Can we pull the wool over our own eyes or do we see through our mind games?

It feels good when someone pays attention to our concerns and our feelings—and it turns out such empathy is good for our health, too. Researchers at the University Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health report in Family Medicine that patients of doctors who expressed such concern had a cold for one day fewer than patients whose physicians focused on just the facts. In randomized controlled trials the colds of patients assigned to empathetic doctors lasted an average of seven days; those with low empathy docs endured an extra day of cold misery. The doctors’ empathy also boosted the patients’ immune systems. There was a direct relation between a physician’s empathy level and his or her patient’s level of IL-8, a chemical that summons immune system cells to fight microbial bad guys.

There are two kinds of madness: the kind that strikes suddenly, like a startled bird, and the kind that stalks silently for years, circling round and round until you are fully gathered in its dark wings. Mine was the latter.

All my life I have been afraid of losing my mind. I don’t know why — there is no legacy of mental illness in my family — but at a young age I decided that reality was a wild horse on which the best you could hope for was a tenuous grip…

…Describing psychosis is a bit like recounting a dream. There is very little one can say to capture its horror or its brilliance. There were many dimensions to my psychosis, the most prevalent being a severe strain of paranoia fueled by profound guilt and self-reproach. No longer was my world peopled by friends, colleagues, relatives or even strangers. Instead, all had become jurors or witnesses for the prosecution, and I was to be held to account for every real or imagined offense.

These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

As this short article illustrates, it certainly is a strange time to be a therapist, largely because of the internet and the ways in which that has changed everything - from advertising, to how people go about looking for help, to issues of privacy, transparency and confidentiality, to a whole host of other issues.  Obviously, Freud and Jung didn’t keep blogs  (though if they did, imagine how great a resource that would be for us today!) and there’s no real protocol for how to use the internet - or not use it - in one’s practice.   It’s something the field, in general, is struggling to figure out ethically and otherwise, and something that definitely causes a rift between older therapists and younger ones a lot of the time.

Each of us has to work it out for ourselves, for now.  Which is why I don’t reveal my full name or use an actual picture of myself anywhere on this site: that’s just how I decided I felt most comfortable running things here.  Other psychology/therapy blogs are run differently, with more information - sometimes even direct contact information - available.  Some therapists even keep Facebook pages.

Like I said, we’re all trying to figure it out.  And with each new advance in social interactions/networks online, we have to re-evaluate where we stand, and why.

Okay, here’s the article:

Five years ago I was having lunch with my father, a psychiatrist of almost 45 years. He was curious to know how I was getting such a full client load being a new therapist. I explained my website was coming up high in search engine rankings for my area and that these days people search for most things online, including therapists. He cocked his head slightly and looked at me suspiciously.

“Do you put your picture on your website?” he asked.

When I told him that I did, he about fell out of his chair and went on a rant about how inappropriate this is, likening it to taking an ad out in the yellow pages of a phone book. Initially I felt deeply criticized and offended by what my father had said. But upon further reflection, I “got it.”

My dad comes from a very different time in the practice of psychotherapy — when therapists didn’t advertise at all, let alone display a personal photo.

My, how the landscape has changed for therapists since then! Some of us have websites (with pictures, Dad), some of us list ourselves in directories (again, with pictures), some of us use social networking platforms and some of us are writing and blogging. A few of us have figured out ways to create a passive income to supplement our therapy practices.

What does all of this mean? It means that therapists are more visible than we’ve ever been in the history of this field of work. However, the change in landscape has not occurred without controversy around issues of personal disclosure, therapist-client boundaries and the “digital footprint” left online, which cannot easily be removed.

Being that this is the age of information (albeit “information overload” at times), people want to know a little about who might become their therapist. I’m not suggesting therapists lay out their life stories on their personal websites but strike a balance between demystifying themselves and remaining in their ethical comfort zone.

The other night when my dad was over for dinner, he sidled up to me and said, “Hey Lis, I’d like to ask you a few questions about how to do a website.” This time it was me who cocked my head slightly and looked at him suspiciously. He enthusiastically explained that he wants his own website to put all of his articles in one place.

For a moment I flashed back five years to that day we sat on the patio and he berated my online endeavors. This memory was quickly followed by a surge of validation knowing he must have decided what I’ve been doing all this time has some merit. (Isn’t it true how much we want validation from our parents?)

“But,” he clarified. “No picture of me.”

In that moment, two psychotherapy eras came together — well, sort of.

Psychotherapy may be a better remedy for people with seasonal affective disorder than light therapy, a new study suggests.

Researchers in British Columbia estimate about two per cent of Canadians suffer from SAD, a form of depression that occurs during the darker, colder months.

Like many mental illnesses, SAD can be treated and managed by various methods, including light therapy, medication and cognitive behaviour therapy. Those with less severe cases can often find some relief through regular exercise and outdoor activity.

In the September issue of the journal Behavior Therapy, Kelly Rohan, a psychologist at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues compared the treatments in 69 people with SAD randomly assigned to receive light therapy, psychotherapy, both or nothing.

Six weeks after treatment started, 80 per cent of those receiving combination therapy were in remission, compared to 50 per cent for cognitive behaviour therapy and the same for light therapy. About 20 per cent of those in the control group experienced remission.