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Posts tagged with the category Jason Dias
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...
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...
Retardation and meaning
Years of working with adults with developmental disabilities have left me with questions regarding the meaning and meaningfulness of the lives of people who experience high levels of mental retardation.
I mean something different here from purpose. What a divine entity might mean for these people must remain a question beyond my ability to...
The difference between "having" Asperger's and "being" Asperger's
I think I “have” Asperger’s disorder. The “have” is in quotes because I’m not certain what it means to “have” it.
If you have pneumonia, you just have it. There are bacteria in your lungs which are detectable and eradicable. You can go from having it to not having it to having it again, and each...
Existential dimensions of Kill Bill: despair, revenge, and the ruinous nature of hope.
In the titular movie, Beatrix Kiddo awakens after several years in a coma brought on by the treacherous actions of Bill, her former boss and lover and father to her child. Both she and her child are presumed comfortably dead by Bill and his employees, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.
But Kiddo is no longer dead. She rises from her...
Where the myth of the white male "majority" came from
Diversity is an issue among existential psychologists. We tend to believe we are above the fray because we try to accept each person in an holistic manner. We don’t always care about the labels or make the first move in talking about diversity. Becoming more sensitive about the treatment of “minorities” in our...
Corporate personhood, the Turing test, and free speech
There are basically two statements that sum up the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case. 1. Corporations have the same rights as American Citizens. 2. Money is the same thing as speech.
If a corporation has the same rights as you or I, and I have the right to say whatever I want in the political process, then a...
The myth of American egalitarianism and the pratice of therapy
It is drummed into us beginning in grade school, that famous line from the Declaration of Independence, the document that started the bloody revolution that is America:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable right.
Our patients have heard this...
Reflections of a Shrinking Man: the existential implications of weight loss
Every day, there is a little less of me. I literally do not exist now as much as one year ago. I have lost an average of a pound every five days for months and thrown out two wardrobes because they have grown too large.
Losing weight presents a number of challenges, existentially speaking. The first is the challenge between food...
Luminosity
It has been my privilege recently to watch people suffer.
Allow me to say what I mean. Sitting with therapy clients, with students in group process, with hurt relatives, I have watched as people unveiled their selves. I have watched as they allowed their hurt to surface, as they cried in front of me, as they expressed the deep pain they had been...
Power, Influence and Will
Question: is someone good if they do good because they are forced to?
Imagine I find a Bernie Madoff in the act of stealing millions. Imagine I force him at gunpoint to phone up his investors and come clean, and wire the money back. Would this hypothetical Bernie then be a good, ethical business-person
Imagine I find a person in the act of killing...
The Courage to Love
Every relationship ends. We grow apart, we lose touch, tragedy strikes; even in the most hopeful circumstances, one person must outlive the other. Our losses compound and sometimes it gets difficult to engage in new relationships. If a loss is especially traumatic and there is nobody to understand and nurture, in fact it becomes...
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