The Institute jumped into the free webinar field at the beginning of this year.

It’s much simpler than I would have thought! We give people access to an audio or video. After listening/viewing, they can join an hour-long live chat, email questions and comments, or do nothing. I’ve led the online chat twice (with other Institute faculty doing the others) and I really enjoy how much we get to know each other through the improvisational conversation we create out of questions and comments.

The May webinar is on social therapy. The material is an audio interview a Brazilian psychologist conducted with me two years ago when I was in Brazil. (It’s in English.) I trace  some of the history of social therapy. I introduce my work as a post-doctoral student in Michael Cole’s laboratory at Rockefeller University in the late 1970s and my meeting Fred Newman and founding the East Side Institute. The interview presents some of the highlights of the next 40 years of engagement and conversations with radical and critical psychologists, social constructionists, humanists, Vygotskians, Marxists, activity theorists, and the narrative therapy movement. People who’ve listened to it really like it! (I’ll be listening to it before the chat!)

If you’re interested, the interview is available at http://eastsideinstitute.org/audio_files/LHolzman%20Ricardo%20Lana.WAV at your convenience.  I’ll be leading the instant chat on Friday, May 18, 12:00 PM EST. Contact Mary Fridley at mfridley@eastsideinstitute.org for webinar registration.

If you can’t make it, you can share questions and comments at webinar@eastsideinstitute.org.

In addition to Catherine Jackson’s thoughtful and comprehensive overview of the issues involved in the DSM-5 controversy I wrote about  yesterday, there’s some other worthy reading. That’s partly due to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) holding its annual meeting this weekend in Philadelphia. Last week the APA posted the latest draft of the proposed changes to the manual on its website and it will be a major agenda item among this 10,000 member organization.

Whatever happens inside the convention halls, what goes on outside is equally newsworthy. Demonstrations planned by Occupy the APA are bringing medical and social work professionals together with concerned citizens, psychiatric patients and consumers to peacefully protest the many troubling aspects of DSM-5.

Some articles to check out:

How do controversial revisions in psychiatry’s guidebook make you feel? by Stacey Burling in the Philadelphia Inquirer 

This Weekend, Philadelphians can say “Screw You” to Normal by Liz Spikol in the Philadelphia Magazine blog

Protestors, Rejecting Mental Illness Labels, Vow to “Occupy” the American Psychiatric Association Convention is a press release  from MindFreedom International (MFI), an independent voice of survivors of psychiatric human rights. 

An article in the Minnesota Post entitled Last Chance to comment on psychiatry’s controversial diagnostic “bible” by Susan Perry speaks to a number of the controversies of DSM-5 including adding bereavement to the definition of depression.

On a hopeful note, Maia Szalavitz writes for Time.com that the public debate and petition signing is not falling on totally deaf ears:  DSM-5 Debate: Committee Backs Off Some Changes, Re-Opens Comments. 

There’s an extensive and excellent discussion of the DSM-5 controversy on Therapy Today.net , an online publication of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. The article—“Diagnostic Disarray” by Catherine Jackson, Therapy Today’s Deputy Editor, which appeared in April—is unique compared to the dozens of news items, essays and critiques of the DSM-5 and diagnosis appearing this last six months or so, in several ways:

• It’s comprehensive, laying out the politics (discrimination of particular groups and behaviors, the narrowing of mental life to the biological); economics (profits to drug companies, the APA and professionals); science and ethics (lack of evidence for diagnoses, and the limits on what choices we have of how to understand emotional distress and get and give help) of the DSM and its critics
• Jackson includes the opinions of the clients/consumers/patients on what diagnosis means to them
• We get a view from outside the US and how diagnosis looks in the UK and other countries where the DSM is not (yet) required by everyone who does therapy or counseling
• The article hints at the broader than psychiatry-psychology-psychotherapy problem with the diagnostic way of life as an increasingly intrusive and controlling aspect of our overall culture

One person Jackson quotes is Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and spokesman for the British Psychological Society on the DSM debate. Jackson writes that, according to Kinderman,

DSM-5 is making a bad system worse. ‘It’s trying to pathologise a vast swathe of human nature and social problems as symptoms of mental illness. It makes people look for biomedical solutions to social problems, and it allows people to prescribe medical solutions to social problems. We should be identifying people’s problems, formulating an intelligent hypothesis about why they have them, and then doing something about them. That is different from diagnosis….Where medication is helpful, it should be identified as such. But attaching the label “major depressive disorder” to someone doesn’t tell us if the drug is going to help the person or not, and the vast majority of people with a mental health problem would benefit more from therapy than from drugs. The label carries stigma; it means they haven’t got problems that are part of normal life.’

Another British voice in “Diagnostic Disarray” is Pete Sanders, retired counsellor and trainer, a trustee of Soteria Network and founder of PCCS Books. He told Jackson,

‘There is an ideological battle going on. We are seeing an alarming medicalisation of everyday life. You can’t be sad any more; you have to be depressed. You can’t be shy any more; you have to have social anxiety disorder’.

He also told Jackson that the whole mental health care system has to change. This change, he believes, will inevitably come from the bottom up, and he advises therapists to seek out their nearest mental health user or survivor group – for example, the Hearing Voices Network or Mad Pride – and support them.’

I agree with the bottom up approach, but it should be much more inclusive than Sanders’ vision. Most people who seek psychotherapy or counseling aren’t part of organized mental health user or survivor groups. And it’s my experience as a community organizer that they don’t need to be. But they do need to learn what’s going on here and be given the opportunity to organize with others, including their therapists and counselors, as a force for change.

Please write me if you know of organizing of this sort going on. I’ll be part of one event on June 8 when I join Gil Eyal, Columbia University sociology professor and co-author of The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic, and Christine LaCerva, director of the Social Therapy Group and the Institute’s director of clinical training, for a public conversation.

Click here to read the complete article, “Diagnostic Disarray.”

Right after being at TEDMED I flew to Vancouver, British Columbia for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). There are 25,000 members! And about half that number actually come to the five-day meeting. These are the folks who teach education courses at colleges and universities and train new educational researchers, their graduate students, directors and program people at research and evaluation organizations, deans and administrators and advocates. So many educated people!

I’m a long-time AERA member, I present something each year, and I just finished my tenure as chair of one of its many (SIGs) Special Interest Groups—Cultural-Historical Research. For three years I’ve been leading the effort to bring play and its importance to the learning process to AERA. This is no small task, as play is nowhere to be found in this organization. A look through the 300+ entries in the annual meeting program index comes up empty for play, performance and creativity (and overflowing with assessment, evaluation, curriculum studies, special education, and school reform). And a few years ago, a petition to form a Play SIG was denied by the association.

Be that as it may, my SIG—Cultural-Historical Research—is one of the very few that annually sponsors sessions on play and/or performance. And this year, we had a great one! For our meeting/social hour, we featured a brief talk by Graduate Student Award winner Tony Perone,  and a panel organized by Carrie Lobman featuring play researchers/advocates Joan Almon (Alliance for Childhood), Mike Askew (Monash University), Andrew Burton (Street Spirits Theatre Company),  Artin Göncü (University of Illinois-Chicago), and Jaime Martinez (NY Institute of Technology). They involved the audience in some simple play activities and each speaker was as passionate, compelling and playful as any TEDMED speaker I heard earlier that week. The crowd was small and it’s my hope that the new SIG officers will continue to reach out and build the play movement within AERA.

I also attended a session in which part of the discussion was how it was hard to be a Vygottskian educator in the US and countries that are following the US model (which, one speaker, called “a road to hell”). As it often does among researchers, the conversation among speakers and the audience turned to talk of teachers, including their “resistance.”  My experience in these kinds of discussions is that they go nowhere fast. So, when called on I said I was speaking as a community organizer. I told them that one of my missions has been to make Vygotsky a household word by speaking with kids, parents— everyone—about learning and developing. Parents and students need to be let in on the way learning is understood, how they are being taught, and hear of other approaches including Vygotsky’s. I asked them why they were only speaking of and to teachers and urged them to open up the conversation about a Vygotskian understanding of the learning-developing process. I got some applause and sat down.

While its politics aren’t particularly conservative, AERA is very conservatively organized and structured and, as such, it contributes to its members remaining conservative—comfortable with what and who they already know and do, even if the impact on the everyday lives of children and educators is minimal. I’ll keep organizing!

I don’t usually promote activities here but now is an exception. Recent posts on the DSM-5 and all that it reveals about the ways our culture relates to human emotionality have drawn new readers (much thanks to everyone who’s reposting!). I’ve been introduced to many others who are writing, blogging, and generally working hard to expand the dialogue and to share “best non-diagnostic practices.”

Which is why I decided to share one of the programs of my Institute—Social Therapy as Clinical Practice. They’re training weekends being held in March, May and November, 2012 in New York City. They’re open to social workers, counselors, psychologists, medical professionals, and educators who favor non-diagnostic, relational approaches to mental health.

Interested?

Social Therapy as Clinical Practice

Social therapy is the group-oriented, development-focused psychotherapy that relates to people of all ages as performers and creators of their lives. Its unique approach to emotionality as social activity places it at the cutting edge of postmodern therapeutic approaches.

Intensive training weekends are an effective way to learn this powerful approach to group therapy. Each four-day training will focus on a specific aspect of social therapeutic method introduced experientially through diverse learning activities: social therapeutic role-plays, observations of therapy groups, reflection sessions with social therapists, group supervisions, and seminars linking theory and practice.

2012 Schedule

Thursday-Sunday, March 8-11

Thursday-Sunday, May 17-20

Thursday-Sunday, November 29-December 2

Fee

$475.00 per training weekend. 20% discount on two or more.

To learn more about social therapy and/or download an application, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/ClinicalTraining.html or contact Christine LaCerva at clacerva@socialtherapygroup.com.

Want to read something first?

Psychological Investigations: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy Edited by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez  Psychological Investigations explores the nature of the social therapeutic group process, the social therapeutic relationship, and applications to health care, alternative medicine, education and youth development. The book features over 70 dialogues between Fred Newman, the creator of social therapy, and therapists-in-training, These dialogues, together with introductory overviews by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez, are a provocative invitation to both new and seasoned professionals seeking alternative modes of practice and understanding. (Brunner-Routledge, 2003)

Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth

by Fred Newman with Phyllis Goldberg

In a culture of “getting,” this is the little book that keeps on giving. The 2010 edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! has a foreword by Patch Adams (the peripatetic, clowning MD) and new introduction by Lois Holzman. Based on 25 years of clinical practice and his discovery that people can reinitiate development at any stage in life, Newman urges his readers to eschew insights, explanations or getting to the “bottom” of deep-rooted emotional problems and seek their cure in development.

 

 

 

Please check out the latest issue of the East Side Institute’s newsletter, Reports from the Field, for news on what our friends, colleagues and alumni are up to. You’ll hear from Annalie Pistorius and her new social therapy practice in Pretoria South Africa, the synergy between Elina Lampert-Shepel and Brazilian educators at a Vygotsky research conference, and much more.

October 3, 2012

Here’s a more graphic rendition of the Performing the World invitation and call for proposals.

October 2, 2011

I’m thrilled to announce the next Performing the World (PTW) conference/festival, “Can Performance Change Save the World?” to take place in New York City October 4-7, 2012. Proposals are due March 1, 2012.

The theme of the last PTW, held in 2010 and attended by over 500 people from dozens of countries, was, “Can Performance Change the World?” The depth of the challenges facing humanity two short years later have led the conveners of Performing the World to recast the question for the 2012 conference as, “Can Performance Save the World?”

Performing the World (PTW) was born in a conversation between East Side Institute co-founder, the late Fred Newman, and me at the end of the summer of 2000. We had already “discovered” performance, and its essential role in human development and learning was key to the therapeutic, educational and community-organizing work of the East Side Institute and its broader community. At the same time, Newman and I were also having conversations with Ken and Mary Gergen, leading social-constructionist psychologists who themselves were turning toward performance, particularly by experimenting with new performatory modes of presenting research and scholarship. During the 1990s at annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, we and the Gergens did some joint performatory symposia and Newman’s original “psychology plays” were performed—all to great enthusiasm. We were encouraged, and wanted to do something bigger and of our own structure.

My international travels had introduced me to many different performatory practices initiated at both the grassroots and from within the universities. I met dozens of people and heard of hundreds more who were using performance to help people and communities grow and create positive social change. We decided to reach out to those doing this work/play—from community organizers to business people, from artists to social workers, from therapists to teachers.

The first Performing the World conference was held in October 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. Hundreds from all over the world showed up at the beautiful ocean side village of Montauk, 120 miles from New York City, as if this kind of gathering was what they and their communities needed at such a moment.

There have been five PTWs since then. The last two—in 2008 and 2010—were held in New York City, bringing the conference to one of the most vibrant and diverse cultural centers of the world and partnering with the All Stars Project as co-sponsor. PTW has been greatly enriched by having the All Stars’ performing arts and development center on 42 Street near Times Square as the conference’s home base and by the inclusion of hundreds of young people and adults who participate in its programs. Additionally, both the Institute and the All Stars reach out to friends across New York City’s many communities to provide housing for PTW participants and broaden the “performance space.” I am inspired by the growth of the global performance movement and the role that PTW is playing in it, as not only a conference/performance festival but also a unique community event bringing people together to perform a new world.

I’m on a working vacation at the beautiful ocean community of Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. Today, after the preparations for and actuality of Hurrican Irene (which was not too bad out here), I got to some reading. One book is Rom Harre’s Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, an unusual but very accessible book about how living things have contributed to a scientific understanding of the world. It got me thinking about my friend and mentor, the late Fred Newman. How much he would have enjoyed Harre’s book (Fred was enamored of the creativity, rigor and improvisational nature of science). And how much Fred contributed to a new understanding of understanding the world (not scientific, but not unscientific either).

What do I mean by that? Here’s the brief introduction I wrote to the revised (2010) edition of Fred Newman’s book, Let’s Develop! (It’s a great book!)

1994, the year that Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth was first published, was also the year that the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) came out. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Let’s Develop!, written by philosopher and lay therapist Fred Newman with the assistance of his friend, sociologist Phyllis Goldberg, is informed by hundreds of ordinary people, the clients he saw in his social therapy practice. Its subject matter is people and their emotions, their pain, their dreams, their relationships, their therapeutic conversations, and their activity of growing. DSM-IV, written under the auspices of the American Psychiatric Association, is informed by over 200 psychiatrists and psychologists (nearly half of whom had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry). Its subject matter is 297 classified mental disorders, which serve as prototypes for judging patients’ symptoms and behaviors. When the DSM-IV came out there was minor protest, most of it around the pharmaceutical connections of the writers. In contrast, work on new edition due out in 2013 (referred to as DSM-5) is being carried out in a flurry of controversy over the even greater proliferation of mental disorders than with prior revisions.

Fred Newman thinks the DSM (all editions) is silly. Scientifically silly. Since he loves science and is quite knowledgable, his opinion on this carries some weight. If diagnose we must (and it’s not at all clear that we must), Newman says, then we should diagnose ourselves and each other, rather than take up the diagnoses of the so-called experts, people who don’t know us. Newman is one of many, many therapists, social scientists and philosophers who have written thoughtful and often scathing critiques of the medical model and pseudoscientific diagnostic approach to mental health and illness for academic books and journals. However, Newman is not primarily interested in critiquing; he’s interested in helping. Let’s Develop! is a self-help book, written for ordinary people. It’s an exceedingly practical book, which attempts to give the everyday usefulness of Newman’s social therapy to the average Joe and Jane. And precisely because it is so practical, I think it’s perhaps Newman’s most thoughtful and scathing critique. It is, to use a term Newman and I like very much, practical-critical.

In 1994 there was not all that much receptivity for the practical-critical from scholars. The divide between theoretical critique and alternative practice was great. Newman and I were emerging voices in the intellectual dialogues taking place on the unresolvable problems that arise from forcing human life into a natural science framework, and advocating for the creating of new psychologies. With Newman’s philosophical sophistication and my grounding in human development across the life span, we more than held our own. But it was our practice, in particular Newman’s social therapy practice, that set us apart as the most practically oriented of theoretical critiques. To make that statement loud and clear, we decided that Newman should write the practical guide that is Let’s Develop!

During the sixteen years since the book first appeared, the sharp distinction between critical intellectual debate and alternative practices in psychology and psychotherapy has begun to blur. New critical practices have developed and, like Newman’s social therapy, others have grown, and this has significantly advanced the overall substance and quality of the intellectual conversation. The debate continues, but critique and practice are now closer together.

If you’re not involved in these intellectual conversations, you might be wondering why you should care about this history and debate. Well, think about where your therapist, your child’s school counselor, your uncle’s addiction counselor or your mother’s social worker got her or his training. What were these professionals taught? How many different approaches were they exposed to? What understandings of how human beings grow and learn and feel and think do they work with? Do they think you and your family can grow emotionally, or do they think that all that can be done is modifying the most dysfunctional ways you all relate? Can they help you create your life (including your emotional life) or are they only concerned to treat the symptoms of your so-called mental disorder? The more that critical practice and theoretical critique intermingle, the more likely it is that the training future counselors and therapists receive will be broad and inclusive, and the answers to these questions will be thoughtful and rich with possibility.

Newman sees and does therapy as a creative activity, not as a medical procedure. Together, therapists and clients create the therapy—that’s how it works. He relates to people as creators of their development, no matter how severe their pain, “presenting problem” or psychiatric diagnosis. He never tries to fix a problem. Rather, he supports people to grow, to create their lives. There’s always a choice. Not as a denial of how one is, but as a loving act. Ask for help. Be giving. Share the shame. When a conversation is heading toward a screaming match, start it over again. Do something completely unlike you. You’ll still be “you” but it’ll be a you who’s actively becoming. Becoming what? Becoming you.

Newman’s social therapy is unique in its focus on people’s development, but it’s not alone in being humanistic and creative. This is good news for the growing masses of adults, children and families in need of help for whom the choices have been to “tough it out” without therapy or to be pathologized. Those who engage in social therapy or another of the dozens of alternative therapies that now exist are, by their very activity, critical psychologists as much, if not more, than their academic counterparts. Their voices, and those of their therapists, are slowly being heard in the seminar rooms and clinics that train tomorrow’s therapists and counselors.

It is in this revived playing field that we reissue Let’s Develop! Some slight changes have been made throughout the text to reflect life style changes that have occurred over the years but, overall, the content remains not only intact, but equally—if not more—relevant.

As a new reader of Let’s Develop!, you’ll be joining a global grouping of tens of thousands. Unlike most books, its following wasn’t built with advertising dollars or critical reviews, but by a community that it helped to grow through viral marketing. Across the US, social therapists gave it to clients, psychology professors to students, youth workers to urban teens, teacher trainers to school personnel, business coaches and consultants to executives. Colleagues of ours in other countries xeroxed chapters from their copies and handed them out to friends and family. Chapters were translated into different languages (the ones I know about are Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish) and used in university courses. Zdravo da Ste, a community of hundreds devoted to human development in Serbia, translated the book in its entirety, found a publisher and promotes it throughout the country to both the public and professionals.

I’ve worked with Fred Newman for most of my adult life on many social change projects. But none has been as difficult or rewarding as working to liberate psychology from its own pathology. “You don’t have to be sick to get help,” Newman insists. That’s the practical-critical message of Let’s Develop! It’s critical psychology at its best. Welcome to the “grassroots” critical psychology movement!

I’ve written before about the All Stars Project’s unique and fabulous UX, a free, open-to-all, university-style development center, but it’s worth mentioning over and over. This new project creates its curriculum from suggestions for courses from those who want to learn and ideas from those who want to teach something. Dean Lenora Fulani and Associate Dean Dan Friedman lead and coordinate this new initiative—a truly postmodern Zone of Proximal Development.

Here’s this week’s e-newsletter.