What’s Next in Mental Health‪?‬ MinduuPro

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 larger service providers improve their outcomes. However, self-report measures also have known p...

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 about the pharmaceutical industry capitalizing on this expansion and suggested that the exceptionally lucrative Diagnostic a...

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 the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program at Emory University School of Medicine and specializ...

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 the background for a long time. Surprisingly for many, the difference in efficacy between a plac...

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 with psilocybin-assisted therapy. He also works as a clinical psychiatrist at Addiction Treatment S...

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 has for improving effectiveness and decreasing treatment dropout. He also gives his take on how psy...