Joan Farrell

Joan Farrell, PhD

President-Elect

Joan Farrell did not simply adopt Schema Therapy. She helped determine what it could become.

For more than four decades, Farrell 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.

Together with her long-time collaborator Ida Shaw, Farrell co-developed Group Schema Therapy, bringing Jeffrey Young's model into group formats for personality disorders and complex trauma. She did not just develop a model. She proved it worked.

The clinical trials that followed produced some of the most compelling outcome data in the field’s history, including a randomized controlled trial supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant and an international multi-site study of schema therapy for borderline personality disorder.

Farrell co-directs the Schema Therapy Institute Midwest in Indianapolis and directs its Cleveland center. She has served 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. Forty-five years of psychotherapy training, supervision, and clinical practice sit behind everything she teaches.

Joan's contributions to the schema therapy literature are extensive and in active use around the world. She has provided schema therapy training in more than twenty countries. The reach of her work 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, she co-authored Group Schema Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder and The Schema Therapy Clinician’s Guide. 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.

Joan has shaped the standards by which schema therapists are trained and certified across the world. 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, Farrell served on the ISST Executive Board as Coordinator for Training and Certification from 2012 to 2018. 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.

Joan Farrell serves as President-Elect of the Jeffrey Young Schema Therapy Association. The field she has spent four decades building now has a home, and she is helping lead it into its next chapter.