For me, the term "psychotherapy" is limiting. It implies that we work with mind and emotions, but excludes the body and pays scant attention to the spirit, soul, and broader environmental issues.

Symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggression, alcohol or drug use, are responses to physical and emotional pain that has its roots in traumatic experiences from childhood and later in life.

Effective psychotherapy works because the therapist continues to grow as a person and as a healer.

Psychotherapy is a practice that many different professional disciplines engage. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors and increasingly offer medication and do less and less actual therapy.

I've been a therapist for more than forty years and certainly there is a place for "wise elders" in the healing process. But most people, most of the time, can heal themselves and those they love, with the help of their family, friends, and community.

Energy healing is based on the supposition that illness results from disturbances in the body's energies and energy fields and can be addressed via interventions into those energies and energy fields.

My own work on depression demonstrated that men and women often have different symptoms, with males often becoming more irritable, angry, and aggressive when they are depressed, while women show the more inward symptoms such as sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness.