Jaakko Seikkula, Ph.D.
I have been mainly involved in developing family and social network based practices in psychiatry with psychosis and other severe crises. During the years 1981 – 1998 I was a member of the team in Western Lapland in Finland, where we together initiated a new family centred psychiatric system that was named as Open Dialogue approach. After moving to the university of Jyväskylä 1998 I have continued studies concerning both the effectiveness of open dialogues in psychotic crises and the dialogue processes in meeting with families and social networks. I am involved in several international development and research project in many countries. These projects focus on increasing the resources of social networks in crises and combine new practice with developing systematic analysis of the practice with both outcome and process research.
At the moment my main interest focuses on the present moment in dialogues with families. We are developing research methods for psychotherapy as an integrated discipline instead of looking at the specific psychotherapy schools. Since 2002 I have been working with developing a methods for exploring qualities in multi-actor dialogues, and 2008 a new version of the method has appeared. I am responsible for the Multidisciplinary Doctorate Program in Psychotherapy research.
Main forums for the international co-operation are the International Meeting for Treatment of Psychosis network; International Famil Therapy Association (IFTA) board member; American Family Therapy Academy member; Society of Psychotherapy Research member; International Sociaty fo Psychological Treatment of Psychosis and Schizophrenia (ISPS) member and visit as invited lecturer.
