What’s Next in Mental Health?

Clinical care is estimated to account for only 20% of a person’s health outcomes. So how do we tackle the far more influential social and economic determinants of health?  Social prescribing is one of the approaches aiming to change how we view health by recognising that wellbeing is shaped as much by social factors as by medicine. It is centered around connecting people with support in their comm...

Mental health and consciousness are intertwined. Basic subjective experiences like feeling good, bad or depressed, or perceiving your surroundings “accurately” relate to conscious processes. The field of consciousness research can deepen our understanding of these experiences and also exceptional occurances – like how hallucinations happen or how sensing your own body can be disturbed in dissociat...

Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM) is gaining traction in psychotherapy and psychological treatments. Session-by-session monitoring with multi-item self-report questionnaires is also one of the cornerstones of the influential Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) -program in Britain. There is promise that routinely measuring helps identify cases where therapy is “off-track” and can help...

 About a decade ago, one of the most influential psychiatrists of our time, started speaking out against over-medicalization and vested interests corroding the diagnostic system in psychiatry - a system he had helped pioneer. Professor Emeritus Allen Frances points to systemic biases with specialists pushing to expand their own speciality. Dr. Frances has protested that the pharmaceutical industry...

Virtual reality technology has been used for exposure therapy for decades but has not yet become mainstream in clinical practice. Advances in the gaming industry and recreational applications for VR have, however,  made equipment increasingly affordable and available.  In this episode we discuss VR exposure therapy with Dr. Andrew Sherrill who is Assistant professor and clinical psychologist at th...

Over the decades, the pharmaceutical industry and parts of the psychiatric profession lead us to believe that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that antidepressants helped correct it. Now a new effort is being made to say that antidepressants are effective, even if the biological mechanism is unclear. The problem is that both these narratives have been falling apart in...

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is an area of great research interest, widespread media coverage and increasingly also financial dimensions. In this episode, we discuss psychedelic research and everything related to it with Dr. Sandeep Nayak. Dr. Nayak is assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research where he studies treating psychiatric disorders wi...

Focusing on which psychotherapy is best for a specific psychiatric disorder has had limited value in providing a path to improving overall psychotherapy outcomes. Research has, however, identified multiple promising ways to boost effectiveness by personalizing treatments. Dr. John Norcross and I discuss what current research says about personalizing psychological treatments and the potential it ha...

The field of psychotherapy has splintered into multiple theoretical orientations and over 500 different forms of therapy - each with their own theory and often with their own famous founders and competing interests. Could broadening the perspective to the cognitive neuroscience mechanisms underlying all psychological change bring some sorely needed coherence? My guest, Dr. Warren Tryon is professo...

Traditionally, psychiatric symptoms have been the primary focus in diagnostic systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). This episode questions whether there are better ways forward. This episode is a continuation of the previous episode’s conversation about reforming the diagnostic system. We continue the dis...

The DSM and ICD diagnostic systems are lagging scientific understanding of how mental health and mental illness work. This episode discusses the future of mental health diagnostics with personality neuroscience researcher Dr. Colin DeYoung.  Dr. DeYoung is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota where he runs the DeYoung Personality Lab. He is a member of the Hierarchical...

Dr. Bruce Wampold is Emeritus Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was, until his retirement, the Director of The Research Institute at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center, Vikersund, Norway. The American Psychological Association and Society for Psychotherapy Research have both granted him awards to celebrate his career and contributions to psychotherapy research...