Getting It Together: Group and Family Therapies
Not all therapy is conducted on an individual basis. Group and family therapies often add a valuable dimension. Group members learn from each other and in the process discover things about themselves. The same is true of family therapy and how they ...
Out of Balance: Experiencing Psychological Disorders
Stephen Hinshaw and Kay Redfield Jameson share their experiences with bipolar illness, one as a child whose father suffered from the disease, the other from a very personal point of view. The line between normality and abnormality is blurry, as one ...
Out of Balance: Labeling Psychological Disorders
The psychiatry profession has created a mechanism for classifying psychological disorders, often referred to as DSM. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders uses behavioral definitions to help mental health workers diagnose p...
Out of Balance: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a condition in which people experience recurrent, unwanted thoughts they find disturbing. It is usually associated with compulsive rituals like hand washing to neutralize an obsession with cleanliness and a fear of d...
Out of Balance: Anxiety Disorders
Fear and anxiety are part of the normal human condition. It's when the alarm system that protects us from danger starts malfunctioning that we have anxiety disorders and the host of subcategories that fall within this category. Generalized anxiety d...
Out of Balance: Panic Attacks
A panic attack is the rapid mobilization of the fight or flight fear response that creates fear as a result of the body's response. People fear they are losing control, or dying from a stroke or heart attack. People with panic disorder become so fri...
Out of Balance: Phobias
Many people are afraid of public speaking and go to great lengths to avoid it. Others are frightened of most social situations and avoid as many public events as possible. The concept of social cost is often at work. Should I make a mistake when I'm...
Getting It Together: Cognitive-Behavior Therapy
The idea of combining cognitive therapy with behavioral treatments has proven effective for many anxiety disorders. Its focus is to help people unlearn patterns that tend to maintain a disorder. Within the context of that understanding the fear subs...
Going to Extremes: Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a disorder in which people lose touch with reality. It commonly strikes in late adolescence after an apparently normal childhood. Thinking becomes fragmented; ideas are irrational, delusional and bizarre. Schizophrenia patients show...
Getting It Together: Psychological Therapy: Then and Now
Until recent decades, little was known about how to treat psychological disorders. People who were seriously disturbed were hidden away or confined to institutions, and treated in ways that look appalling by today's standards. Stephen Hinshaw descri...