Jeffrey Deitz's Blog

From the August 28, 2015 Psych Central World of Psychology blog.

How Teachers Make a Difference by Jeffrey Deitz

In clinical practice, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists are usually so consumed with treating psychopathology they don’t often get the chance to prevent it.

A dear friend, a teacher visiting from the Midwest, explained how she turned a potentially explosive situation with one of her students into a story with a wonderful ending.

Claire Keller is a sixth-grade reading teac...

It’s your turn #5 is a situation that often perplexes parents of adolescents. You’ll find a typical example in the subplot of my novel Intensive Therapy: A Novel.

Your teen-aged fraternal twin son and daughter want to spend several weeks of their summer at music camp. Even though you can afford it, you think it would be good for them to pay for part of it with money they earn during the school year, but they claim they’re too stressed by all their activities, homework, and community service w...

Indie Review Top Book Pick: Intensive Therapy

Transformation over twenty years in: INTENSIVE THERAPY: A NOVEL By Jeffrey Deitz

Rating:

IR Verdict:INTENSIVE THERAPY: A NOVEL is an excellent read with very good pacing; so much so that at times it’s difficult to put down. “Author Jeffrey Deitz, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst himself, uses language and terminology that is credible and illuminating.”

Book Reviews, IR Approved, Literary Fiction • Aug 07, 2015

“INTENSIVE THERAP...

From https://www.facebook.com/IntensiveThe...

July 2, 2015

Welcome to the page’s new interactive feature called “It’s your turn,” where you get to be the therapist. FYI, all the situations are hypotheticals; no one’s confidentiality is compromised. Here’s the situation: you’re treating a 17 year old girl with cutting behavior and poor impulse control who “fired” her last therapist for telling her mother that she (the patient) was planning to snort heroin. Today, she (the patient...

Thanks everyone your comments; it’s obvious that you really took time to think through and communicate your ideas. I’m thrilled to say that “It’s Your Turn” has a future on our page.

The comments in this case focused on two important and related questions:

1) What issues within this young woman’s mind that are driving her to ‘act out’?

… and

2) To what degree is a therapist obligated to intervene should he or she decide that the patient’s mental state renders him unable to control him or h...

Creativity for Better Performance ByJeffrey Deitz, MD
~ 3 min read

A long term-patient told a fascinating story a couple of weeks ago which points to the power of creativity in strengthening critical thinking. The person’s identity is well-disguised so no confidentiality is breached.

For several years I have been treating a young man (we’ll refer to him as Collin) with psychostimulants for chronic ADD and psychotherapy to address his perfectionism. We’re also working on finding a work en...

Inside "Inside "by Jeffrey Deitz MD

My wife and I spent rainy day watching the new Disney Pixar movie Inside Out, an animated feature that takes movie-goers inside the mind of an eleven year old girl named Riley. Riley is overwhelmed with anger and sadness when her family uproots her from an idyllic life in Minnesota and moves to the strange environment of urban San Francisco. To make matters worse, Riley’s father’s business begins to fail and the high cost of living necessitates living in a dreary fixer-upper. As if nothing else could go wrong, the moving van gets lost and Riley is disconnected from the comforts of home that might help ease the transition.
In the movie—and this is something that animation can present extremely effectively—the core of Riley’s inner life is represented as place within Riley’s mind aptly named Command Central. Five basic emotions, each embodied by a character, jockey for control: “Joy” (who looks and acts like a bossy Tinkerbell) is used to controlling of Riley, whose parents need to see her as Happy Girl. They either don’t get, or cannot accept, that Riley—like all youngsters—is a mixture of emotions.
This is a powerful and imaginative way to portray the relationship between a person’s outside, and what’s going on inside their deeper emotional life.
As a result of the abrupt change in Riley’s life, Joy—who is used to dominating Riley’s inner life—loses control. Up until this point in Riley’s emotional development Joy is the protagonist, who sees Sadness as an antagonist whose very existence is a threatens Riley’s emotional stability.
The dramatic tension in the movie arises as Joy recognizes the importance of Sadness (who looks and acts like Lucy Brown with a permanent puss), Anger, Disgust, and Fear, all of whom want their say in controlling Riley’s dreams and behavior. As Riley sinks into depression, Joy and Sadness become separated from Command Central, and Riley’s inner world—represented by islands of good coping such as friendship (Riley’s best friend from home makes her jealous when it looks like Riley can be easily replaced), athleticism (Riley’s an excellent ice-hockey player who loses her confidence and temper om the new hockey team), and family ties (Riley’s father misinterprets his daughter’s sullenness and punishes her for having a bad attitude), crumbles piece by piece. In effect, she loses herself.
What makes the movie ring true emotionally is Joy’s poignant realization that she needs Sadness if Riley is to come to terms with the emotional chaos she faces. What a paradox!—and one whose implication all children (and their parents) need to accept: that in order in to meet the challenges inherent in life’s travails, Joy and Sadness must learn not to just coexist, but to cooperate. Without them, adaptation to change becomes impossible.
Long time ago in 1914, Sigmund Freud penned a classic paper entitled Mourning and Melancholia, in which he took up the subject of grief and depression. Although his theory of depression was misguided, he was right on in recognizing that grief—the feelings of sadness about the loss of a deeply cherished, unambivalent attachment (or in Riley’s case several attachments)—is as central to mental well-being as is scab formation to wound healing. Grief hurts; but it also heals. To avoid the pain of grief is to invite depression and despair. In Inside Out, it is only when Joy lets Sadness take the lead in a moving scene where Riley and her parent share their sadness with each other, that Riley’s psyche reconstitutes, and we see Riley calling on her Inside strengths, to give her confidence that she can meet the challenges coming from without.

Jeffrey Deitz MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Connecticut and New York City. For years Deitz wrote for the professional about psychotherapy; he also conducted seminars at international conferences about the role of psychotherapy in treating PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. In 2010, he began publishing in the New York Times and Huffington Post about sports psychology, the power of psychotherapy, and the public health risk of sleep deprivation. Deitz’s first novel, Intensive Therapy: A Novel, a fiction about the life-saving relationship between a psychiatrist and patient has recently been published. For more information visit: www.jeffreydeitz.com.

Inside Inside Out Jeffrey Deitz MD

My wife and I spent rainy day watching the new Disney Pixar movie Inside Out, an animated feature that takes movie-goers inside the mind of an eleven year old girl named Riley. Riley is overwhelmed with anger and sadness when her family uproots her from an idyllic life in Minnesota and moves to the strange environment of urban San Francisco. To make matters worse, Riley’s father’s business begins to fail and the high cost of living necessitates living in a...

Having had the good fortune of taking writer and teacher extraordinaire William Zinsser’s last class on memoire at The New School, it is a privilege to reprint this review of his classic book On Writing Well which I posted recently on Goodreads.

Full of wit, humor and wisdom, Bill Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well belongs next to every writer’s Elements of Style. After digesting Bill’s crisply-written prose, you’ll look at every sentence differently, and remove all the little words that do nothing but expand the word count and distract the reader.

I think of Bill as a literary economist; or maybe a gardener whose word-pruning allows the story to blossom, unstrangled by those little weedy words that are used so often they’re taken for granted.

Whenever editing, I think of Bill’s exhortations to “Spend your adjectives and adverbs wisely.” Why write, “‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said apologetically,'” when, “‘I’m sorry,” Joe apologized,'” works even better? Why “look up to someone” when you can “admire them?”

And his reprint of a review about James Michner’s prose had me howling for hours. On Writing Well is as educative as it is entertaining. No matter whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, every chapter is relevant. And if you read it years ago, the updated section about Email is more timely than ever.

The post Goodreads Review: William Zinsser’s On Writing Well appeared first on Jeffrey Deitz.

Friends, familyand patientsoften talk aboutwhat they want to be. “I want to be rich. I want to write a book. I want to be a better parent.” Children areoften asked by their parents, “What do you want to be when you grow up? That’s the wrong question. A betterwaywould betoinquire, “What do you want to become when you grow up.”It is so easy toget involved in waning to be thatone loses sight of the processing of becoming. For if people don’t find the joy in becoming they’ll never be who they wan...