Jaakko Seikkula Speaks on Finnish Open Dialogue, Social Networks, and Recovery from Psychosis

via Daniel Mackler
Here I interview with Jaakko Seikkula, PhD, a professor of psychotherapy at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland who is best known for his work with Finnish Open Dialogue. He speaks about the value of engaging social networks in crisis situations, the development of the Finnish Open Dialogue approach, the idea that there is meaning behind psychosis, and some unexpected benefits in Western Lapland of including family members in therapy with people experiencing psychosis.

via TAOS Institute:

Professor of Psychotherapy
Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä
Box 35, FIN-40014 Jyväskylä, Finland

Jaakko has been mainly involved in developing family and social network based practices in psychiatry with psychosis and other severe crises. Since early 80’s until 1998 he was a member of the team in Western Lapland in Finland for developing the comprehensive Open Dialogue approach, which Jaakko has been studying both concerning the processes of dialogues and the outcomes in treatment of acute psychosis. The power of dialogue became evident in the remarkable results when 85 % could return to full employment and over 80 % living without any psychotic experiences at five year follow up. This was reached by minimum use of antipsychotic medication, in 2/3 of cases none.

After moving to University of Jyväskylä he has become involved in many development and research projects. Recently ideas of open dialogues have been applied in social work with children’ problems, in organization consultation, supervision and teaching. Research has focused on outcome and process studies on family therapy of psychosis and depression and social network interventions. Concerning outcome studies in psychotherapy the main focus is on developing methods for naturalistic designs to see how the psychotherapy affect in real world, in every day clinical practice.

Another line of developing and research has focused on research methods for dialogues in family therapy settings. A new method – at the moment named as Dialogical Methods for Investigations in Happenings of Change – is in progress. The main aim is to develop tools for making sense of what happens in multi actor dialogues, especially focusing on the responses in dialogues.

This is related with Jaakko’s main language philosophical interest on Mikhail Bakhtin’s works for 25 year. Jaakko wrote first text referring to Bakhtin 1987 and since then Bakhtin has been the main inspiration for understanding the power of dialogue in human life. During last years the importance of the being present in the moment in the “once occurring participation in being” has become the most important aspect of therapy and writing and teaching about therapy. Jaakko is invited for tens of workshops and congress presentation every years.

Healing Elements of Therapeutic Conversation: Dialogue as an Embodiment of Love
Open Dialogues With Good And Poor Outcomes For Psychotic Crises: Examples From Families With Violence
Inner and outer voices in the present moment of family and network therapy
Psychotherapy Research. Five-year experience of first-episode non-affective psychosis in open-dialogue approach: Treatment principles, follow-up outcomes, and two case studies

For more on Open Dialogue, see: http://psychrights.org/research/Digest/Effective/fiveyarocpsychotherapyresearch.pdf

Daniel Mackler's website: Essays for the Truth Seeker Healing from Childhood Trauma

photo credit thizzlerice on photobucket
originally post with just the video 7-31-2011