RICHARD RABKIN's specialty as a psychiatrist is "strategic psychotherapy" which consists in getting people to discontinue what they are currently doing that isn't working to solve their problem and trying something new, a different strategy.
"It is interesting to know that most people, when they come to see me, are more interested in being right, in justifying their actions, and putting someone else in the wrong, than in making strategic changes. Therefore the real trick is to get someone interested in making strategic changes.
"Since psychiatry has become more neurological, that is synaptic, and people are even more uninterested in making strategic changes then before, preferring to swallow the solution as a pill, I have gone back to my first love, painting. I am now a graduate student getting a MFA in studio art. I'm older than the other students, in fact my paint box is older than the other students, but my paintings are not below average."
He is the author of Strategic Psychotherapy: Brief and Symptomatic Treatment and Inner and Outer Space: Introduction to a Theory of Social Psychiatry.