Jay Haley, who died earlier this year at the age of 83, was an unlikely candidate to become a founder of the early family therapy movement. An outsider to the field, he had no formal training in psychology or psychotherapy. Yet, if you ask family and brief therapists who most inspired them, chances are his name will be among the first mentioned, and if you ask which figure inspired the best arguments about therapy, you'll probably get the same result.

Earlier this year, therapist Michele Weiner-Davis spent hours in front of a camera, her husband patiently hitting the record button as she rehearsed for what she believed could be the most important 18 minutes of her professional career: her first TED talk.

I’m finding myself unable to take on more clients due to a full schedule, but I still want to grow my practice and finances. Would starting a group practice be a smart career move?

When it comes to treating depression, neuropsychologist John Preston, author of Clinical Psychopharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple, says that psychoactive medication is only one alternative and often not the most effective. In addition to his integrative approach—which includes exercise, combating social withdrawal, family involvement, and possibly meds—he’s always on the lookout for toxic relationship issues in the client’s life.

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

It wasn’t their research results or bestselling books that set apart Freud, Rogers, Minuchin, and Satir. They seemed to have a sense of what really mattered. Today have conceptions about clinical wisdom become obsolete?

 

Phenylketonuria is a disease that results in mental retardation. It’s an inability of the infant’s body to get rid of an amino acid called phenylalanine. If you’re born with a certain gene, you can’t get rid of it and end up with mental retardation. But according to psychiatrist David Mays, author of the Major Mental Illness Pocket Guide, the way we treat phenylketonuria may be the way of the future in treating a range of psychological disorders.

When therapy goes wrong, it’s typically because we’ve entered our clients’ trance, joining them in their myopic misery. Once there, our job is to break the spell, broaden the vision, and open ourselves to possibilities outside the tunnel.

 

“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.”