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The work of a psychotherapist involves being empathic and insightful with one's patients without getting too lost in their painful stories to be helpful.

I hope I am a psychotherapist's dream. I've spent enough hours in therapy.

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.

When you're with a group of semi-psychotic people, you kind of lose track of reality; it's almost like being in some sort of cult or something.

Certainly there is such a thing as chemical depression, and for that, obviously, there are issues that psychotherapists are much more expert at speaking to, but I think there is a low-grade depression that actually prevails in our society. And most of us feel it.

People often express surprise that I'm not a psychopath. But it's not about what I want to do to other people, it's that I'm scared of what other people might do to me.

The stereotype of psychotherapy portrayed in popular books and movies is lying on the couch and saying whatever comes into your mind, while a kindly psychoanalyst listens and nods knowingly from time to time. After years and years, something wonderful is supposed to happen.

It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'

We are all born with an innate understanding of interpersonal equity - the idea that if you lend me your rake today, I'll respond in kind when you come to borrow my shovel tomorrow. Or nearly all of us are born with that. Psychopaths aren't.