The mu-opioid system: the brain’s natural painkillers Tina Pentland: News Editor Could the brain’s natural pain relievers, the opioids, offer a new way of treating depression and anxiety? The results of a recent study carried out at the University of Michigan Medical School suggest this is...

The Seat of Empathic Bias:  Right supramarginal gyrus plays an important role in empathy    News Editor Maria Kostyanaya Proposed by Carl Rogers and his followers in the 1940s and 1950s, the concept of “empathy” as “the therapist’s sensitive ability and willingness to understand...

BrainWise Leadership: Practical neuroscience to survive and thrive at work by Connie Henson and Pieter Rossouw BrainWise Leadership: Practical neuroscience to survive and thrive at work from The Neuropsychotherapist on Vimeo. The challenge confronting today’s leaders and their teams is...

  Pleasure Maximisation and Distress Avoidance Over the past three blogs in this series on Neuropsychotherapy Basics, we have looked at the basic psychological needs of attachment, control, and self-esteem enhancement. Now we turn our attention to the forth basic need in the consistency...

Bilingualism Encourages Mental Agility  Tina Pentland: News Editor An active brain is a healthy brain. This is the message to be learned from recent studies of advanced bilinguals who use a different kind of mental process, called “parallel activation”, to access a word in two languages...

Self-esteem Enhancement Last time we looked at the basic psychological need for orientation and control. This time we consider another basic need, and that is the need for self-esteem enhancement and protection. This need for self-enhancement or self-esteem has been regarded as a fundamental...

Orientation and Control Last blog we looked at the basic psychological need of attachment—the need for others. This time we are going to look at an equally important and integrally linked need for orientation and control. According to Epstein (1990), the need for orientation and control is...

  Attachment Style Continuing in our series on Neuropsychotherapy Basics, we look at the central, and critically important, need for attachment. I have touched briefly on attachment in the first blog “Basic Needs” and this time will expand on the concept of attachment as a basic...

The World Happiness Report ranks the happiest countries, with Denmark ranking #1, and reveals six key factors supporting happiness Economic and social progress of a nation may well be measured by its level of happiness. The second World Happiness Report, published by the UN Sustainable...

Consistency Theory Last time in “Neuropsychotherapy Basics” we looked at the four basic needs as defined by Klaus Grawe and based on earlier work by Seymour Epstein. In this blog I would like to take you through the consistency model that we touched on last time and consider how this...

Compulsive drinking in rats linked to hyperactive NMDARs in the prefrontal cortex Tina Pentland: News Editor A team of scientists at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco have identified a molecule that can—quite literally—turn off or on the compulsion to drink...

A New Classification System The newly released Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has made a number of modest alterations to the previous DSM-IV, but at the core it remains a dictionary, describing clusters of symptoms, to ensure clinicians and researchers use the...

The Diagnosis of Mental Disorders - the DSM-5 and Neuroscience – Highlights and Controversy Pieter Rossouw B Honns, MClin Psych, PhD, MAPS, MCClin, QCA Director – Unit for Neuropsychotherapy Director – Mediros Clinical Solutions Director – MOC Program - School of Psychology –...

Basic Needs   Klaus Grawe (2004, 2007) developed a view of mental functioning from conceptualizations formed in mainstream contemporary psychology, yet with a particular ‘driver’ that may not be altogether ‘mainstream’. That is, “the goals a person forms during his or her life...

The Neuropsychotherapist is looking for articles by professionals in the field of mental health, who subscribe to a biopsychosocial perspective and an appreciation for the ways neuroscience and other disciplines are informing...

Study suggests young African American women who binge eat are more likely to report suicide attempts   Press Release: Springer, New York / Heidelberg, 22 July 2013   Is binge eating a tell-tale sign of suicidal thoughts? According to a new study of African American girls, by Dr....

Childhood Trauma Causes Long-lasting Changes in Brain Architecture News Editor: Tina Pentland   While it is generally well-recognised that various forms of childhood abuse are risk factors in the development of psychological problems including mental illness and sexual dysfunction in...

PROVIDING OUTPATIENT TREATMENT TO THE MENTALLY ILL POST-HOSPITALIZATION HAS MULTIPLE BENEFITS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY News Editor: Tina Pentland It is quite well established that people with serious mental illness make up a disproportionate percentage of people who are involved with the...

Two New Theoretical Papers On Cortical Processing Psychotherapy and the Brain: The Dimensional Systems Model and Clinical Biopsychology Robert A. Moss Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital  Abstract The dimensional systems model explains cortical processing on the basis of cortical column...

To the Editor: It is with decidedly mixed feelings that I encountered your website. I am the author of Neuropsychotherapy and Community Integration: Brain Illness, Emotions, and Behavior (1999), which is linked on your website. I coined the term “neuropsychotherapy” to describe my work,...