Joan Farrell, PhD
President-Elect
More than four decades at the forefront of developing, researching, and disseminating Schema Therapy internationally.
More than four decades at the forefront of developing, researching, and disseminating Schema Therapy internationally.
Joan Farrell is a licensed clinical psychologist who did not simply adopt Schema Therapy. She helped determine what it could become. For more than four decades, Joan has been at the forefront of developing, researching, and disseminating the model internationally. That is not a career summary. It is a description of someone who showed up at the beginning of something significant and never stopped pushing it forward.
The work brought Jeffrey Young’s model into group formats for personality disorders and complex trauma. Developing the model was not where it ended. Joan and Ida proved it worked. The clinical trials that followed produced some of the most compelling outcome data in the field’s history, including an inpatient pilot and a randomized controlled trial supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant, as well as an international multi-site study of schema therapy for borderline personality disorder, with recovery rates rarely seen in treatments for BPD.
Joan co-directs the Schema Therapy Institute Midwest in Indianapolis and directs its Cleveland center. She also serves as Research and Training Director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Center for Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment and Research. Earlier roles include serving as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and as Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine, where she developed and directed an inpatient schema therapy program for borderline personality disorder. Schema therapy training has reached more than twenty countries through her work, and the reach is measurable in the clinicians she has trained, the trials she has run, and the patients who got better because of both.
With Ida Shaw, Joan co-authored Group Schema Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder and The Schema Therapy Clinician’s Guide, texts that have become standard references in schema therapy training programs worldwide. She is also co-author of Experiencing Schema Therapy from the Inside Out, a self-practice and self-reflection workbook for therapists that has become essential reading for clinicians serious about understanding the model from the inside, and Deliberate Practice in Schema Therapy, published by the American Psychological Association in 2023 as part of its deliberate practice series.
That is a different kind of legacy than writing books or running trials. It is the legacy of someone who understood that a model is only as strong as the people who carry it, and spent decades making sure they were ready. A founding member and Honorary Lifetime Member of the International Society of Schema Therapy, Joan served on the ISST Executive Board as Coordinator for Training and Certification from 2012 to 2018 and now chairs the ISST Training and Certification Advisory Board. She is recognized globally for her contributions to both individual and group schema therapy, and for the training programs she has built across more than twenty countries.