The application of palliative care to intractable psychiatric disorders has been debated at least since 2010, when a journal article reported that a patient with severe anorexia nervosa died in hospice, after referral there by her psychiatrist. The New York Times published a thought-provoking article earlier this year on the same topic: whether we […]
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Two senses of “psychotherapy is political” are often conflated. The first is the notion, popular lately, that psychotherapy either allows or demands political advocacy in the therapy room itself. The other is recognition that political factors influence the nature and practice of psychotherapy. It is a conceptual error to confuse the two, and a […] Currently, therapy apps featuring a nonhuman “therapist” aim fairly low at best, and at worst willfully mislead the public. However, the advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT-4 brings exciting potential for genuine depth psychotherapy delivered by AI — and many challenges and potential pitfalls as well. Since “therapy” has no precise […] When one of America’s most prominent psychiatrists expresses deep disdain for depth psychotherapy, especially when that criticism is misinformed and hopelessly outdated, it should concern all of us. Dr. Tom Insel directed the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015. Formerly a psychiatric researcher “at the cellular level,” he studied medications […] Is there more “presence” during online therapy, or in the office — even while wearing masks? […] What is a retronym? Retronyms are adjectival qualifiers, like “acoustic” guitar and “snail” mail, that were previously unneeded — because all guitars were acoustic and all mail was slow. We only added qualifiers when alternatives arose. As these two examples illustrate, retronyms can be nearly neutral — the status and popularity of acoustic and […] I’m increasingly asked by patients and potential patients when I plan to see people in the office again. I had been an exclusively “in person” psychiatrist and psychotherapist until mid-March of this year, when the pandemic forced even skeptics like me to convert completely to remote (“virtual”) treatment. Like many of my colleagues, over […] |
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