Free Online Training Module Using Normalizing Within CBT for Psychosis


Ron Unger is a licensed cognitive behavioral therapist whose understanding of psychosis I greatly appreciate and admire. His writing has helped me enormously in “normalizing” the way I think about my own relative, calming ME down, and increasing MY hope for my son’s recovery. Ron has recently created an online course in “how to talk to people with psychotic experience in a way that allows them to calm down, feel more grounded, access coping skills, and increase hope for recovery.” His course was designed with professionals in mind, but it is also open to service users, ex service users or survivors, and family members.

  • Free Online Training Module Using Normalizing Within CBT for Psychosis
  • Use the link above to signup to get access to a free online training in how to talk to people with psychotic experience in a way that allows them to calm down, feel more grounded, access coping skills, and increase hope for recovery. By signing up here, you will also be added to an email list to be notified about upcoming events like the release of the complete online training in CBT for Psychosis, which will include CE credits for US professionals. You can unsubscribe from this list at any time.


Please read more about the background for this course. I have reprinted an excerpt from Ron’s Mad in America post below. (If the link above doesn’t work, there is further information in the comments section of Ron’s post.)

How Can Professionals Learn to Reduce Fears of Psychotic Experiences Rather Than Emphasize Pathology?

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July 19, 2014

The kinds of experiences we call psychotic are often incredibly scary: people feel they are being persecuted by strange forces, or that their brains have been invaded by demons or riddled with implants from the CIA . . . the list of possible fears is endless, and often horrifying.
While standard mental health approaches counter many of these fears, they often create new fears of a different variety.   People diagnosed with schizophrenia for example may be led to believe that they will definitely be mentally ill for life, that this illness controls what happens in their brain and not themselves, and that there are few or even no alternatives if drugs don’t work for them.
This can be extremely demoralizing.  Oryx Cohen graphically described his own reaction to the standard mental health psychoeducation he received after his first psychotic experience:  he reported it made him feel he had lost his membership in the human race!  As a result of it, he felt caught up in a pathologized understanding of himself, he lost his expectation of being capable of learning from experience and shaping his future, and he now felt defined by his abnormality rather than by his humanity.
Despite − rather than because − of what the mental health system taught him to believe, Oryx later discovered other ways of understanding his experience, and he made a full recovery.  But wouldn’t it be better if people like Oryx were helped to find a more humanistic understanding of themselves within the mental health system and from the very beginning of treatment?
Wouldn’t it be helpful if professionals were trained in an approach that could help people shift away from both dangerous psychotic ways of thinking and also away from the sometimes equally terrifying explanations which emphasize pathology?
Further, what if such an approach could also build a foundation for learning effective coping skills, and also help a person build hope and a road map toward a possible full recovery?
And wouldn’t it be nice if this approach was already proven to be “evidence based,” so that both people learning the methods, and their supervisors and colleagues could have confidence in its effectiveness and safety?
Fortunately, at least one such approach exists, and it is called CBT for psychosis.  This method allows professionals to collaborate with people in developing understandings of their psychotic experiences that neither minimize problems nor emphasize pathology, but instead help make sense of extreme human experiences in a way that is grounded in more everyday human experience and issues.
Read the rest here.

Is cognitive-behavioral therapy really all that good for schizophrenia?

I am being deliberately provocative with my title. What prompted today’s post is an article about careers for the coming decade. Cognitive-behavioral therapist is one of them, the reasons given below.

The Mental Health Parity Act requires that mental health now be covered as fully as physical health, but many insurers will cover only cognitive-behavioral therapy because it’s both shorter and, on average, more efficacious than traditional psychotherapy. Learn more: Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

My blog is USA-centric, even though I don’t live there, for the reasons that the USA tends to drive the way the world sees things, for better or for worse. Is it throwing the baby out with the bath water by favoring CBT over other kinds of psychotherapy when it comes to schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is not garden-variety depression. It’s not about coping with a dead-end job or having your wife leave you or your dog die. Schizophrenia is the larger than life mother of all existential blow-outs. People who come under its influence deserve the best psychotherapy from the most skillful therapists, which may not be cognitive-behavioral therapy and probably isn’t in most cases. I don’t want to rain on CBTs parade. I just think that schizophrenia is more complex than what CBT can deliver.

Here’s another viewpoint about this from Psychminded.co.uk. … there are radical approaches in psychotherapy that are especially vulnerable to state regulation, approaches that really do provide the space to speak freely. Some approaches like ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ are unfortunately compatible with state regulation because there is an assumption in them that there is a correct and incorrect way of thinking about the world.

People experiencing a crisis of schizophrenia do not think about the world conventionally, and I wonder really how effective CBT is in helping them grapple with their myths and heroic struggles. CBT may be cost effective for governments, but will it really up to the job of helping people in severe existential angst get on in a conventional world?

Getting there sooner rather than later

Another reason why I like the book, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure by Chris Prentiss is because he maintains that if you want to get to the bottom of your problems, the multiple therapy approach is best and it works faster. Many people can go for years seeing the same therapist and never become well or else not well enough. This may be because they are undergoing the wrong therapy or perhaps because they do not have a good rapport with the therapist.

Since the goal for everyone should be to resolve their problems as quickly as possible, people should be free to pick and choose their therapy and their therapist, and use several different therapy approaches. People should be free to choose but in reality they are not, as I have found trying to ask Chris’s doctors for the use of other therapies while he was under their care. Just because psychiatry is slowly opening the door to acknowledging the value of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for schizophrenia doesn’t mean that CBT should be the only therapy employed. CBT may not work for you.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be slow going, so I have introduced Chris to Family Constellation Therapy, sound therapy including the Tomatis Method, and Emotional Freedom Technique. I am of the strong opinion that schizophrenia needs to be solved at the intuitive level. You literally have to become a different emotional being inside your body in order for your sense of self to develop.