First-Person Accounts of Psychotherapy and Mental Health Recovery
A Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X) belonging to the section "Psychiatric, Emotional and Behavioral Disorders".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 1012
Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In this Special Issue, we welcome first-person accounts that illuminate the lived experience of mental health professionals engaged in psychotherapy and mental health recovery work. While narratives from clients and patients remain welcome, this Issue places particular emphasis on the internal worlds, reflections, dilemmas, and transformative moments encountered by clinicians themselves. Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, and other practitioners often witness profound human suffering while simultaneously navigating their own emotional responses, countertransference dynamics, ethical complexities, institutional pressures, and personal growth. Yet their voices—deeply embedded within the therapeutic process—are rarely foregrounded in academic research.
By bringing these perspectives to the forefront, the aim of this Special Issue is to broaden and humanize our understanding of psychotherapy and recovery. Clinician-authors may explore themes such as therapeutic intimacy, ruptures and repairs, supervisory influences, burnout and resilience, the impact of trauma work, or the ways in which clinical encounters reshape professional identity and personal meaning. Contributions that bridge narrative, reflective practice, phenomenology, and psychodynamic or relational frameworks are especially encouraged.
Overall, through this Special Issue, we seek to create a reflective and ethically sensitive space that enriches our collective understanding of what it means to practice psychotherapy—emotionally, intellectually, and existentially—from the inside.
Dr. Ilias I. Vlachos
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- first-person accounts
- mental health professionals
- psychotherapy practice
- countertransference
- professional identity
- recovery narratives
- reflective practice
- therapeutic process
- lived experience
- clinician well-being
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