Member-only story
Inside the Revolutionary Treatment That Could Change Psychotherapy Forever
IFS therapy is upending the thinking around schizophrenia, depression, OCD, and more
In May 2014, three days before graduating from college in Massachusetts, Ross Calvert (name changed for privacy), a quiet, artsy guy whose hopeful eyes and side-parted mop lend him some of the cherubic quirkiness of a Wes Anderson protagonist, had a bad acid trip from which his brain somehow failed to come back. His best friend’s face kept looking weird and sinister. Passing strangers seemed to be whispering about his appearance, his mannerisms, his thoughts. Ross managed to keep it more or less together when his family arrived for his graduation, but for the next several months, voices came in and out of his head in a constant swell. One evening, Ross locked himself in the bathroom of the house he shared with friends just outside Boston and refused to come out. After exhausting all other avenues, his friends finally called the police, who broke down the door, hauled Ross out to a squad car, and delivered him to the hospital, where he was stripped of his clothes and belongings, forcibly administered antipsychotic medication, and confined to the psych ward.
The conventional view of psychosis in modern Western medicine is that it is essentially biological…
