If a therapist is feeling insecure in therapy, a lot of therapists will try to sort of push that aside to try to do the therapy. Instead, we would ask people to get with that feeling of insecurity, because after all, the client is being asked to do the same thing. It has a kind of a quality of two human beings in the same situation, really, working through these psychological processes. And yeah, you hired me; I'm working for you as a therapist. But I'm not up here and you're down there. And what you're struggling with, at other times and with other areas I'm struggling with.

The definition of happiness being very emotion-oriented - the problem is that there's too many quick and dirty ways to chase that in ways that end up being unhelpful to people. If you just have another martini or even more severe substances. But commercial culture and our media is constantly encouraging us to think that if we feel good we live well. We're only too happy to sell you goods and services from the dancing oivoids and the pill you can take, or the trips or the cars or the clothes or the women that you can get with - whatever that is that will give you the quick route to that.

I want good science, and I want it to be realistically marketed. I wouldn't like only two countries on the planet that allow pharmaceutical companies to market directly to people, New Zealand and the United States. It ought to be better regulated. And when it's presented to people, it ought to be presented in a way that's realistic. For example, often people will prescribe antidepressant medications, and we'll say, you have a brain disease; you'll have to be on these medications permanently. There is no biological marker for depression. It's not true that we know that it's a brain disease.

Let's take something like antidepressant medications. There's decent science saying it has an effect, but it's shockingly small after you control for penetration of the blind, people knowing that they're getting the active pills versus sugar pills, if you use an active control. It's probably only a few points. But it's a multi, multibillion-dollar industry. And by the way, has huge side effects. 40 percent of the people taking them have significant sexual side effects. And that's just one. A single antidepressant medication can be worth a billion dollars to a company.

Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie.

It's pretty clear in how things are moving in empirically supported treatments that we're going to be speaking to the culture in a different voice. It's going to have some echoes of some of the deeper clinical and spiritual and religious traditions that had wisdom in it. If we're not going to get there through religious means and things of that kind, we're going to have to find a way to put it in the culture in a different way, because we need something right now other than yet another cable shoutcast or yet another Internet Web page showing us the cellulite on the actress's rear end.

The mental cognitive processes that we're targeting are ones that narrow human beings' repertoire and make it harder for them to learn to be more flexible, to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. We can have something to help with in areas like child development or organizations and schools, or maybe even how peoples interact with each other, one to the other. We've taken the work into things like prejudice and stigma, because if we can't solve that we have planes flying into buildings. So it applies broadly because anywhere that a human mind goes these processes go.