PsiAN Speaks: Enrico Gnaulati PhD

Editor’s note: The Forum will periodically post video interviews of authors, researchers, academics, and policymakers under the heading PsiAN Speaks. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect PsiAN’s official positions.

In this first installment of PsiAN Speaks, Dr Bevin Campbell interviews clinical psychologist and PsiAN Advisor Enrico Gnaulati PhD. Dr. Gnaulati’s book Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care is vital reading for anyone who cares about the future of therapies of depth, insight, and relationship. His book is so essential that PsiAN provided a copy to everyone who attended its national conference in December 2019. With his characteristic humor and thoughtfulness, Dr. Gnaulati speaks about how talk therapy helps, the economic and social forces that have eroded access to high-quality mental health treatment, the problems with therapy-by-manual, the psychotherapy drop-out crisis, and why the personhood of the therapist matters so much to the process of change. The running time is 53 minutes.

Enrico Gnaulati PhD has published numerous journal and magazine articles. His work has been featured on Spectrum News, Al Jazeera America, China Global Television Network, a host of public radio stations across America, and online at the Atlantic, Salon, The New Yorker, Huffington Post, Maclean’s, Psychology Today and Psychotherapy Networker. Nationally recognized as a reformer of mental health policy and practice, he has published two books: Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care (Beacon Press, 2018) and Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Beacon Press, 2013). He has also written articles in top psychology journals challenging “evidence-based psychotherapy” on ethical grounds: as failing a public who desires from psychotherapy more than mere symptom reduction through short-term, protocol-driven technique. Dr. Gnaulati is currently building on his recently published journal articles outlining an existential approach to couples therapy to write a new book with the working title: Couples that Last: Breaking the Love Code..

Bevin Campbell PsyD is a psychologist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York.