Description: Have you heard of E.M.D.R. therapy? It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. This is an unfair oversimplification, but it involves a patient thinking of a past traumatic event while guided by a therapist to engage in some form of bilateral stimulation such as following the therapist’s finger moving from side to… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Psychological Intervention
Which Treatment is Best for Self-Harming and Suicidal Teens?
Description: Perhaps you have heard about the alarming increases that are being observed in rates of self-harming behavior and suicidal thoughts and actions among teenagers. These stats are often discussed in relation to the question of whether they might be linked to recent generational jumps in use of social media and the attendant shifts in… Read more »
We Need Citizen Therapy, But Why?
Description: We are hearing from several directions that there are not enough therapists to go around these days. Even discounting the impact of the Covid pandemic (if we can), the successful reduction of stigma associated with admitting that help is needed and increasing levels of burnout and retirement among support and therapy providers, and we… Read more »
Mental Health Thermometers
Description: You drop into your doctor’s office and tell them you are not feeling well. Assuming COVID is not the issue (which would likely be picked up at the front desk of the clinic using screening questions) what is one of the first things the doctor will likely do? Take you temperature, right? (Or ask… Read more »
CBT Works But Is Its Theory Wrong?
Description: You know what Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is, don’t you? It is, perhaps the most widely used approach to therapy taken by psychologists treating clients with depression, anxiety and many other symptoms of mental illness or the lack of wellbeing. I suspect you also know something of what CBT involves: The challenging of irrational,… Read more »
Let’s Talk Talk Therapy!
Description: The Canadian cellular services company, Bell, launched the Let’s Talk campaign in 2010. It is focused on reducing/eliminating stigma associated with mental illness. Stigma, related to mental illness, is a social phenomenon involving beliefs about the nature of mental illness (e.g., that it is somehow the fault of the people who struggle with it)… Read more »
Psychology of Covid – Long Covid and CBT (the Old ‘Bio is real Psycho is not’ argument)
Description: Have you heard of Long Covid? It involves a number of symptoms that resemble those seen in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) in which individuals recovered from Covid infections experience long-term shortness of breath, fatigue, and body aches and pains. What causes these symptoms? Are they due to lingering Covid effects?… Read more »
Anxiety and Entrenched Habits: Treatability
Description: I will not even ask whether you know what anxiety is, of course you do, especially given how much experience we have all had with it recently. Have you also heard about the Yerkes-Dodson Law? Basically, it says that for most tasks that we take on, a certain amount of stress increases our performance… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Reasoning with Unreasonable People About Vaccination
Description: How do you deal with someone who you believe is completely unreasonable? Well, one possible answer that makes a lot of sense is simply to not deal with them at all. Who needs the stress and the headaches associated with trying to take on an unreasonable person and try to get them to BE… Read more »
Psychology of COVID-19: Suicide
Description: When we look back on the year or two (or whatever it finally turns out to be) of the Covid-19 pandemic what do you think we will find happened to the suicide rate during the pandemic? If the rate increased significantly why might that have occurred? What factors were (are) involved? The study of… Read more »
Books for Success!
