Faith-based therapy, nutrition and mental health, children’s therapy, therapist best-practices, and more mental health trends we hope to see in 2012.

Mental illness and addiction are mental, physical and spiritual diseases—is medication always the answer?

It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. If you are drinking or using drugs your therapist needs to know.

If you are a therapy patient, you need to know: You have the right to see your clinical records, at any point in time. There are no ifs, ands, or buts.

What therapy isn’t is a panacea. Yet, that seems to be precisely the present paradigm. When people are lonely, questioning their lives, feeling shut out or shut down and they don’t know where to turn, today, in the 21st century Western World, a therapist’s office is often where they land.

At a subsequent session, after she tentatively questioned him again, Dr. Lange told her she simply must trust him. “How can you expect to ever trust your husband if you don’t trust me”?

How many months of therapy will I need if I come to see you twice a week?”

Leslie thought for a moment. “Well, dear, you see, with your family history, you will most likely be in therapy for the rest of your life.”

Angelica felt as if she had been hit by a hammer.

No matter what methods or techniques your therapist uses there are universal recommendations for the process of therapy.

Despite the frustrations and limitations of treatment, the reality is that a person with a mental illness such as schizophrenia is far better off today than at any point in history—the knowledge and the capacity we have to treat people is greater than it ever was.

One therapist commented, saying that using a treatment plan during therapy was “rigid” and “unsophisticated” and that she liked to “go with the flow”. She was emphatic—a treatment plan “constrained her creativity as a therapist”.

But therapy is not about the therapist. It is about helping patients.