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Schizophrenia is a very disabling psychiatric illness affecting about 2 to 3 million Americans. Contrary to popular perception, it has nothing to do with a "split personality." Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder involving "positive" and "negative" symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing visions that aren't real), delusions (fixed false beliefs), and disorganized thinking or speech. A recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Paul Grant, Aaron Beck, and their colleagues found that a modified version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a specific type of talk therapy, can produce clinically significant improvement in patients with schizophrenia. Importantly, significant improvement was seen in certain negative symptoms-apathy/avolition (lack of drive)-as well as in positive symptoms. These results are impressive, especially considering that the participants had been ill for an average of 18 years and suffered from severe symptoms. In this study, study participants were divided into two groups. One group received CBT in addition to "standard treatment," which included treatment with antipsychotic medications. The other group received standard treatment alone. CBT has been shown to be effective in a variety of psychiatric illnesses. It uses pragmatic techniques to help a person correct inaccurate or dysfunctional thoughts and emotions by promoting critical comparison of those thoughts with observable facts. For example, if a person believes that he/she is "doing absolutely nothing," one CBT technique would be to encourage the person to keep a detailed diary of daily activities. The therapist would later review this diary with the patient and facts would be compared to perceptions. Homework assignments would include strategies to increase productive activities. In the study mentioned above, the researchers focused CBT "on identifying and promoting concrete goals for improving quality of life and

A new form of therapy makes use of virtual therapists, who have the capacity to read facial expressions, vocal patterns, body posture, and speech tones. Cleo Stiller, host of Asking For A Friend, said in a video, "[The virtual therapist]'s also interpreting my speech in real time. Am I using positive or negative language? [the therapist] adjusts her questions based off of my responses." The benefit of virtual therapy is that it removes some of the stigmas associated with "seeing a shrink," and allows people to feel more open with their feelings and problems... at least, that's the idea.

Check out this article to learn more about the impacts of talk therapy, both on a psychological and neurological level. This article also delves into the specifics of psychodynamic therapy, which targets introspective thinking and its application to our daily life.

This article shows the importance of music therapy practice when focusing on communication skills with a speech pathologist within a pediatric rehabilitation setting. There is a case about a kid named Sam who is an eleven year old boy who sustained a severe garrotting injury. The article goes over how the individual music therapy program helped him to maximize his potential and motivation in achieving his communication goals, while speech pathology provided therapeutic intervention and outcomes while he re-learned his speech skills.

Check out this article to learn more about the impacts of talk therapy in relation to psychotropic medications, in addition to the controversy that often comes with the supposed effectiveness of talk therapy.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Why does psychotherapy favorably compare to medication in treating depression? One reason may be rooted in the evolutionary origins of depression. Scholars suggest humans may become depressed to help us focus attention on a problem that might cause someone to fall out of step with family, friends, clan or the larger society-an outcast status that, especially in Paleolithic times, would have meant an all-but-certain tragic fate. Depression, by this account, came about as a mood state to make us think long and hard about behaviors that may have caused us to become despondent because some issue in our lives is socially problematic. Steven D. Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, explores the implications of helping a patient come to grips with the underlying causes of a depression-which is the goal of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), and is also in line with an evolutionary explanation. The anodyne effects of an antidepressant, by contrast, may divert a patient from engaging in the reflective process for which depression evolved-a reason perhaps that psychotherapy appears to produce a more enduring effect than antidepressants. Hollon notes that depression has a purpose--it spurs rumination about complex social problems, and that CBT can expedite rumination and make it more effective. He states, "For most people, depression motivates them to think more deliberately about the causes of their problems and the solutions they can apply. In most instances in our ancestral past this worked well enough; most depressions remit spontaneously even in the absence of treatment. Cognitive therapy, at the least, hurries the process along and, at the most, helps unstick that subset of individuals who get stuck making negative ascriptions about themselves, typically about personal competence or lovability."

Check out this article to see how Psychologists use specific words and phrases to get their patients to open up and feel comfortable. This article goes into detail about how language helps people and why therapy can be good for someone.

interactive introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy (self-talk). Has lots of self-quizzes and coaching.

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, are treating stroke patients who have little or no spontaneous speech by associating melodies with words and phrases. "Music, and music-making, is really a very special form of a tool or an intervention that can be used to treat neurological disorders, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel and Harvard University.

Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disorder, and current treatments may not do enough to address the personal suffering, family burden, and cost to society linked to the illness. But a landmark new study finds that a treatment combining talk therapy and low-dose medication is more effective than traditional medication-only treatment. The actual study can be found at this link: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.15050632.

Listening to music can be therapeutic but making music can literally be a form of therapy for deteriorating brains. Music shows to be an effective in helping long-term depression and dementia.

hour-long video of a small presentation at UNM

Language describes reality. That is its primary, most self-evident function. We use words to define for ourselves, and communicate to others, what's going on out there. Less evident, but almost as potent, is language's role in shaping reality. The meaning of what is out there changes with the words we choose to describe it.