Our understanding of what happens when we weep hasn't progressed much beyond Freud's theory of catharsis. However, knowing how our nervous systems work can help guide what we do—and don’t do—when clients burst into tears.

Often clients come to therapy to resolve ambivalence or because they can’t make up their minds. But sometimes, the problem is that they’re too certain about things they should be uncertain about.

When something is coming at you that may cause pain or self-doubt, it’s natural to want to duck.

Our growing understanding of attachment and the processes that shape the parenting brain are opening new possibilities for helping stressed-out parents who are turned off to their own children.

An alternative to the old talking cure is expanding the knowledge base of psychotherapy as we recognize the role that exercise, nutrition, spirituality, mind-body approaches, and lifestyle can play in enhancing our clinical effectiveness.

The recent spate of negative research findings and unfavorable media coverage of antidepressant drugs have obscured some important clinical issues.

Adult ADHD too often goes unrecognized.

As the writers in this issue powerfully demonstrate, medical science has made extended dying and its impact on relatives and loved ones—what psychologist Joseph Nowinski, in the issue’s cover story, calls “the new grief. . . the gritty business of living with slow death”—increasingly common, even normal.

The increasing ability of modern medicine to arrest or slow terminal illness means that never before has death been such an extended process for so many. But as a culture, we're only just beginning to face the deep ambivalence this creates for both patient and family.

In an age of cynicism, a refreshing look at “the social cure.”