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It’s 50 years since Carl Rogers published his Client Centered Therapy with it’s claim that no person is essentially bad or ill, but at worse merely working out their natural potential to find the healthy goodness that all people are. Roger’s philosophical base was...

If we are to seriously entertain an alternative to our current draconian treatment of “the drug problem” then one alternative to the simplistic suggestion of de-criminalization is to consider licensing. Just as we have licensing laws for driving on our roads, why not...

Sometime ago the World Health Organisation funded a study exploring the prevalence of psychotic disorders cross-culturally.  The surprising finding was not so much that this phenomenon seems to be found in all cultures, but that the prognosis was better in the...

One of the more unusual schools of therapy to emerge on the American scene in the past decade has been Thought-Field Therapy.  Perhaps the easiest way to understand it, is to imagine that it is form of acupressure therapy; and that it requires you to tap certain parts...

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a constructionist inspired approach to organisational development, which rejects deficit oriented (problem-solving) approaches to management in favour of discovering, understanding, and fostering positive assumptions about people and the...

"The challenge of accountability, the managed-care meteor hurtling toward Planet Therapy, has created the opportunity to change the prevailing orthodoxy of psychotherapy” (Duncan & Miller, 2000, p.65) Sept. 2000** Over the past 40 years research into therapy...

Person Taxonomy Disorder (PTD) is a condition which affects many professionals but it seems to be particularly prevalent within the mental health field. The major characteristic is an assumption of intellectual or moral correctness or superiority frequently held in...

In the year 2000 when this blog was first published, a directory of counselors and psychotherapists in New Zealand listed only one practitioner identified as offering Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT).  As the directory listed over 300 practitioners in private...

ND: Perhaps one of the most important philosophical texts for those wanting to make the shift to a post-Cartesian or ecologically sounder way of thinking is Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", which was first published shortly after his death in 1951. The...

Anyone studying counselling or psychotherapy might find it useful to study a little Zen along the way; but in doing so one needs to be mindful that too much Zen can leave you with the reputation of having ‘the stink of zen’. This is because it is a bit like a joke,...

With an estimate of a little over 1% of the population attracting a diagnosis of schizophrenia, it is reckoned that 1 new case for every 10,000 people will be identified each year by mental health workers as deserving this diagnosis.  As a result of the effectiveness...

Let’s look at ‘Recovery’ in a deeper way; in a way that includes helping our culture recover a wider range of discourses on the nature of ‘madness’. One of the most compelling pieces of research in Mental Health must be the World Health Organisation studies in the...