Meditation on Personhood: Looking For My Self
Dave continues his meditation on the tensions and play between our multiple “selves”; the social, fantasy and core parts of our being–and what this means for our relationship with others.
Author: begeltherapy
An X-Ray Of A Couple In Distress
An X-ray, or CAT scan, is designed to show what’s invisible to the naked eye. An X-Ray of a couple, in the therapeutic setting, exposes the anatomy of the couple, revealing what’s beneath the surface in the relationship. Sometimes the patient doesn’t like the results.
The Opposite of A “Good Death”: A Young Woman’s Grief
Surgeon Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, has a lot to say about the unintended consequences of doctors’ failure to acknowledge the dying process. Here’s a case of a young woman whose complicated grief over her mother’s death reflects this failure.
A Little Girl With Bipolar “Deserves” A Trial of Lithium
This is a Two-Part Post: Dave: This illustration gives a picture of how the use of a psychiatric diagnosis and
The Bipolar Girl Grows Up And Becomes A Role Model For Her Mother
Dave: Just one month after Trish left for college, her mother, Carol Marie, called me. I was surprised because she
A New Understanding of Emotional Distress
Our current cultural model for conditions like anxiety and depression uses language like “chemical imbalance”, implying that suffering is related to our brain chemistry. In this post, Dave Keith offers another perspective that looks at our moods as dynamic states related to the context of our living patterns.
When A Patient Requests Xanax: A Doctor’s Unexpected Response
Many doctors feel under pressure to prescribe medications to patients with even moderate anxiety or depression. But it doesn’t have to be that way: Here’s a case of a physician with courage and imagination who takes an unexpected path to help her patient.
Out of the Darkness: Therapy For A Depressed Young Woman
In this post, Dave shares his clinical story about a young woman with severe depression and her recovery, without the use of medications. It again reminds us about the power of relationship, and the power of creative caring.
The Human Experience Inside “Mental Illness”
In this post, Dave Keith reflects on how he came to understand psychosis as a symbolic expression, embedded in a person’s relationships and experiences. This offers an alternative, dynamic and life-affirming perspective on what is often considered the “destiny” of mental illness.
Anxiety: A Guide To Ourselves
Anxiety is a common human emotion, one that we all experience at one point or other. Though most of us feel anxiety as a painful feeling that we want to “go away”, our anxiety in fact may be a helping us learn something important about ourselves.