The Heroic Agencies Vision
We envision a future where clients' heroic stories overshadow descriptions of illness and client-directed partnerships revolutionize "mental health" as we know it.
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The Heart and Soul Conference
June 10-12, 2004
Click here to view photos from the conference
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There Must Be 50 Ways
By Barry Duncan and Jacqueline Sparks
The medical model rules. Psychotherapy is almost exclusively described, researched, taught, practiced, and regulated in terms of the equation: diagnosis plus prescriptive treatment equals symptom amelioration. The result: The medical model of mental health is like the old story about a fish in water. You ask a fish, “How’s the water?” and the fish replies, “What water?” You ask therapists why they talk about diagnosis of mental disorders and prescriptive treatments, they reply much like the tragic heroine in “Boy’s Don’t Cry.” When asked why he allowed himself to be dragged on the ground behind a pickup truck, she said, “I thought that’s what boys did around these parts."
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How Do I Know It's Helping?
By Bill Robinson
Have you ever wondered about how your clients experience their therapy sessions with you? Measuring the effectiveness of counseling is a task that many therapists feel daunted by both from the perspective of personal vulnerability and the logistics of how to do this in an uncomplicated way that doesn’t disrupt the counseling.
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The Ethics and Science of Medicating Children
By Barry Duncan and Jacqueline Sparks
Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents have skyrocketed in the past 10 years. This article presents evidence that the superior effectiveness of stimulants and antidepressants is largely a presumption based on an empirical house of cards, driven by an industry that has no consequence about the implications of its ever growing , and disturbingly younger, list of consumers.
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