The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery
Staff Psychiatrist Kyle Shepard, DO, talks about psychoanalytically-based treatment at Austen Riggs.
Transcript
So, what might be distinctive about our approach compared to other forms of therapy? I mean this is hard to answer as I keep saying it's really individualized both for each treatment and for each therapist. We do as a group we are psychoanalytically based. So, one of the things that can mean is that we pay attention to what is not necessarily always at the tips of our awareness. So, not what's always conscious but what might be expressing itself unconsciously. So, for example, you might be engaging in some kind of behavior and it might have all kinds of meanings that you've never actually thought about and you've been expressing those meanings through behavior. Partly because you didn't have the words to say it. One of the things that's most serious could be behavior related to self-harm or behaviors around suicide that have many meanings to the person. What they need to express, what they need to communicate to others, but that they've never had the chance to put this into words before. They've never known how to put this into words before. So, this kind of translation can be a major part of what happens in people's therapy while they're here.
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