195 articles
Psychoanalytic review
The Psychoanalytic Review, founded 1913 by White and Jelliffe, is the first English-language psychoanalytic journal, official journal of NPAP since 1958, published quarterly by Guilford, editor Paul Marcus.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy
Psychodynamic psychotherapy: talking treatments derived from Freud's psychoanalysis exploring unconscious processes, early experience, and the therapy relationship; manualized short-term forms show equivalence to CBT in trials.
Psychological first aid
Psychological first aid (PFA) is supportive, non-intrusive assistance providing safety, calming, and practical help to people in the hours to weeks after disasters and emergencies.
Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler
Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler: retrospective psychiatric and psychoanalytic diagnoses of the dictator, from the 1940 Lancet debate and Langer's 1943 OSS profile to Redlich's 1999 medical review, the Pasewalk myth, and 2025 DNA claims.
Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the scientific study of mental disorders, their symptoms, etiology, diagnosis, and treatment, historically organized by DSM and ICD classifications and increasingly studied through dimensional frameworks such as HiTOP and RDoC.
Psychosexual disorder
Psychosexual disorder, also called psychosexual dysfunction, is a former DSM-III (1980) psychiatric category covering sexual dysfunctions, paraphilias, and gender identity conditions; ICD-11 (2022) replaced it with the chapter Conditions Related to Sexual Health.
Psychosocial intervention
A psychosocial intervention, also called a psychological intervention, is a non-drug approach such as therapy or support groups that targets the psychological and social dimensions of illness.
Psychosomatic medicine
Psychosomatic medicine: field studying psychological, behavioral, and social factors in disease; also called consultation-liaison psychiatry; Heinroth coined the term in 1818; US subspecialty since 2003.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, treats mental disorders through structured dialogue and psychological methods. Key approaches include CBT, psychodynamic, humanistic, and integrative therapies; overall effect size SMD 0.34, comparable to medication.
Psychotherapy, Imagery
Psychotherapy, imagery (MeSH D019018, guided imagery): use of imagined mental images as psychotherapy, spanning guided affective imagery, imagery rescripting, and imagery rehearsal therapy, applied to PTSD, anxiety, depression, and nightmares.
Ralph Crawshaw
Ralph Shelton Crawshaw (1921–2014) was a Portland, Oregon psychiatrist best known for his work with mentally ill and addicted physicians and for co-designing the Oregon Health Plan.
Ralph O. Wallerstein
Ralph O. Wallerstein (1922–2009) was a German-born American hematologist and internist, chief of clinical hematology at San Francisco General Hospital for nearly 30 years and a UCSF clinical professor.
Rational emotive behavior therapy
Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), created by Albert Ellis in 1955, is the pioneering cognitive behavior therapy using the ABC model of activating events, irrational beliefs, and consequences, renamed REBT in 1993.
Reality therapy
Reality therapy is a counseling and psychotherapy method developed by William Glasser, built on choice theory and the WDEP system of wants, doing, evaluation, and planning.
Research diagnostic criteria
The Research Diagnostic Criteria are explicit, symptom-based criteria for 25 psychiatric disorders, published in 1978 by Spitzer, Endicott, and Robins as the basis for DSM-III.
Rosenhan experiment
The Rosenhan experiment, or Thud experiment, was a 1973 Stanford study in which eight healthy pseudopatients were admitted to psychiatric hospitals and diagnosed as ill.
Rosy retrospection
Rosy retrospection, also called rosy retrospection bias, is the tendency to recall past events more fondly than they were actually evaluated while happening, first described by Mitchell and Thompson in 1994.
Routine outcome monitoring
Routine outcome monitoring, also called measurement-based care, is a mental health practice in which standardized symptom measures are administered repeatedly and fed back to guide treatment decisions.
Schema therapy
Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey Young in the 1990s, is an integrative psychotherapy targeting early maladaptive schemas and modes through limited reparenting, imagery rescripting, and chair work, studied mainly for personality disorders.
Serial-position effect
Serial-position effect: memory depends on an item's position in a sequence, with primacy (early items) and recency (late items) advantages over middle items, producing the U-shaped free-recall curve first quantified by Murdock in 1962.
Sex therapy
Sex therapy: a psychotherapy subspecialty treating sexual concerns like desire, arousal, and pain. Founded on Masters and Johnson's 1966–1970 behavioral work; AASECT offers voluntary certification requiring 90 hours sexuality training, 60 hours therapy training, and 50 supervision hours.
Sexual arousal disorder
Sexual arousal disorder, or female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD), is a sexual dysfunction of reduced genital and subjective arousal despite desire and stimulation; DSM-5 now classifies it as female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD), distinct from persistent genital arousal disorder.
Sexual fantasy
Sexual fantasy, also called erotic fantasy or sexual daydream, is imagined sexual content that arouses. Research shows few fantasies are rare; 68.8% report BDSM fantasies; only 1.7% of men with paraphilic fantasies feel distress.
Shirley Ardell Mason
Shirley Ardell Mason, aka Sybil, 1923-1998, Minnesota-born artist and psychiatric patient of Cornelia Wilbur, subject of the 1973 book Sybil; her 16-personality case was later shown to be largely fabricated.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis; born in Freiberg, Moravia, worked in Vienna, fled the Nazis in 1938, died in London; wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and Studies on Hysteria.
Silent treatment
Silent treatment: deliberate withholding of communication to punish, control, or avoid conflict; a dyadic form of ostracism studied by Kipling Williams, linked to pain, stonewalling, and relationship dissolution.
Somatic experiencing
Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter A. Levine, is a body-oriented trauma therapy using interoception, titration, and pendulation; first RCT (Brom 2017) showed large PTSD symptom reductions, but overall evidence remains preliminary.
Status quo bias
Status quo bias, coined by Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988), is the non-rational preference for keeping the current state or default option, explained by loss aversion, transition costs, and sunk costs, and documented in health plans, retirement saving, and organ donation.
Steve Pieczenik
Steve Pieczenik, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and hostage negotiator, later co-creator of Tom Clancy's Op-Center and Net Force novels, and an Infowars guest known for Sandy Hook and bin Laden conspiracy claims.
Suicide in the United Kingdom
Suicide in the United Kingdom: 7,147 deaths registered in 2024; England and Wales rate 11.4 per 100,000, male rate 17.6 versus female 5.7; coroner-certified with long registration delays; devolved prevention strategies in all four nations.