Faculty Profile: Joshua Lipsitz
May 24, 2012
Department of Psychology
Prof. Joshua Lipsitz of the Department of Psychology is a practicing clinician who specializes in short-term interpersonal psychotherapy. This approach emphasizes the patient’s interpersonal context as a contributing factor to problems such as depression, and aims to help patients function better socially, and thereby decrease symptoms.
Lipsitz is especially interested in training people in the use of this approach, referred to as ITP. It is not well known in Israel.
“ITP examines current life problems in the interpersonal context as being involved in maintaining the disorder. Focusing on the person’s interpersonal relationships is seen as the key to ameliorating symptoms.”
He believes ITP is more effective in treating depression than cognitive behavioral therapy, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which is often used. He also advocates for the use of short-term therapy rather than medication for chronic depression, except in severe cases.
Prof. Lipsitz has adapted this treatment to anxiety disorders. He is currently looking at social anxiety related to use of the Internet. One experiment showed that when people who measured high on social anxiety participated in online chat, they experienced less stress during subsequent face to face conversation.
“So does chat move people away from social contact or toward it? Online chat is a social facilitator,” he says.
Another study is examining the effect of psychotherapy approaches delivered by telephone to patients with a variety of medical concerns.
“We’ll look at the impact on a number of outcomes, including patients’ own sense of stress but also how it affects their utilization of medical services.”
Yet another project studies individuals with chronic pain, including children with pain symptoms but without medical findings.
Lipsitz considers the department’s strength in neuroscience—“the wave of psychology’s future”— extremely important. This was one of the things that drew him to BGU four years ago.
“I think now there’s much more understanding that clinical therapy has become a rigorous science and decisions on diagnosis and treatment are influenced by empirical studies. Until recently people in Israel would just decide on an approach—like psychoanalysis—despite the fact that clinically depressed persons, for example, often don’t respond well to that and may do better with more focused treatments. This development owes a lot to neuroscience findings, which help elucidate the mechanisms.”
Read more about BGU’s Department of Psychology in the Spring 2012 issue of Impact >>
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