Three offices in New Jersey! Telehealth services are available. We now accept Aetna, Medicare, UnitedHealthcare, and Oxford with most providers. Contact us for more information.
by Margie Nichols What does the placebo effect have to do with psychotherapy – other than to cast doubt on its validity? The placebo effect is the tendency of people to get better if they think they’ve been given medicine or treatment to ‘cure’ them, even when all they’ve gotten is a sugar pill. …
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I’ve been watching media reports on kink ever since ‘Fifty Shades’ made the subject popular, and I ran across one of the more heinous recently, a blog by an educator named Judy Molland questioning whether the current trend of college campuses to develop BDSM support organizations, in the manner of LGBTQ…
by Margie Nichols I’m not sure that ‘The Holidays’ – the part of year from Thanksgiving through New Year – can ever be truly fun again for someone who has lost a child. I lost my daughter Jesse in June 2004, four days before her tenth birthday. That first holiday season was one of…
by Margie Nichols When Courtney Zehnder, our Social Media Coordinator and my son’s S.O., asked if I wanted to blog about the massacre that occurred this morning, my first reaction was ‘I have nothing new to say.’ What can you say about a senseless tragedy that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by others?…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I’m frustrated by hearing sex experts tell people to ‘communicate better’ about sex. I’m impatient with advice to ‘tell your partner what you want.’ For one thing, many people don’t know what they want. Even those who can be pretty specific tend to know only what they want OUT OF THE THINGS…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Two things recently have made me think about that important piece of LGBT history, the ‘de-classification’ of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. The first is the news, released this week, that the fifth edition of the ‘Bible’ of psychiatric illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, will be published in Spring…
by Margie Nichols The November 25 edition of the New York Times Sunday Magazine has a headline that reads ‘What Brand is Your Therapist?’ The story, ‘The Branding Cure: My so-called career as a therapist,’ is written by Lori Gottlieb, herself a newly practicing psychologist. She describes – and mostly deplores – the trend towards…
by Margie Nichols and Colleen Powers (Colleen Powers, L.C.S.W., is an IPG therapist specializing in work with children and families. She contributed to this article but couldn’t write it because she and her own family were flooded out of their home by Hurricane Sandy) It’s been more than two weeks since Sandy hit, and unless…
by Margie Nichols In honor of Thanksgiving, I’m posting this blog I wrote in 2010, along with an update at the end. It’s pretty personal, and when I read it again I realized the theme is as true now as it was then. I hope you enjoy it. One night last week I offered my…
by Margie Nichols I. Why You Aren’t Crazy If You Feel Stressed – AFTER It’s Over Okay, your power is back on, you pumped out the basement, your kids may even be back in school. You survived Hurricane Sandy, the Superstorm, the ‘Frankenstorm.’ So you should be feeling fine, right? Even brimming over with gratitude because no…
