Shows
What’s Next in Mental Health?The Mechanics of Conscious Experience (with Prof. Anil Seth)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 dissociative states. Research in the area of predictive processing has greatly expanded over the last decades and revolutionized our understanding of how the brain creates our experiences. It proposes that perceptions of ourselves and of our surroundings are not constructed by the information coming...
2025-01-2858 minWhat’s Next in Mental Health?Psychological Treatments – Can We Get Routine Outcome Monitoring Right? (with Dr. Chris Evans)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 problems. What risks need to be navigated as measuring becomes widespread? Can these outcome measures be misleading for certain patient groups? How long will questionnaires be the norm and what role might smart watc...
2023-06-121h 00What’s Next in Mental Health?How the diagnostic system started to swell (with DSM-4 Chair Allen Frances) 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 is capitalizing on this expansion and suggested that the exceptionally lucrative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) be taken entirely out of the hands of the American Psychiatric Association. He also doesn’t see the World Health Organization’s corresponding system working any b...
2023-03-2833 minWhat’s Next in Mental Health?A Glimpse into VR Exposure Therapy (with Dr. Andrew Sherrill)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 specializes in VR therapy for anxiety. Dr. Sherrill guides us through what VR exposure therapy is like in practice, why it is appealing, what limitations it has an...
2023-02-2859 minWhat’s Next in Mental Health?Should We Stop Prescribing Antidepressants for Depression? (with Prof. Joanna Moncrieff)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 placebo and antidepressant is so small that many drug trials don’t find it and most patients wo...
2023-01-101h 05What’s Next in Mental Health?Psychedelics - Untangling the Potential and the Hype (with Dr. Sandeep Nayak)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 Services (ATS) at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.Episode timestamps:00.00 A brief history of psychedelic research7.40 Where the funding is coming from10.10 Psychedelic-assisted the...
2022-12-011h 08What’s Next in Mental Health?The Science of Personalizing Psychological Treatments (with Dr. John Norcross)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 psychotherapy orientations are evolving, how mental health research funding should be redirected and how personalization could be part of clinical guidelines.Dr. Norcross...
2022-11-151h 05What’s Next in Mental Health?Can a Neural Network Perspective Bring Coherence to Psychotherapy Theory? (With Dr. Warren Tryon)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 professor emeritus of psychology at Fordham University. His book Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychotherapy: Network Principles for a Unified Theory outlines a cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychotherapy and clinical psychology. With computerized neural network models, it is becoming possible to simulate and...
2022-06-141h 25What’s Next in Mental Health?Understanding Goal Pursuit and Dysfunction in Mental Illness (with Dr. Colin DeYoung)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 discussion with personality neuroscience researcher Dr. Colin DeYoung. His cybernetic theory of psychopathology combines a neuroscience understanding of personality traits, psychiatric symptoms and dysfunction in the ability to pursue our wide range of goals as human beings. We discuss wa...
2022-05-2337 minWhat’s Next in Mental Health?The Elephant in the Clinic: The DSM has Fallen Behind. Here is How Psychiatric Diagnosis Might Work in the Future. (with Dr. Colin DeYoung)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 Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Consortium, a sizable group of scientists attempting to create an improved diagnostic system.The DSM “bible of psychiatry” has been seriously criticized, especially, since the development and relea...
2022-05-111h 02What’s Next in Mental Health?Bruce Wampold - Moving Beyond Comparing PsychotherapiesDr. 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. He has authored or co-authored nine books and countless book chapters and research papers and pioneered the Contextual model of Psychotherapy.The debate, whether some psychotherapies are superior to others, started decades ago. At the turn of the millenium the...
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