The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that...

Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions....

get rid” of identities (although it is acceptable to provide strategies for the patient to resist the influence of destructive identities, or to help control the emergence of certain identities at inappropriate circumstances or times).It...

In the world of psychiatry today, there is no doctor … who could say that an 11-year-old, with a 6-year-old’s mentality, could form criminal intent.

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one’s own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding...

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.

You told a half-truth. They’ll say you lie twice when you tell the other half.

Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case....

Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained...

You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew...

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves

Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscience

I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what...

On having a backup plan: “Always a good plan anytime you want to follow your dream – I love writing, acting, and psychiatry – there are crazy people everywhere which means I can take my...

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little...

You see, people in the depressive position are often stigmatised as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If these people are in the depressive position, it is most probably...

SELFHOOD AND DISSOCIATIONThe patient with DID or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) has used their capacity to psychologically remove themselves from repetitive and inescapable traumas in order to survive that which could easily lead...

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the...

I don’t hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the...

Since when did psychiatry become one big, fat Myspace survey?

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation...

The maladies of the spirit alone, in abstracto, that is, error and sin, can be called diseases of the mind only per analogiam. They come not within the jurisdiction of the physician, but that of...

Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices echoing inside my head, just asking ‘why’ ‘who’ and making me think...

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to...

Talking about one’s feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and...

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory...

…it seemed to Kirsch that the most reliable guide to the mental landscape of a patient was the patient himself. He was better placed to explain his behaviour and his experiences than anyone else. Yet...

The irony of taking Anti Depressants: you take them to feel good but they also make you feel bad or worse because you worry about your purse.

It takes two to tango” isn’t even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before...

Wilhelm Reich identified ‘armor’ as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, ‘deadness’. Functionally...

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did...

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

Happiness. We’re tearing our hair out to try to find a definition of it, for heaven’s sake. Is it joy? People will tell you that it isn’t, that joy is a fleeting emotion, a moment...

The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is...

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact...

The irony of seeking a shrink: they are successful in shrinking your brain but unfortunately they also make your wallet shrink.

You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the...

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

Yes. The gloriously imperfect human being.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own...

Denial and minimizing is often seen in genuine PTSD and, hence, should be a target of detection and measurement.

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book...

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it’s the smell of schizophrenia.

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it’s...