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Posts tagged with the category Key concepts
Desperate Lives
The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation ~ Thoreau
If you have eyes to see, you’ll see it everywhere. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear it. Most times, logging into Facebook provides an overwhelming dose of it.
Desperation.
It looks a lot like the person who can’t wait for the weekend.
It sounds like the person who walks into the office...
Passing for Normal: The Culture of Conformism in Clinical Psychology Training
A recent blog post by Dr. Bruce Levine at madinamerica.com contended that anti-authoritarian individuals are socialized out of the mental health professions, leaving these professions filled with authoritarian personalities. According to Levine, “most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily...
The Value of Suicide Ideation
As a student, the clinics where I earned my hours had particular attitudes towards suicide ideation: it is bad and needs to be treated. Lately, I hear about an even more extreme posture from psychiatric institutions: namely, a person who reports suicide ideation cannot be discharged until they no longer report these thoughts.
I have never used a...
Pain Without Suffering
I’d like to share with you one of my finest supervision sessions. The session did not start off very promising for through parallel process, I was confronted with the same sense of helplessness as my student. However, in the midst of despair came inspiration and beauty that I would like to share with you.
The student is doing his placement at a...
A Love Thing
It is one of those 4 A.M. nights and my “blog” time is up, so I might as well go with what is upon me. After all, isn’t a blog really just a diary gone public; everyone putting their two cents in for all the world to see? Just the word “blog,” can make me cringe, and I did resist this whole idea at first. Now, each time the month rolls around, I...
Defining Mental Disorder, DSM-5 Style
What is a mental disorder? This is a question the American Psychiatric Association (2012) has been contemplating as it prepares the DSM-5, the soon-to-be-published revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM-5 development website proposes the following new definition of mental disorder (APA, 2012):
A. A...
Riding a Harley-Davidson—A “Vehicle” to Existential Joy?
What relationship does the experience of riding Harley Davidson-Motorcycles have to existentialism? A first response may be “Nothing!” Riding a Harley is a leisure activity—it is not related to existentialist philosophy or psychology at all. Because I have conducted extensive research on the meaning of riding a Harley for those who own them, I...
The Space Around Thoughts
Life. Running here and there. Pre-occupied with this and that. Swept away by one thought or another. We barely have time enough to notice time passing, never mind the preposterous proposition, dare I say, to notice not just our thoughts, but the space around them: a momentary peripheral reverberation, an infinitesimal synaptic break between...
Learning to Live
Dear Reader,
I come to you in the form of this article simply because I have found I have no other way to get through to you. It seems that most times when we meet, our encounters are quick, superficial, and you quickly push your awareness of me from your mind.
Our relationship wasn't always this way. When you were a child, you couldn't understand...
The Search for a Unifying Vision to Save Our Lost Culture
Yesterday I was speaking with a colleague at the college where I teach, a sociology instructor, who asked me this question: “Why doesn’t our society teach people how to be happy?” Implicit within this question, which became more explicit in our brief conversation, was a shared concern regarding our cultural values, focusing particularly on the...
The Power to Give and the Power to Receive
I had this experience a couple years ago that has been haunting me off and on ever since.
When guys go “over there,” they know what they are signing up for. They don’t think they are coming back. Their delusion, if they have one, is that their death will have some kind of meaning: they will die honorably, in the line, pulling their brother out of...
Put On Your Sunday Clothes When You Feel Down And Out
We’ve all heard the saying that “Clothes make the man” (or woman). Now, a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and then reported in The New York Times is adding credence to that phrase—in an embodied way.
The process, which the researchers Adam and Galinsky (2012) term “enclothed cognition,” was described as follows...
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