Blog

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Clients as Heroes

Clients as Heroes

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...

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Grass and Law’n Order

Grass and Law’n Order

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...

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Psychosis: A Brief Note

Psychosis: A Brief Note

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...

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Thought-Field Therapy

Thought-Field Therapy

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...

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Go Ask Alice*-The Search For An Effective Therapist

Go Ask Alice*-The Search For An Effective Therapist

"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...

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Missing Page From DSM Discovered!

Missing Page From DSM Discovered!

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...

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Talk of Miracles

Talk of Miracles

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...

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A Little Zen (Revised 2015)

A Little Zen (Revised 2015)

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,...

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Early Intervention Ethics

Early Intervention Ethics

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...

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Recovery

Recovery

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...

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