Family Dysfunction and Mental Health Blog

This blog covers mental health, drugs and psychotherapy with an emphasis on the role of family dysfunction in behavioral problems. It discusses how family systems issues have been denigrated in psychiatry in favor of a disease model for everything by a combination of greedy pharmaceutical and managed care insurance companies, naïve and corrupt experts, twisted science, and desperate parents who want to believe that their children have a brain disease to avoid an overwhelming sense of guilt.

About Me

David M. Allen M.D.: Memphis, TN, United States; David M. Allen, M.D. is the author of the self-help book, Coping with Critical, Demanding, and Dysfunctional Parents: Powerful Strategies to Help Adult Children Maintain Boundaries and Stay Sane. He is also the author How Dysfunctional Families Spur Mental Disorders, and co-editor of Groupthink in Science. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and the former Director of Psychiatric Residency Training at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, a position he held for 16 years. Additionally, he has done research into personality disorders and is a psychotherapy theorist. He is the author of three books for psychotherapists: A Family Systems Approach to Individual Psychotherapy, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy with Borderline Patients: an Integrated Approach, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is a former associate editor of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration. He received his medical degree from U.C. San Francisco, and his psychiatric residency at the Los Angeles County - University of Southern California Medical Center.

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Family Dysfunction and Mental Health Blog

Pages

My New Self Help Book is Out Today!

Book Review: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Another Pharma Trick for Overstating the Effectiveness of their Drugs: The Will Rogers Phenomenon

Differences in the Size and Activity levels of Brain Parts: Long-Term Potentiation

Book Review: Judas by Astrid Holleeder

The Relationship between Marital Problems and Family of Origin Dysfunction

The Amazing Complexity of Environmental Research in Psychiatry

Words Do Matter in Psychiatry

A new interview of Dr. Allen by life coach Delaney Kay

60 Minutes on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Reading Between the Lines