Despite the increasing popularity of psychiatric meds as the go-to remedy for everything from seasonal depression to social anxiety, drugs are often not the best treatment alternative. In the following video clip, Steven Dubovsky, MD, explains why therapists should create a hypothesis about what might be causing a client’s suffering and investigate it thoroughly before deciding to recommend medication.

By Douglas Flemons - Got flow? As a psychotherapist specializing in hypnosis, I work at times with elite performers—people who've spent long years learning and honing a skill that they can carry out with precision and grace. Except when they can't. Except when, with their mind and body out of sync, they lose concentration, coordination, and confidence.

It’s always cause for celebration when depressed clients nears the finish line of treatment, feeling energized, empowered, and more content with their life. But it’s one thing to get people back on their feet from a depressive episode; it’s another to prevent recurrences down the road.

By Joshua Wolf Shenk - Each year, seventeen million Americans and one hundred million people worldwide experience clinical depression. What does this mean, exactly? Too many of us take comfort in language that raises the fewest questions, provokes the least fear of the unknown. When we funnel a sea of human experience into the linguistic equivalent of a laboratory beaker, we choke the long streams of breath needed to tell of a life in whole.

By Graham Campbell - Anxiety disorders are a means of keeping the external world at bay. Anxiety keeps new ideas and information out of a person's awareness. It saves overloaded mental and emotional circuits from additional strain. It is a sea wall built against the tide of physical circumstance. As a psychotherapist, I'm an empathic listener, but I'm still teaching a skill. That skill is inner listening: the ability to hear one's own heart, spirit or soul.

By Margaret Wehrenberg - The rewards of teaching people how to use deceptively simple anxiety-relief techniques are great. While clients in this culture have been indoctrinated to want and expect instantaneous relief from their discomfort at the pop of a pill, we can show them we have something better to offer.

By Bill O'Hanlon - People run into problems when their lives are dictated by rigid beliefs that make the stories they're living out too restrictive. Permission counters these commands and prohibitions. At the most basic level, we must discover how to perform the balancing act of simultaneously giving up the need to see clients change while holding open the possibility of change.

By Stephen Lyons - My work with Sara began in an uninspiring, windowless, downtown suite that she shared with another therapist. But before long, my therapy hour was the high point of my week. She came to show me that there were places I needed to go—vital, hidden places—that I couldn't get to all by myself. She showed me that she was a trustworthy guide. But after Sara suffered a devastating loss, I saw clearly, all at once, that she didn't simply exist to meet my needs.

By Chris Lyford - Disaster work is anything but therapy as usual. In the aftermath of August's Hurricane Harvey, clinicians at ground zero explain why the medical model of traditional therapy as most know it becomes irrelevant, and the simple but important components of effective psychological first aid.

By Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley - There's a moment that we therapists savor above all. Before our eyes, a shift takes place and the client slips from the grip of a lifelong pattern. Three decades ago, we discovered that what distinguished the pivotal interactions was that we had completely stopped trying to counteract, override or prevent the client's debilitating difficulties.