Good Morning or Good Afternoon (wherever you may be),
In 28 minutes I’ll be online presenting for the Mental Health Academy Suicide Prevention Summit. A big thanks to Pedro and Greg for their organizing and broadcasting of this worldwide event. I’m honored to be a part of it.
It’s still not too late to register. The link is here: https://www.mentalhealthacademy.net/suicideprevention. It’s all free . . . or you can pay a whopping $10 and have access to all the recordings. TBH, I’m not sure if I’d pay $10 to hear me (jokes), but tomorrow morning features Craig Bryan, and I’ll be an early-riser to catch him live (and free). There are also some other FABULOUS presenters.
Recently, I had the honor of presenting to Camp Mak-A-Dream residents (13-20 year-olds) on “Happiness and You.” To empower the residents—all of whom have experienced brain tumors—and resonate with the challenges of being human and having emotions, I shared the Three Step Emotional Change Technique. Then, I invited a volunteer to help me demonstrate how sometimes our brains can trick us by immediately providing the wrong answer to a question. A marvelous young man named Brandon stepped up and volunteered.
Here’s the video link, as recorded by Alli Bristow, last year’s Montana School Counselor of the Year (you can hear her reactions, which are pretty fun too):
You can watch the video, but I’m also sharing a description and rationale for the activities below.
The Riddle Activity
You’ll see me asking Brandon to respond to three riddles. I manage to trick him with the first one. For the second one, he’s briefly fooled, and then catches himself and gives the right answer. On the third, he pauses and gets the right answer the first time.
Why This Activity
I’ve used riddles like these in individual counseling with youth and in group presentations (as illustrated in the video). The riddle activity is all about a basic cognitive therapy message: If we go with our automatic thoughts, without pausing and evaluating them, we can be wrong. However, if we pause to evaluate the situational context and our reactive thoughts, sometimes we can override our automatic and possibly maladaptive impulses (Aaron and Judy Beck would be proud).
The Next Lesson
In the video, you only see Brandon and me doing the riddles. He’s great. When I’m doing this presentation (or using it in counseling) after the riddles, I immediately give the youth a situational example. I say something like, “Okay. Now let’s say I go to the same high school as Brandon, and I know him, and I’m walking by him in the hall at school. When I see him, I say ‘Hi Brandon!” But he just keeps on walking. What are my first thoughts?”
Whether I’m working with a group or with individuals, the young people are usually very good at suggesting possible immediate thoughts. They say things like: “You’re probably thinking he doesn’t like you.” Or, “Maybe you think he’s mad at you.”
At some point, I ask, “Have you ever said hello to someone and have them say nothing back?” There are always head nods and affirming responses.
Way back in our “Tough Kids, Cool Counseling” book, Rita and I wrote about the typical internalizing and externalizing responses that people tend to have in reaction to a possible social rejection. The internalizing response is depressed, anxious, and self-blaming. Internalizing thoughts usually take people down the track of “What did I do wrong” or “What’s wrong with me?” Alternatively, some youth have externalizing thoughts. Externalizing thoughts push the explanation outward, onto the other person. If you’re thinking externalizing thoughts, you’re thinking, “What’s wrong with him?” or “That jerk!” or “Next time, I’m not saying hi to him.” Back in the day, Kenneth Dodge wrote about externalizing thoughts in adolescents as contributing to aggression; he labeled this cognitive error “the misattribution of hostility.”
In counseling and in group presentations, the next step is to ask for neutral and non-blaming explanations for why Brandon didn’t say hello. The youth at Camp Mak-A-Dream were quick and efficient: “He probably didn’t hear you.” “Maybe he was having a bad day.” “He could have had his earbuds in.” “Maybe he was feeling shy?”
What’s the Point?
One goal of these activities is to help young people become more reflective and thoughtful. My neuroscience enthralled friends might say I’m working their frontal lobe muscles. I basically agree that whenever we can engage teens with thoughtful and reflective processes, they may benefit.
But the other goal may be even more important. Although I want to teach young people to be thoughtful, I also want to do that in the context of an engaging, sometimes fun, and interesting relationship. For me. . . it’s not just teaching and it’s not just learning. It’s teaching and learning in the crucible of a therapeutic relationship. As one of my former teen clients once said, “That’s golden.”
When I wrote this, I was listening to Dr. Jennifer Crumlish, a consultant for the CAMS-Care program. Dr. Crumlish provided a fantastic overview of the challenges associated with suicide prevention and interventions, along with introductory information pertaining to implementing the CAMS model. For more on CAMS-Care, see this link: https://cams-care.com/
Earlier in the day, Leah Finch—one of our excellent doc students in counseling—and I, did our presentation. Our participants were awesome. A bit later, I got to be on an “expert panel” along with several very cool people, facilitated by Dr. Jen Preble. We fielded an array of interesting questions from the audience. Very fun.
For those of you interested, here are the ppts Leah and I developed, here they are:
I’m continuing with the theme of featuring diverse identities from the Clinical Interviewing (7th edition) textbook with a case example written by Dr. Umit Arslan. Dr. Arslan is writing about his experience as an international graduate student in counseling, when he was at the University of Montana. Currently, he’s a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.
The photo is from when I visited him in Istanbul in January, 2023.
Enjoy!
As you’ll see below, Umit’s experience was unique. Given his Turkish heritage and cultural background, he needed to reflect and engage in a self-awareness process to experiment with finding a better way to introduce himself to clients. What I love most about this essay is Umit’s authentic description of his own experience. His answer to a better way to introduce himself won’t be the right answer for everyone. But his process is open and admirable.
CASE EXAMPLE 2.2: BEING A COUNSELOR FIRST . . . AND TURKISH SECOND, WORKED BETTER THAN BEING TURKISH FIRST . . . AND A COUNSELOR SECOND
Finding the right words and ways to introduce yourself is important. In this essay, Ümüt Arslan, Ph.D., an associate professor of counseling at İzmir Democracy University (Turkey), writes about challenges he faced as an international doctoral student in counseling at the University of Montana. Put yourself in Dr. Arslan’s shoes as he discovers (for him) a better way of introducing himself.
While pursuing my doctoral degree in the U.S., my supervisor and I discussed how to share my cultural identity and accent to clients. When I shared, my clients were not only interested in my appearance and accent, but also about my diet, coffee preferences, job, and of course, about my native country, Turkey. But they were reluctant to talk about themselves.
Clients assumed I was Muslim and against alcohol. Their assumptions were especially challenging because they were inaccurate. I was not religious, and like many Americans, I enjoyed having a beer after work. I wanted to challenge clients’ assumptions about my identity, but worried about countertransference and focusing too much on myself.
One cisgender female client came for an intake interview. She saw me, grabbed her bag (almost the size of a camping tent), and put it on her knees. I couldn’t see her face. I told her she could put the bag down if she wanted to. She declined.
When I re-watched this and other sessions, the striking thing was that my clients (mostly White) appeared stressed at the sight of me, a bearded Turkish man with dark skin. They didn’t even talk about the problems they had written on their intake form. My identity as a Turkish man overshadowed everything else. I needed a path forward.
In class, my supervisor discussed alternative ways to open sessions. I tried asking clients: “If you were the counselor today, what question would you ask yourself?” Clients suddenly engaged with me, giving deep and enthusiastic answers to their own questions. I stopped opening sessions by emphasizing cultural differences. Instead, I focused on my counselor identity, saying: “I completed my master’s degree and am currently a doctoral student. What do you think is the best question for me to ask you for us to have a good start here today?”The message, “I am here with my counselor identity” instead of “I’m a Turkish man in the U.S., and desperate to explain my culture to you,” had an amazing effect. Using a less cultural opening was more culturally sensitive. Clients could naturally introduce their own cultural identities, with fewer assumptions about me. Although I could still talk about culture, emphasizing my counselor identity enabled me to focus on counseling goals, the therapeutic relationship, and evidence-based counseling interventions.
The Practical Psychology Podcast just dropped a new episode titled “On Happiness and a Life with Meaning.” This episode includes Kyrie Russ (the show’s host” and me in conversation about happiness, CBT, life, and other things. This conversation was based, in part, on content from a keynote I gave at a conference in Helena about 2 years ago. The ppts (which is are a bit cryptic. . .) are here:
While doing supervision today, I found myself encouraging my supervisee to be more direct, to embrace his knowledge and his good judgment, and to share his knowledge and judgment with his client. This is an interesting (and perhaps surprising) stance for me to take, because, as some of you know very well, I lean hard toward Rogerian theory. I’m a fan of honoring clients’ expertise and of Carl Rogers’s words that it is “the client who knows what hurts and where to go.”
As I age (more like fine wine, and not like moldy bananas, I hope), one truth I keep feeling is that nearly everything is both-and—not either-or. Yes, I believe deeply in the naturally therapeutic process of person-centered theory and therapy; providing clients with that “certain type of environment” will facilitate self-discovery and personal growth. On the other hand, sometimes clients need guidance. In my supervision case earlier today, my point was that the client was a very long way away from deeper personal insights. That meant my supervisee needed to loan the client his good judgment and decision-making skills. As you may recognize, “loaning clients our healthy egos” is psychoanalytic language. Nevertheless, the guidance I offered my supervisee was to engage in some CBT coaching
All this reminded me of a section I updated in the 7th edition of Clinical Interviewing. The section is titled, “Client as Expert” and I’ve excerpted it below. It captures the essence of honoring client wisdom, which, IMHO, should always precede more directive interventions.
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Client as Expert
Clients are the best experts on themselves and their experiences. This is so obvious that it seems odd to mention, but sometimes therapists can get wrapped up in their expertness and usurp the client’s personal authority. Although idiosyncratic and sometimes factually inaccurate, clients’ stories and explanations about themselves and their lives are internally valid and should be respected.
CASE EXAMPLE 1.1: GOOD INTENTIONS
In one case, I (John) became preoccupied about convincing a 19-year-old client—who had been diagnosed years ago with bipolar disorder—that she wasn’t really “bipolar” anymore. Despite my good intentions (I thought the young woman would be better off without a bipolar label), there was something important for her about holding on to a bipolar identity. As a “psychological expert,” I believed it obscured her many strengths with a label that diminished her personhood. Therefore, I encouraged her to change her belief system. I told her that she didn’t meet the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder, but I was unsuccessful in convincing her to give up the label.
What’s clear about this case is that, although I was the diagnostic authority in the room, I couldn’t change the client’s viewpoint. She wanted to keep calling herself bipolar. Maybe that was a good thing for her. Maybe that label offered her solace? Perhaps she felt comfort in a label that helped her explain her behavior to herself. Perhaps she never will let go of the bipolar label. Perhaps I’m the one who needed to accept that as a helpful outcome.
[End of Case Example 1.1]
In recent years, practitioners from many theoretical perspectives have become outspoken about the need for expert therapists to take a backseat to their clients’ lived experiences. Whether you’re working online or face-to-face, several evidence-based approaches emphasize respect for the clients’ perspective and collaboration (David et al., 2022). These include progress monitoring, client-informed outcomes, and therapeutic assessment (Martin, 2020; Meier, 2015).
When your expert opinion conflicts with your client’s perspective, it’s good practice to defer to your client, at least initially. Over time, you’ll need your client’s expertise in the room as much as your own. If clients are unwilling to share their expertise and experiences, you’ll lose some of your potency as a helper.
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So, what’s today’s big takeaway? We start with and maintain great respect for the client’s expertise. . . and then we either stay more person-centered (or psychoanalytic) or collaboratively shift toward providing more direction and guidance. And the big question is: How do we determine whether to stay less directive or become more directive?
If you feel so inclined, let me know your thoughts on that big question.
Language is powerful, but sometimes subtle in its influence. Last week in Group class I talked about using psychoeducation to teach people the power of language. As an example, I mentioned the work of Isolina Ricci, and the best post-divorce book ever, Mom’s House, Dad’s House. Ricci tells separated or divorced parents they should change the words they use to refer to their “Ex.” Because “Ex” refers to the former relationship with a romantic partner, it gets to the heart of how people use language to live in the past. Ricci says that we should use “My children’s Mom” or “My child’s Dad” because doing so accurately describes the current relationships. Years ago, I taught her language-based principles in the divorce education courses offered through Families First.
In a class-based group, my students brought up that perhaps we should shift from language that identifies others as “racist” to describing them as “people with racist tendencies.” I was happy my students were grappling with the influence of language. . . and was reminded of my first encounter when I really learned about the power of language and labels.
While in the University of Montana library about 4 decades ago, I recall reading something by Gordon Allport. Given it was so long ago, the memory is surprisingly vivid. Sadly, I can’t conjure up the reference. What I recall is Allport describing something like this:
First, we say, John behaves nervously.
Later, it becomes, John is nervous or anxious.
Eventually, we diagnose John: John has an anxiety disorder.
Then, we diagnose everyone similar to John, and put the disorder first: Anxiety disordered youth, like John, are more likely to. . .
In the end, we’ve inserted a trait-problem in John, without consideration of the context of his initial anxiety or the specific rate of anxiety associated with his so-called “anxiety disorder.” And then we repeat this description until the problem is fully placed inside John (and others) and rarely question that presumption.
This process begs many questions. Is the anxiety really located inside John, as if it were a personality trait or a mental disorder? Where did John’s anxiety originate? If John lived years in a frightening setting, should he be blamed and labeled for having anxiety symptoms? Might it be normal for John to expect that something bad is likely to happen?
The tendency for external observers to see behaviors or symptoms in others, and then insert the behaviors and symptoms inside of those they observe is so ubiquitous that in social/cognitive psychology, they named it the “Fundamental Attribution Error.” But even that language isn’t quite right.
Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute the behaviors of others as representing a “trait” or underlying disposition in them (e.g., racist). Not surprisingly, at the same time, people also tend to attribute their own behaviors to situational factors (e.g., I was more judgmental than usual, because I was a bad mood and hadn’t slept well). To use language more precisely, the fundamental attribution error might be better described as a “common” phenomenon, instead of fundamental. And, of course, that tendency is not always in error. Maybe the better terminology would be “Common misattribution tendency.” Put more simply: We tend to blame others’ behavior on them. How common is that? Very common.
This is all very heady stuff, as is often the case when we dive into constructive language and narrative therapy principles. It tends to be easier for people to change and to believe in the possibility of people changing when we use person-first language and say things like, “engaged in racist behaviors” or “exhibited signs of anxiety,” instead of using firmly constructed attributions.
Lately, in this blog I’ve been riffing with excerpts from our Clinical Interviewing textbook. Below, I’ve inserted another section from Clinical Interviewing. This excerpt is about using bias-free language in psychological reports.
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Using Bias-Free Language
No matter how careful and sensitive writers try to be, it’s still possible to offend someone. Writing with sensitivity and compassion toward all potential readers is difficult, but mandatory.
Avoiding bias and demeaning attitudes is mostly straightforward. In addition to following the APA’s guidance and writing for a multidimensional audience, the best advice we have is to encourage you to conceptualize and write your intake report transparently and collaboratively. This means:
At the beginning and toward the end of your session, speak directly with your client about the content you plan to include in the report.
Rather than surprising clients with a diagnosis, be explicit about your recommended diagnosis and rationale.
Discuss your treatment plan openly with clients. Doing so serves the dual purpose of providing clients with advance information and getting them invested in treatment.
If you’re not clear about how your client would like to be addressed in the report (Mr., Ms., gender identity, ethnicity, etc.), ask directly. Avoid mis-labeling or mis-gendering clients in a psychological report. If you’re working with clients who have physical disabilities, check to see if person-first or disability-first language is preferred.
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I’ve been trying to keep the word-length of these blogs reasonable, and so if you’re interested in a bit more on this topic, this link will give you Practice and Reflection 8.4: “Person-First or Identity-First Language” from, of course, the Clinical Interviewing text.
In my Group Counseling class, I’ve experienced predictable questioning of or resistance to evidence-based happiness ideas from positive psychology. . . and so I wrote out some of my thoughts . . . which went on and on and ended with a video clip.
Hello Group Class,
I’m writing my group takeaway to your all this week. Feel free to read at your leisure . . . or not at all . . . because I’m a writer and obviously, sometimes I get carried away and write too much.
When I responded to a question last week expressing reservations about the use of positive psychology—perhaps generally and perhaps more specifically with oppressed populations—I launched into a psychoeducational lecture. Upon reflection, I wish I had been more receptive to the concerns and encouraged the class as a group chew on the pros and cons of positive psychology in general and positive psychology with oppressed populations, in particular. I suspect this would have been an excellent discussion.
Given that we have limited time for discussion in class, I’ll share more reflections on this topic here.
1. The concerns that were expressed (and others have expressed in your takeaways) are absolutely legitimate. I’m glad you all spoke up. Some people have used positive psychology as a bludgeon (claiming things like “happiness is a choice”) in ways that make people feel worse about themselves. Never do that!
2. Positive psychology is poorly named (even the great positive psych researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky, hates the name). Among its many naming problems, the word positive implies that it’s better, preferable, and the opposite of negative—which must then be the correct descriptor for all other psychology. None of this is true; positive psychology is not “better” and, in fact, it’s not even exclusively positive.
3. The point of positive psychology is not to “take over” psychology, but to balance our focus from being nearly always on psychopathology, to being equally about strengths, joy, happiness, etc., and psychopathology. If you think of it as an effort to balance how we work with individuals, it makes more sense. The point isn’t, and never has been, that we should only focus on positive mental health regardless of how our clients and students are feeling. That would be silly and insensitive.
4. As someone reminded me in the takeaways, the sort of happiness we focus on in positive psych is called eudaimonic happiness. This term comes from Aristotle. It refers to a longer form of happiness that emphasizes meaning, interpersonal connection, and finding the sweet spot where our own virtues intersect with the needs of the community. The other side of happiness is referred to as “hedonic” happiness. Hedonic happiness is more about hedonism, which involves immediate pleasure and material acquisitions. Nearly everyone in positive psychology advocates primarily for eudaimonic happiness, but also recognizes that we all usually need some pleasure as well.
5. Individuals and groups who have been historically (and currently) oppressed are naturally sensitive to coercion, judgment, and possibility of repeated oppression. What this means for counselors (among many things) is that we need to careful, sensitive, and responsive to their needs and not our assumptions of their needs. They may appreciate us being positive and supportive. Or they may appreciate us explicitly acknowledging their pain and affirming the legitimacy of the reasons for their pain. There’s substantial research indicating that certain ethnic group expect counselors to be experts and offer guidance. If that’s the case, should we avoid offering guidance because a particular theorist (or supervisor) said not to offer guidance? I think not. Many clients benefit from going deep and processing their disturbing emotions and sensations. There are probably just as many who don’t really want to go deep and would prefer a surface-focused problem-solving approach. Either way, my point is that we respond to them, rather than forcing them to try to benefit from a narrow approach we learned in grad school.
6. Good counselors . . . and you will all become good counselors . . . can use virtually any approach to make connection, begin collaborating, remain sensitive to what clients and students are saying (verbally and non-verbally), and work constructively with them on their emotions, thoughts, sensations/somatics, behaviors, and the current and/or historical conditions contributing to their distress.
7. We should not blame clients for their symptoms or distress, because often their symptoms and distress are a product of an oppressive, traumatic, or invalidating environment. This is why reflections of feeling can fall flat or be resisted. Feeling reflections are tools for having clients sit with and own their feelings. While that can be incredibly important, if you do a feeling reflection and you don’t have rapport or a rationale, feeling reflections will often create defensiveness. Instead, it can be important to do what the narrative and behavioral folks do, and externalize the problem. When it comes to issues like historical trauma, often clients or students have internalized negative messages from a historically oppressive society, and so it makes perfect sense to NOT contribute to their further internalization of limits, judgments, discrimination, and trauma that has already unjustly taken hold in their psyche. The problem is often not in the person.
8. I know I said this in class, but it bears repeating that many people practice simple, superficial, and educational positive psychology using bludgeon-like strategies. Obviously, I’m not in support of that. That said, many people practice simplistic implementation of technical interventions in counseling (think: syncretism from theories class), and many counselors do bad CBT, bad ACT, bad DBT, bad behaviorism, bad existentialist therapy, and bad versions of every form of counseling out there. No matter which approach you embrace, you should do so using your excellent fundamental listening skills . . . so that if your client or student doesn’t like or isn’t benefiting from your approach, you can change it!
I want to end this little 1K word writing project with a video. In the linked clip, I’m doing about a 3 1/2 minute opening demonstrating a “Strengths-based approach” to suicide assessment and treatment planning with a 15-year-old. As you watch, ask yourself, “Is this strengths-based?” Can you identify anything that makes this approach strengths-based or as including even a whiff of positive psychology. [Again, you’re not required to watch this, I’m just rambling.]
In group class, we’re covering content related to group stage called “Storming.” The Coreys’, who’ve written about and led many groups, call this the “Transition” stage. During the storming or transition stage, group members start to push against or question group norms and/or the group leader’s authority. Not to be trite, but like roses, no matter what name it, the smell and tension of storming feels the same.
I’ve been waiting and watching for storming to emerge within my class. I know group process unfolds during class groups, just as it unfolds in psychoeducational, counseling, and psychotherapy groups. I thought I might ignite storming, by asking my counseling graduate students to focus on positive psychology. I did get a little push-back from students who emailed me about their “mixed” feelings about positive psychology. My response was to share that I also hold mixed feelings about positive psychology, along with mixed feelings about psychoanalytic theory, behavioral theory, CBT, feminist theory, acceptance and commitment therapy, and every other theory or approach I can think of.
This past week an ever-so-minor edge of a storm found its way into class. After class started, one student expressed negative feelings about a reading I’d assigned, noting that she thought the article was “shaming” to mandated clients. As often occurs with storming, I had an immediate and complex emotional and impulse-ridden response. Rather than acting on my emotions or defending the reading, I managed to welcome the critique. When I say “managed” I mean to communicate that IMHO, welcoming critiques is not easy, and maybe not natural. A few minutes later, I acknowledged that although I wished everyone would love all the class readings, I also wanted people to feel they had permission to not love the readings and speak openly about their opinions. Later that evening, I received an email takeaway from the student who didn’t like the reading. As you may recall, one of my group class assignments is for students to email me two takeaways in the days following class. Because she expressed what I want to communicate better than I can, here’s her email (shared with her permission).
Hey John,
My biggest takeaway from today was watching your modeling of working with storming, both with myself and [with another student]. The way that you allowed for expression of our feelings, were vulnerable with your own, and then used the material to create more conversations, norms, etc., was really helpful to see. I also want to share on this topic that when my oldest kiddo and I were talking this morning about what our days were looking like, I was talking to her about my feelings about an article we read for class that I didn’t agree with, and that I was going to bring it up in class. And her response was, “You’re going to tell your professor that?!?!” She was shocked that I felt like I could say that in class, and I wanted to thank you for creating a space where I felt like that was alright.
My other takeaway is your quote from class today, “We want to give people the chance to be interesting.” I think there are so few opportunities that people have to be seen and heard by others in a way that is meaningful. Coupled with the big, sort of inherent opportunity as a group leader to take up ‘too much space,’ your advice feels like a really important nugget that I want to take with me into leading groups in the future.
What I love best about this email (and I love a lot of it) is my student’s anecdote about her daughter’s reaction: “You’re going to tell your professor that?!?!” And what I love best about that is—consistent with other conversations we’ve been having in class—we should not run groups like cults. As leaders, professors, administrators, clergy, and politicians, we need to be open to independence of thought and listen to unique perspectives. What I think is not the truth and what I value is not necessarily the correct moral philosophy for everyone.
Today. . . I am very happy to have handled a little storming with acceptance and openness. Tomorrow may be different. But for today, I get to feel the good feelings of being able to live my best group leader values—even if it didn’t involve me being right about anything.
Imagine the possibility of a scalable single-session intervention that has been shown to be effective with a wide range of mental health issues. In these days of widespread mental health crisis and overwhelmed healthcare and mental health providers, you might think that effective single-session interventions are a fantasy. But maybe not.
This morning, my older daughter emailed me a link to two videos from the lab of Dr. Jessica Schleider of Northwestern University. Dr. Schleider’s focus is on single-session therapeutic interventions. Although I hadn’t seen the website and videos, I was familiar with Dr. Schleider’s work and am already a big fan. Just to give you a feel for the range and potential of single-session interventions, below I’m sharing a bulleted list of titles and dates of a few of Dr. Schleider’s recent publications:
Realizing the untapped promise of single‐session interventions for eating disorders – 2023
In-person 1-day cognitive behavioral therapy-based workshops for postpartum depression: A randomized controlled trial – 2023
A randomized trial of online single-session interventions for adolescent depression during COVID-19 – 2022
An online, single-session intervention for adolescent self-injurious thoughts and behaviors: Results from a randomized trial – 2021
A single‐session growth mindset intervention for adolescent anxiety and depression: 9‐month outcomes of a randomized trial – 2018
Reducing risk for anxiety and depression in adolescents: Effects of a single-session intervention teaching that personality can change – 2016
Single-session therapy or interventions aren’t for everyone. Many people need more. However, given the current mental health crisis and shortage of available counselors and psychotherapists, having a single-session option is a great thing. As you can see from the preceding list, single-session interventions have excellent potential for effectively treating a wide range of mental health issues. Given this good news about single-session interventions, I’m now sharing with you that link my daughter shared with me: https://www.schleiderlab.org/labdirector.html
I’ve been interested in single-session interventions for many years. Just in case you’re interested, here’s a copy of my first venture into single-session research (it’s an empirical evaluation of a single-session parenting consultation intervention, published in 2007).
John Sommers-Flanagan 