Today’s Video: How the Brain Creates Neurobiology Ruts
Rich Simon • 6/26/2014
In this brief video clip, Margaret Wehrenberg, cognitive behaviorist and author of The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques, offers some facts about the neurochemical process behind excessive worry. She explains how highly driven people engaging in repetitive worry can literally create a neurobiological pathway in their brains that’s like a worry rut.
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Today’s Video: Clarifying the Fundamental Task of Therapy
Rich Simon • 6/25/2014
Stephen makes it clear that hard scientific evidence now exists for what most therapists instinctively know: successful therapy depends utterly on establishing a safe, caring, mutually trustworthy, stable relationship with a client.
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Today’s Video: Gary Greenberg on the Bereavement Exclusion
Rich Simon • 6/24/2014
“When DSM-III came out and the major depression diagnosis was created,” Gary tells us in this brief video clip, “it was immediately clear that many people who were recently bereaved were going to qualify for that diagnosis. So the question became, what should therapists do about that? And the answer, ultimately, was to create an exclusion—to say that if you’re within two months of bereavement, you don’t meet the criteria for major depressive disorder. You can’t be diagnosed. But this doesn’t make any sense at all.”
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How Role-Playing Can Help Kids Face Their Anxiety
Rich Simon • 6/23/2014
Seven-year-old Emily is continually nervous and her anxiety is keeping her from enjoying summer camp, sleepovers with friends, and after-school activities. Her parents don’t know what to do, and even her therapist is worried that Emily’s anxiety is starting to define too much her integral sense of self. Treating anxiety in kids takes a creative, often playful approach, says Lynn Lyons, author of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents.
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How to Preempt Anxiety Relapse
Rich Simon • 6/19/2014
Before David Burns wraps up therapy with recovered clients, he makes sure they’re well prepared for relapse. In this brief video clip, he breaks down the components of his Relapse Prevention Training.
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Why Therapists Should Know about the Plastic Paradox
Rich Simon • 6/18/2014
Norman Doidge has spent the last 14 years exploring how to integrate recent discoveries in brain science into psychotherapeutic practice. He believes that while the brain has an astonishing capacity for change, brain plasticity doesn’t always work out for the best.
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Getting Beyond the Limits of Diagnostic Categories
Rich Simon • 6/17/2014
Darrel Regier, vice chair of the DSM-5 Task Force and director of the APA’s research division, argues that DSM-5 is less about assessing fixed characteristics in clients than it is about guiding clinicians to think more dimensionally about diagnosis.
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Lynn Lyons On Helping Anxious Kids
Rich Simon • 6/12/2014
Fifteen-year-old Grace doesn’t know it yet, but her troubling anxiety symptoms are run of the mill. Like most anxious kids, it’s not the content of her worries that’s the real issue, but the way her mind and body react to them.
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How to Change the Brain in Therapy
Rich Simon • 6/11/2014
It’s one thing to throw around the scientific-sounding language of brain science, it’s another to actually develop concrete clinical procedures based on our advancing understanding of the brain that make therapy more effective.
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How Increasing Medication Sales Hurt the Therapy Profession
Rich Simon • 6/10/2014
Allen Frances—author of "Saving Normal: Has Psychiatric Diagnosis Gotten Out of Control?"—is one of DSM-5’s most outspoken critics, but his ultimate target is an even larger issue.
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