Jayson Blair

University of Virginia researchers have published a piece in the Archives of Journal of General Psychiatry that examined an Internet-based behavioral intervention for adults with insomnia. They found that insomnia severity, wake after sleep onset and sleep efficiency all significantly improved for two thirds of those receiving the Web-based program while none of the individuals in the control group changed over time. The idea behind the research was straightforward: insomnia is a major problem, cognitive behavioral therapy is the best known treatment for insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy is neither not available, because of cost or the location of practitioners to many people and that the Internet could be used as a conduit to deliver the treatment. The question was really only whether the treatment would work over the Internet and whether the Internet-based programs could be tailored to the individual client. One of the researchers, Lee M. Ritterband, Ph.D, speaks about it in the...

Just finished reading "The Gift of Therapy" by the noted psychiatrist and therapist, Irvin Yalom, MD . I had read Dr. Yalom's writings on group psychotherapy and his hilarious and poignant case studies in the book "Love's Executioner." "The Gift of Therapy" is a well-written look at case studies that form an open letter to today's therapists. As soon as I finished the book, I passed it on to a gifted client who is in graduate school, preparing to become a therapist. There is no more interesting writer in the field of psychotherapy than Dr. Yalom. He is a gifted storyteller with a wonderful mind that can easily analyze an individual client and the broader issues in the industry. What strikes me about Dr. Yalom is both how he truly belongs to no school of therapy -- cognitive behavioral or insight-oriented or psychodynamic , for example -- but instead has an amazing ability to pick and choose different elements of each school to create a uniq...