and irrational. Is there a clear biological difference between the heterosexual and homosexual brain? According to Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain, the answer is predictably complicated.
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Today’s Video: Dan Siegel on the Power of Teenage Brain
Rich Simon • 7/21/2014
Dan Siegel, author of Brainstorm: The Power and the Purpose of the Teenage Brain, knows that nobody—especially an angst-filled teenager—likes being told what to do. As creative and adventurous as they may be, you’re likely to get eye rolls and crossed arms when you tell them, for instance, that the best way to control their anger toward their parents is through breathing exercises. That’s why Dan takes a more roundabout approach. “Would you like to know more about your brain?” he asks first. Only when the answer is yes—or rather, “Sure, why not? I’ve got nothing better to do.”—can you break out the brain science.
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