Professor Caleb Lack

If you’ve followed me much or talked to me about it at all, you know I don’t have much love for EMDR. Part of that is certainly due to the fact that it’s just imaginal exposure with response prevention plus some nonsense. But another is due to the constant shifting stories on its origin by Francine Shapiro.

In this article (taken from a larger exposé), we see yet again how Shapiro lied about another aspect of her development of EMDR:

“We cited evidence that Shapiro’s interest in eye movements did not emerge from her alleged walk in the park. Rather, she had an earlier devotion to a pseudoscientific approach called neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which has a strong emphasis on observing eye-movements for clues about mental states.”

And they have the receipts (as the kids say), in the form of a newly uncovered newspaper article and photograph. Read more here:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/04/a-photograph-exposes-emdrs-true-origins/

My colleague Dr Marla Diebler has a great new blog over on Psych Today, with this entry on helping kids who have BFRBs (hair and skin picking) even if they might not want to be helped.

Read it here - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/from-surviving-to-thriving/202605/bfrb-treatment-does-a-child-have-to-want-to-stop

Got the hard copies in of my latest publication! Thanks to Dr Storch for asking me to put together this special issue of Psychiatric Clinics, and a huge thanks to all the authors who contributed! You can check it out online at:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/psychiatric-clinics-of-north-america/vol/49/issue/2