The positive psychology movement is surely gaining momentum. In a recent discussion with two of my colleagues we joked that positive psychology’s really about a type of recovery from negative thinking.

This got me wondering if a 12-step process might be worth identifying. So guess what…? I think it is.

Here is what I propose for the 12 steps of positive psychology.

About a month ago I attended a wedding in Sonoma, California. Before the ceremony, I made random small talk with one of the other guests. We covered occupation and connection to the bride and groom, moved on to comments about the beautiful setting, and then parted ways to continue with the obligatory mingling process.

Strangers’ responses to learning that I’m a therapist are varied, and it’s not uncommon for them to be loaded in some way or another. “You’re analyzing everything I say, aren’t you?” many people joke. “Mmhmm,” I’m tempted to respond, with a raised eyebrow and Mona Lisa grin. “Oh,” others murmur, before the conversation trails off into stilted silence and the person starts surreptitiously glancing over my shoulder for someone else to rescue them.

The wedding guest’s response to learning I’m a therapist was of the “Oh, that’s cool” variety. I didn’t think anything of it. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t really “analyze” anyone, let alone people I’ve just met.

Over the years, we’ve been involved in many projects to bring better online resources and communities to mental health and behavioral health professionals.

So we’re pleased to formally introduce the newest member to the Psych Central family — Psych Central Professional, a new resource devoted exclusively to mental health and behavioral health professionals.

What will you find on Psych Central Professional? All the rich goodness you’ve come to expect from Psych Central — but targeted content specifically designed for the needs of clinicians and other behavioral health professionals.

Learn more inside…

Miami and Medicare fraud. The two go hand-in-hand like a baby in a basket.

So it probably wasn’t the brightest idea for Lawrence Duran and Marianella Valera to set up a company called American Therapeutic to run a chain of seven mental health clinics in South Florida and Orlando that duped Medicare into paying out $87 million during the past decade.

It probably didn’t help that, in order to perpetuate their fraud against U.S. taxpayers, they held “charting parties” — gatherings where “they would falsify the medical records of beneficiaries to make it look like they needed therapy when they actually didn’t,” according to the Miami Herald.

In the past week, both have been given huge prison sentences — 50 years for Lawrence Duran and 35 years for mental health counselor Marianelle Valera, who will be looking to be released from prison when she’s 75 years old.

Crime doesn’t pay, not even in mental health.

It is an honor for me to publish the following piece by Ronald Pies, M.D., professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Tufts University School of Medicine, because I find him to be one of the most fascinating psychiatrists in the Northern Hemisphere (I’m thinking the Southern is full of kooks).

He always comes up with an intriguing angle on psychotherapy, antidepressants, the psychology of wellness … you name it, and he — like me — loves the intersection of faith and medicine, as is evident in his book, “Becoming a Mensch.” So, here’s a curious piece about why the we might blame the Puritans for the anti-med movement in the US. Let me know your thoughts, because I know that you will have some after reading this piece. I should probably also tell you that he wrote the foreword to “The Pocket Therapist.” I was once yelled at by a reader for not disclosing that … whatever.

These are not good times for Prozac and its progeny. In the popular media, the use of antidepressants has been likened to swallowing “expensive Tic-Tacs”, while in professional journals, the effectiveness of these medications has been challenged, if not discounted. And even a casual Google search under the terms, “Antidepressants damage” turns up thousands of websites and articles claiming that these drugs cause brain damage, induce suicide, or lead to “addiction.” Yikes!

Time is running out to vote for some of your favorite SXSW 2012 Interactive panel ideas through the SXSW panel picker (Friday at midnight is the deadline). Yes, you need to register a free account in order to vote, but it takes only a minute to do so.

I’ve organized a panel again for consideration, as have some other psychologists and professionals. I’ve highlighted three panels I’d like you to vote a big thumbs-up on, if you have a minute today. While people’s votes only constitute 30 percent of how a panel idea is chosen to present at SXSW Interactive, it’s an important part of the process that helps the organizers make the tough decisions.

The panel I’ve proposed is about online therapy. But not your everyday kind of online therapy…

Coming as a surprise to more than a few mental health professionals, a new study out today suggests that bipolar disorder is often missed in patients who present only with major depression. The study examined 5,635 adults seen at community and hospital psychiatry departments in a number of different countries.

The discrepancy was reported because of the use of “bipolarity specifier criteria” that are broader than the DSM-IV criteria, the standard for diagnosis of mental disorders by mental health professionals.

Using the broader bipolar criteria developed by the researchers found an additional 31 percent of patients who could have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

So what’s really going on here? Are professionals really “missing” bipolar disorder? Or have the researchers stacked the deck in this study simply to suggest it is so?

Running a successful private practice can be increasing difficult in today’s competitive environment, especially …

Some of you may be following the development of the forthcoming fifth revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the …

My boyfriend, an avid golfer, always says that golf is mainly a game of the brain. That is, your mental state has a lot to do with your success on the course.

And, not surprisingly, it’s like that with other sports. Psychology can give players an edge. As Ludy Benjamin and David Baker write in From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America, “Indeed, in so many instances when physical talents seem evenly matched, it is the mental factors that will make the difference in winning or losing.”

That’s where sport psychology — also sometimes referred to as sports psychology — comes in. So how did sport psychology start and evolve?

Stop the presses! Randall Stross over at the Digital Domain at The New York Times has just discovered online therapy.

Acknowledging that the idea has been around for a long time, Stross begins the piece by digging up an American Journal of Psychiatry article from 38 years ago, written by Thomas Dwyer describing one of the first telepsychiatry systems ever devised (at Massachusetts General Hospital). How quaint. (Confusing telepsychiatry/telehealth systems — which have been around for decades utilizing private networks and closed video systems, and that are well-researched — with online therapy is a common mistake made by journalists who explore this area.)

The hook, apparently, is to highlight yet some more companies who’ve decided to take the plunge into exploiting this modality:

Today, even with the rise of the Internet, virtual therapy hasn’t been widely adopted. But several start-up companies are trying to make Dr. Dwyer’s decades-old vision a workaday reality.

Despite having little new to say or to add to this topic — for instance, where’s the consumer demand for these services? — I found the article somewhat interesting nonetheless. If for no other reason, to point out how these articles all follow the same tired template: offer a unique hook, point out the opportunity, quote the research, highlight a new service offering a solution, quote some naysayers, and end with a tie-in to your opening hook.

Therapists, psychologists and even psychiatrists are dotting the online landscape with websites, blogs and even with their activity on social networking sites!  Has a new norm in our field been established?

It’s been almost two years since the first post in my Psych Central series on the paradigm shift occurring for therapists in how we present ourselves on the web.  In October 2009, in Psychotherapists Unmasked on the Internet, I used an exchange between my psychiatrist father (of 45 years) and myself, a new Marriage and Family Therapist, to demonstrate the clash of eras and belief systems occurring.  He had given me a hard time about putting my picture up on my website several years back but in the end asked me to help him figure out how to get a website up for himself (sheepish grin).

About 6 months later, in Therapists, Social Networking and Blogging, Oh My! I observed that the “wave of the therapist new world order” was crashing down as demonstrated by a surge in website creation, article writing on topics related to therapy, emotional, mental and relationship health — as well as therapist involvement in social networking.  I offered some pros and cons for the above mentioned.