David M. Allen M.D.
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Psychiatrist, retired |
| Location | Memphis, TN, United States |
| Introduction | David M. Allen, M.D. is the author of the self-help book, Coping with Critical, Demanding, and Dysfunctional Parents: Powerful Strategies to Help Adult Children Maintain Boundaries and Stay Sane. He is also the author How Dysfunctional Families Spur Mental Disorders, and co-editor of Groupthink in Science. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and the former Director of Psychiatric Residency Training at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, a position he held for 16 years. Additionally, he has done research into personality disorders and is a psychotherapy theorist. He is the author of three books for psychotherapists: A Family Systems Approach to Individual Psychotherapy, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy with Borderline Patients: an Integrated Approach, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is a former associate editor of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration. He received his medical degree from U.C. San Francisco, and his psychiatric residency at the Los Angeles County - University of Southern California Medical Center. |
| Interests | Dr. Allen is interested in unifying the large number of different schools of thought regarding psychology, neurobiology, personality, family interrationships, and culture. His psychotherapy model is called Unified Therapy, a treatment designed to alter dysfunctional relationship patterns between adults and their primary attachment figures which he believes trigger and reinforce repetitive self-defeating and self-destructive behavior patterns. He also is interested in consilience, the attempt to find commonalities in all of the biological and social sciences. Dr. Allen's psychotherapy model has particular applications to the condition known as borderline personality disorder (BPD). He believes that a particular pattern of dysfunctional family behavior is the primary risk factor for the development of the disorder in children who are biologically prone towards emotional reactivity. Dr. Allen's newest book describes how how family systems issues have been systematically denigrated in psychiatry in favor of a disease model for everything in psychiatry by a combination of greedy pharmaceutical and managed care insurance companies, naïve and corrupt experts, twisted science, and guilty parents who would rather label their children as bipolar than to look at their family interactions. In particular, he looks at the phenomenon of the widespread rise of extreme guilt in parents, leading them to be afraid to discipline their own children, and how this has led to ready market of parents wishing to find external reasons for the psychological problems of their children. The book looks at the insane way in which the definition of bipolar disorder has been expanded beyond all reason, to the point where even toddlers are being treated with powerful and potentially toxic medications while horrific family problems go unrecognized and untreated. |