Disordered characters tend to think that everybody else is as dishonest as they frequently are. So, they often tell themselves that they should do their best to outwit others before others have a chance to outwit them.

Disordered characters, especially predators, don’t really want us to know who they really are. They tell us what they think we want to hear so that we will think them more like us.

Neurotics have a big sense of right and wrong, set high standards for themselves, and carry the proverbial world on their shoulders. In contrast, disordered characters have a remarkably impaired, immature, or underdeveloped conscience. In some cases, conscience can be absent altogether.

Is psychotherapy about “cases” to be explained, or about individual persons who need and benefit from understanding? In this review of an article by psychotherapist Janet L. Etzi, we look at therapy and counselling as a complex interaction based on understanding the client as a human phenomenon, an interaction that is informed by both the client’s and the therapist’s emotions and thought processes.

Provocative Therapy turns all accepted wisdom about therapy on its head. Here is a therapy in which the therapist makes fun of the client’s problems, blows them up out of all proportion and suggests crazy and surreal solutions seemingly off the top of their heads. So why does it seem to be effective?

Compassion meditation produces physical effects in the brain, “proving” in terms of Western science that an Eastern spiritual practice “works”. Are compassion and empathy skills which can be developed through meditation, or is this missing the point of a spiritual experience?

The issue of self-harm is gaining a higher profile, in the UK at least, but it still remains to some extent a hidden and misunderstood problem, as evidenced by the stereotype of a teenage girl cutting her arms in a dark bedroom.