Scott Smith LCSW

04/12/2025

“In addition to your four to five years of hard-graft training, you also have to collect enough supervised client hours to qualify, usually in an unpaid work placement. It’s expensive too, especially when you add in your own personal therapy (which, to be frank, is probably the best investment you’ll ever make anyway). Fortunately most programmes are part-time, and many people manage it alongside work, at least for a while. By the end of the first year you’ll be in a position to make a judgement about whether or not it’s for you. If not, it’s not a waste: the emotional intelligence you’ll have acquired and the personal growth you’ll have achieved will stay with you even if you don’t want to make psychotherapy your day job.

“Having been through the wringer myself, I can attest that it was totally worth it. It’s just over 25 years since I rocked up for my first day of training, and it really did change my life; I never doubt that my work is fulfilling. The best bit? The learning doesn’t stop at graduation; whatever healing and meaning I’m able to foster in my clients, I get back in spades. And one last thing - I’m only a little bit less crazy than I was when I started - and if you decide to embark on training yourself, you’ll see why that’s no bad thing.”

Everyone wants to be a psychotherapist now. But should they? https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/everyone-wants-to-be-a-psychotherapist-now-but-should-they

How many times have you heard someone say 'I'm thinking of retraining as a therapist' this year? As the professional ranks swell with new recruits, Dr. Aaron Balick explains what it really takes

01/12/2025

"A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person: you're giving to the relationship. And if you realize you are in the relationship just as the other person is, then it becomes life building, a life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you're giving to somebody else. . .

This is the challenge of a marriage. What a beautiful thing is a life together as growing personalities, each helping the other to flower, rather than just moving into the standard archetype. It's a wonderful moment when people can make the decision to be something quite astonishing and unexpected, rather than cookie-mold products."
- Joseph Campbell

From An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms p. 127

01/12/2025

“But this merger was only imaginable once both autism and ADHD were diluted. Autism, once a discrete developmental disorder, expanded into a spectrum with lowered thresholds and blurred boundaries. A non-verbal child and a socially fluent adult with mild sensory discomfort can now share the same diagnosis. ADHD underwent the same widening: the label applies equally to a hyperactive seven-year-old bouncing off furniture and a quiet, dreamy, high-functioning professional recalling childhood forgetfulness. Categories meant to differentiate now absorb opposites, and the range of presentations has become so broad that it is used to justify inventing new ones.”

AuDHD and the Death of Psychiatric Differential Diagnosis https://open.substack.com/pub/hannahspier/p/audhd-and-the-death-of-psychiatric?r=32275k&utm_medium=ios

A breakdown of the three pillars used to justify "AuDHD" — comorbidity, genetics, and lived experience.

27/11/2025

This is the best Internet listicle I’ve ever seen on this topic. I imagine it’ll p**s off some therapists (and some clients), but IYKYK…

50 Therapy Red Flags

Warning signs you may not be in expert hands.

24/11/2025

Researchers Colin Shaw and Daniel Longman argue that for nearly all of human history, stress came in short bursts, mostly in the form of predators popping out of the bush to obliterate us. If you were fortunate enough to survive, that was generally the end of your peak stress levels for the foreseeable future.

Now, there are lions everywhere. The lions are traffic jams, constant notifications, smartphones, etc. Our bodies respond to all of this exactly the way they were programmed to—by panicking like you’re about to be pounced on by a beast. And since there’s no off switch, we’re just marinating in stress hormones that are firing off nearly 24/7.

A new study warns evolution mismatch stress is breaking our bodies as modern life overwhelms an ancient stress response.

24/11/2025

Our findings show that when we see someone being touched, our brains quickly interpret what that touch might feel like. This fits with the idea that the brain briefly "mirrors" what it sees in others, simulating their experience as if it were our own.

This rapid, embodied response may form the basis of empathy, a process that helps us to recognize danger and connect socially.

Some people actually feel sensations such as tingling, pressure or pain when they watch others being touched – a phenomenon known as "vicarious touch". Understanding how the brain instantly decodes observed touch may help explain why seeing an image of injury or pain can make some people physically cringe while others remain unaffected.

Our next step is to explore how these rapid brain responses differ between people who experience vicarious touch and those who do not, which could help explain individual differences in empathy.

In the long run, understanding how the brain sees and interprets touch could help explain problems with empathy, improve therapies that use touch or body awareness, and enhance immersion and social connection in digital environments such as virtual reality.

Touch is fundamental to how we perceive our own bodies and connect with others.

22/11/2025

“Concept creep.”It's the idea that the labels we use to describe mental health are expanding and being applied to an ever-wider array of human behaviours.

If everything is traumatic, is anything traumatic? The power of labels - ABC listen https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/if-everything-is-traumatic-is-anything-traumatic/105872096

We've come a long way in how we talk about mental health. But while diagnoses like depression and anxiety can empower people to seek help and support — they also influence how we see ourselves and how others might see us, too. Today, we investigate 'concept creep.' It's the idea that the labels we...

22/11/2025

20/11/2025

19/11/2025

A combination of confusion, contradiction and loneliness – when Sam finally meets some of his online friends in the flesh, his joy is heartbreaking – suffuses every interaction James has with these young men. It is clear that none of them are evil or anything close to it. But they are adrift in a world that is changing in ways it is easy for them to believe are not for the better, and vulnerable to predators. They may not be being groomed by more powerful men for s*xual reasons, but there are plenty of other types of exploitation, many of which make them even more of a potential threat to others’ happiness and safety than they are to their own.

Mortified documentarian James Blake meets young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their s*x drives

17/11/2025

“Some of us don’t understand what it is inside us that means we cannot be in the outside world, or be with other people, in an ordinary way. We haven’t yet worked through whatever traumas or unconscious conflicts keep us trapped in the past. We don’t have the capacity to digest our own feelings, so we cannot bear, never mind relate to, the feelings of others. Sometimes, if we cannot tolerate whatever emotions spontaneously develop within us, we fend off these feelings with screens or drugs or s*x or gambling or other self-harm, or work or sabotaging work or abuse of loved ones, and things get far more dangerous.

“Without psychoanalytic help, many of us are stuck in our own ordinary and devastating narcissism, unable to relate to ourselves or to others in meaningful ways. If we are blind to what is going on inside, we can’t look outwards to find solace and meaning in community, in the natural world, in work and in love. Meaningful therapy doesn’t indulge narcissism; it lights the way out of it.”

Are you stuck in ordinary - but devastating - narcissism? There is a way out - Guardian Australia https://apple.news/ATM8dSWP6TrmYSBwosTnSqw

Meaningful therapy offers a path past our worst impulses. We should be fighting for it to be available for everyone

17/11/2025