Deb BushongFounder, Owner, & Therapist, Conversations Therapy · Clinical Expertise Meets Lived Experience in Psychosis Care

Is Psychosis the end of the road?

9 Jan 2025 · 3 min

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2:33

In this monologue, Deb Bushong‑Song, founder and therapist of Conversations Therapy and Supervision, describes her practice’s focus on individuals in the early stages of psychosis, a group often identified by concerned parents rather than the patients themselves. She explains that parents frequently feel lost and turn to her after searching online, seeking guidance on how to support their child or young adult. Deb outlines the distinctive therapeutic style and specialized training she employs, emphasizing that unlike the historically fatalistic view of diagnoses such as schizophreniform or schizophrenia, these conditions are not a death sentence. She stresses that modern tools, resources, and therapeutic approaches can enable individuals to recover, return to school or work, and pursue family life, offering a hopeful narrative that psychosis can be managed and overcome.

Chapters

My name is Deb Bushong-Song. I am the owner, founder, and therapist of Conversations Therapy and Supervision. We are a therapy practice focused mainly on people who are dealing with developing, early in developing their experience with psychosis. And a lot of times people don't know what that means. So usually it's parents that call me and contact me. It's not even the person experiencing it. And parents are frequently at a loss for words. They don't even know where to turn. And they find me in various places online because I've been working with psychotic disorders for over 20 years. So— They find me, they call me, and they're like, "Help, please tell us what to do. You know, this has happened to my child, this has happened to my young adult, and I don't know where to turn next. I don't know what to do. What do you do that's different?" And so that's when I get to tell them a little bit about the style of therapy that we use, the style of therapy that I use in particular. Some of the specialties that I have been trained in. And also I get to tell them something that they probably don't hear from most psychiatrists, from most other therapists that they might have talked to, that there is hope for their child. That the diagnosis of something like Schizophreniform, schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder of any sort is not a death sentence because that's how it was seen for so many years. But this is something that their child can move on from. There are tools, there are resources, there are things that are available nowadays and different ways of seeing psychosis that allow people to move on in their life and go on with their dreams, go back to school, have a job, have a family.