Bring Your Whole Self to Life
The twentieth century was the age of commercialization. The century opened with industrialization that undermined agrarian independence and wrought destruction on a global scale. The tonic was the media revolution that eroded cultural disparities and gave the working class a voice. But the century closed with the digital age, allowing us to filter our realities… Continue reading The Whole Truth
Starting with Freud, psychiatry tried to convince us that happiness unfolds from understanding the cause of our unhappiness. Freud proposed sexual frustration in childhood, Eric Erickson focused on crises of socialization, psychopharmacology focuses on chemical imbalances in the brain. The downfall of all such theories arises from the vagaries of human experience and the plasticity… Continue reading ACTing Up?
When it was discovered that syphilis progressed to mental illness, psychiatry was grandfathered into medicine. Surgery and drugs became the preferred interventions. These were applied when the psychosis was fully evolved, as desperate measures for those that could no longer conform to social expectations, and thus endangered themselves and others. Application of these measures is… Continue reading Taught by the Children We Heal
When at 35 my hair began to turn gray, my female friends teased that I better had start coloring it, With a roll of the eyes, my retort was “When it’s completely gray, I’ll want people to know that I’ve made it that far.” Now nearing 60 little of the pepper is left, and I… Continue reading Aging Grace
Dr. John Kappas, innovative genius and founder of America’s first accredited college of Hypnotherapy was an avowed behavioralist. Having surveyed the practice of psychiatry, he concluded that lay therapists, dedicated to the relief of client symptoms, were far more effective than the psychologists who tried to force their patients into theoretical boxes. But of course,… Continue reading Mental Wellness: From Theory to Practice