I recently completed a draft paper summarizing and discussing the survey results for a special issue of a journal dedicated to the growing movement to develop alternatives to the current diagnostic system in psychiatry and clinical psychology. In my latest blog post appearing on Mad in America, I give a...
Eric Maisel interviewed Hugh Polk, psychiatrist and social therapist, for his The Future of Mental Health series. ...
I've been rereading my Psychology Today columns since I began writing them over two years ago. It's something I'm doing while I'm finishing up writing a chapter on psychology for my online book, The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better...
I haven’t attended the American Psychological Association convention in about ten years. But I couldn’t turn down an invitation to speak on a symposium on alternatives to diagnosis. And so, I’ll be traveling to Toronto in a few weeks for this year’s convention. The session, organized by SUNY New Paltz psychology...
Three weeks ago I was in Washington, DC for the First Summit on Diagnostic Alternatives. It marked what I think is an important turning point for what has been a loud outcry against the DSM-5. The Summit was sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Psychology, which has been a...
I few months ago I was invited to write a chapter for a book being published on the topic of critical psychotherapy, counseling and psychoanalysis. I’ve begun working on it this week and am at that early stage in writing (for me) where something is emerging, but I don’t know...
Reprinted below is my Psychology Today column, "Danger! A Frightening New Mental Illness." A friend from South Africa contacted me today to see if I had read the article about a new diagnosis, sluggish cognitive tempo. I hadn’t. My first thought was that she must be referring to some parody of...
September 20, 2013 Although Vygotsky’s ideas are applied to dozens of disciplines/practices, psychotherapy is not among them. With few exceptions, contemporary Vygotskians have stayed clear of the sub- ject; and most psychotherapy researchers and clinical practitioners have little familiarity with Vygotsky—despite Vygotsky’s challenge to psychology’s isolation of the intellectual from the...
May 29, 2013 To New York Times columnist and cultural and political commentator David Brooks, psychiatrists are not heroes of science but “heroes of uncertainty.” Such is the title of his May 27, 2013 Op-Ed piece. Brooks takes the compilers of the DSM-5 and contemporary psychiatry to task for presenting their field...
May 6, 2013 I wonder why no major media outlet is covering this story—the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) announced on April 29, 2013 that it won’t be using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) anymore. (The story is all over the blogosphere, which is how I...