Mind For Therapy

We are two days away from launching www.mindfortherapy.com. There is new content on the site. There are a couple of eBooks, discussion topic in the forum, the addition of the Brief Journal of Brief Therapy, links to more info about our mentors and some of the pioneers. A hidden Irreverent portal for "spoof" photos, and much more to come. So if you are not active on the site, start adding your content and new ideas.

I also want to announce a new blog from the Center for Children and Families (www.cfcfnela.org) called Therapeutic Rhythms (www.therapeuticrhythms.wordpress.com) very cool stuff so check it out.

The is still alot of work to be done on "mind". I am wanting to start publishing the first journal articles for SHIFT within the next couple of weeks and I know that there are a couple new eBooks in the works. So keep checking back with us.

I am usually a great fan of commercials. While I am never compelled to go out and buy anything, I enjoy the creative and humorous nature of most of them. However, my least favorite commercial is one for a “supplemental” anti-depressant. It magnifies our cultures dependency on medication for everything. It starts out with a very interesting fact, “2 out of every 3 people taking an anti-depressant still experience depression symptoms.” This is enough information to make me stop and think for a moment, but it is the next phrase that really puts me in to a twist. “[Add-on medication] may be right for you.” Are you kidding me? You just gave me the stats that say, 2/3 of people taking anti-depressants are not helped by them, and you have the nerve to try and sell me more medication. Isn’t that one definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over expecting different results)? After I have my initial furious reaction, I typically slip into a mild state of depression myself. Is this what our society has come to? We are so blinded by the propaganda of huge drug companies that we are willing to swallow this. Even the commercials have negative side effects.

My thoughts regarding this website are developing slowly. I think to give more life to the site I am going to have to let it go. As Bateson said, "iin order to save the world you have to be willing to let it go to hell." My thinking now  is to let "mind" become more of an interactive place. I have added a discussion forum and am working out details for an eJournal. I am going to bring 8 or 9 people into its development and managment. Some of those bright minds can do things I only dream about. I want each person to have control over the site. To be able to add and build in their own individual personality. I think it will be fun. I want to get everyone started with an absurd e-book. I am thinking of titles like "How to lose a therapist in ten sessions", "Dirty Secrets: A Scandalous Brief History of Family Therapy", "Top Ten All Time Worst Interventions"... Who knows, but I think it would be fun to let folks loose with a creative assignment to start with.

I am pleased with where my "mind" is headed. I don't want it to stop with my own skin. I think a major issue with making real advancments in our field has to do with how territorial everyone is with their "intellectual property". I am frustrated with a lot of what I see in the field, nothing more so than the idea of trademarking the names of schools of therapy and marketing them as "canned" approaches to effective treatment. Most of the research is halfcocked clinical trails that pit one program against basically no treatment, and the studies that do compare treatment usually ened up with no difference. If you want to find out more about this "baloney" check out the website www.talkingcure.com. It is a great site with strait talk about what research is really showing... that is without all the propaganda.

So I quess... that is the pitfall I want to avoid. Give up control... let the site take a life of its own...Let "mind" be as Bateson might define it... including all the pathways along which transforms of difference can be transmitted.

Well... lets be realistic. I know the people that I am bringing in to the work on this website and I know their theoretical orientations... so its not all up in the air.

I'm interested in letting loose a bit with this website. I have thought for sometime about adding a little meaning to the noise about therapy, counseling, etc, etc, etc. I am hoping to have a fun while giving people something worthwhile to read. I am not interested building up some new establishement or the next new thing in therapy. I think we have plenty of people who think they have found the answers. I want to poke fun and be a little irreverant. So... this is my outlet. 

I would like to see a real movement towards an evovled understanding of therapy that sheds the old shackles of scared models and prideful men bickering back and forth about whose ideas have the most currancy or potency.

For the most part, the research on therapy shows that there is little to no difference between treatment models or schools. And in large part the fiield simply keeps on ignoring this fact.

I come from a family therapy tradition and I find it interesting. I apply systemic family therapy principles to how I approach every case. Does this mean that I am always systemic... No. Even Gregory Bateson said he only have brief moments of clarity inwhich he was able to hold a full appreciation for systemic thought.

I love the new work of Bradford Keeney. His new book Creative Therapy is coming out in July... A must read (partly becuase most of the cases he writes about in the book took place at the agency I work at). I think his greatest contribution will be his unwellingness to continue the creative, improvisational, and absurd work of the family therapy forefathers. Brad has described is birth into the field of family therapy to me in detail. "Bateson was my father in the filed and Whitaker my mother." I love it.

For now... I consider myself more or less an orphan.