Presentation -- 1

I've been busy. It has been much more difficult than I ever thought with this unstructured schedule  for me to know where I am and what I'm supposed to do next.  Time fills up quickly, and often far in advance because many people think that I'n not doing much, and therefore they think I could be available to do stuff for them.

Also, many more of my friends aren't doing much any more so they are now available for us to get together and try to figure out a way to be relevant.

Yes, I still work three days a month.  In fact I am going to work tomorrow and I have a very full day. I will be seeing people who feel that their time with me is valuable and well-spent. For most of them, I can see that their lives are improving. Perhaps I am part of that process.

But also, during this time, I am putting together a presentation to give at the fall convention of our Psychological Association.   I am not a very widely published psychologist.  Most of my work has been seeing patients, but every four or five years I get the urge, and a strong urge it is, to tell my profession that most of them are headed in the wrong direction, and this presentation will be more of the same.

But, I've been right before and I'm right this time.

I have spoken in the past, beginning in 1993, about how the world is changing and we are not keeping up.  The insights and methodologies of the vast majority of mental health professionals is both inefficient and often ineffective.  Psychotherapy can work very well for many people, but the process can, and often does, take years, or even forever. There is not enough time or people available to even take a chip out of the huge block of psychological and emotional difficulties that are created by the kind of world we live in now.

Technological and medical research has done a fantastic job of finding ways to treat, and sometimes cure, many of the worst medical conditions that confront humans, but emotional difficulties are so complex that few people know how to do more than target one or two specific symptoms.  But everyone has about eight to two hundred different difficulties facing them these days.  That's why progress is so difficult.

So, I'm working on the paper.  I hope to have time to explain some of it here.  I'm older now, so I have all the answers.  Stay tuned.