The hottest Psychotherapy Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Health & Wellness Topics

Book Review: Sanity and Sainthood, by Dr. Tucker Peck

Sasha's 'Newsletter' • 1455 implied HN points • 16 Dec 25
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. Meditation and psychotherapy start from different ideas — meditation treats thoughts as transient waves to watch, while therapy treats them as meaningful stories — but both can help and often complement each other.
  2. Combining meditation with therapy creates a virtuous loop: meditation calms and clarifies the mind so therapeutic work is more effective, and therapy helps integrate difficult material so meditation becomes more stable.
  3. This path needs practical guidance and realistic expectations: deep practice can be hard, may lower short-term happiness, and real change usually takes many years of steady effort rather than quick fixes.

Impossible to Possible

thestoa • 786 implied HN points • 06 Jan 24
📖 Philosophy Psychotherapy
  1. Three popular strategies to respond to the sense of impossibility: self-help, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual.
  2. Beware of bypassing - engaging in good behavior in an escapist way to avoid facing real challenges.
  3. Consider the Stoic Response: do the right thing even if it feels impossible, lacks recognition, or is painful.

Is CBT Superior?

Mental Disorder • 275 implied HN points • 15 Feb 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) may not be superior to other therapies for treating mental illnesses.
  2. Studies have shown that CBT is effective for depression but not significantly more effective than other psychotherapies.
  3. CBT's reputation as the "gold standard" may influence people to choose it, but other therapies may be just as effective.

DIY Psychological Parts-Work: A Hacker’s Guide to IFS and Entactogens (20/30)

psychotechnology • 8 implied HN points • 21 Nov 25
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. The mind is made of semi-independent parts or subagents that have their own ages, goals, and roles, and you can learn to notice and talk to them to get clearer answers about how you feel.
  2. Cultivate your inner system like a garden: practice parts-work sober first, develop your own simple ways of classifying and communicating with parts, and use what fits your mind.
  3. Entactogens (like MDMA) can make parts-work more plastic and compassionate while psychedelics may cause bigger, riskier reorganizations, so approach drug-assisted work cautiously and seek professional help if things get destabilized.
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The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 2/2)

Living Fossils • 19 implied HN points • 05 Feb 25
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. Belief and expectation can significantly influence healing, often making the placebo effect just as powerful as actual medicine. When patients believe they will get better, it can boost their healing.
  2. Therapy often works not because of specific techniques, but due to the relationship between the therapist and client. That caring connection can lead to real healing and change.
  3. The effectiveness of therapy may not rely on the method used, but rather on the simple fact that someone is there to listen and support the client, making therapy a type of meaningful social interaction.

The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 1/2)

Living Fossils • 18 implied HN points • 08 Jan 25
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. There are over seventy types of therapy, each with its own method, but research shows they often work about the same. It's called the Dodo bird verdict.
  2. The placebo effect plays a big role in therapy success. Just believing that therapy will help can lead to real changes.
  3. Instead of focusing on which therapy type is best, it might be smarter to understand what makes therapy work, like a supportive environment and the client's expectations.

Psychologists are not legally required to affirm the gender identities of their patients

Year Zero • 23 implied HN points • 12 Sep 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. Psychologists are not legally required to affirm the gender identities of their patients.
  2. Therapists in California can provide non-affirming therapy for gender dysphoric youth without risking their license.
  3. APA guidelines caution against immediate affirmation and recommend a thoughtful, explorative approach when working with transgender individuals.

Neural Correlates of Emotional Resilience

Rough Diamonds • 8 implied HN points • 13 Jan 24
🏥 Health & Wellness Psychotherapy
  1. People handle stress differently, and there are identifiable brain patterns related to emotional resilience.
  2. Emotion regulation techniques like reappraisal can reduce negative emotions and show increased brain activity in specific regions.
  3. Studies suggest that activation in certain brain regions is linked to successful emotional regulation and reduced amygdala activity.

Chain of Empathy Prompting (CoE)

Cobus Greyling on LLMs, NLU, NLP, chatbots & voicebots • 0 implied HN points • 15 Nov 23
🕹 Technology Psychotherapy
  1. Chain of Empathy Prompting (CoE) helps large language models understand and respond to human emotions better. It uses ideas from psychotherapy to recognize how a person's feelings affect what they say.
  2. Emergent abilities in language models allow them to perform unexpected tasks without being specifically trained for them. CoE is an example of how these models can develop new skills through better understanding of context.
  3. Understanding the emotional context of a conversation is crucial for effective communication between humans and AI. By recognizing feelings, AI can respond in ways that feel more supportive and understanding.