Description: Ask people how they are seeing the world around them these days as they deal with or do not deal so well with the social, isolation imposed due to the coronavirus and most will say something like weird, surreal, strange, or odd. These perspectives arise for the large extent to which usually or typical… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Mental Illness
Is (or When is) City Living Good For You?
Description: Is city living good for you? When lecturing on mental health and illness I usually refer to research suggesting that rates of a number of mental disorders are higher in urban centers but that causal nature of that observation is problematic as cities are where most mental health treatment centers are located and most… Read more »
Mental Illness: Beyond the Biomedical Model
Description: Do we (Psychologists and Psychiatrists) know what caused mental illness? When I teach the Psychological Disorders and Treatments sections on my Introductory Psychology course, after talking about the drugs used in treating the symptoms of various mental disorders (like depression or schizophrenia) I will usually ask if people think that because there are drugs… Read more »
Psychosis: Early Identification and Intervention Opportunities are Important
Description: You are no doubt aware of the standard medical observation that the earlier an emerging health challenge is identified the more effectively it can be treated or even prevented from fully emerging. There is also a lot of talk about the sorts of things one can do to contribute positively to one’s mental health… Read more »
They Must Be Crazy! Mental Illness and Gun Violence: Think Again
Description: It is frankly quite alarming how many times the opportunity to have this sort of conversation arises these days. Someone goes on a shooting rampage and we and the media try and figure out why. As a psychologist, I am most concerned that it is too easy for people to say some version of… Read more »
Biology and Mental Illness: Why No Cures Yet?
Description: We have drugs that treat mental disorders like schizophrenia and depression so do we have cures for those disorders? One of the reasons given for the focus shift taken by Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others to Positive Psychology (optimizing things for everyone) is that we have addressed mental illness and can move on…. Read more »
Pitching Apps/Sites for Mental Health: Fad or global change in mental health management and promotion?
Description: The Calgary Distress Centre (in my home town) started out as a call-in center, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Until recently its only form of contact with distressed individuals was over their phone lines and that worked very well as a way for people to find someone to talk to… Read more »
Is There a Useful Psychology of Mass Shooters?
Description: As I contemplated whether to choose to blog on this particular topic I ran across the article linked below and while reading through it, for a number of associative reasons (I suspect), I was reminded of a song by Canadian Blues artist Lest Quitzau called Home on the Range. It contains the line “Welcome… Read more »
Heart Disease <=> Mental Illness?
Description: Look at the title of the article featured in the link below. Based only on the title, what do you think the article is about? Is it suggesting that heart disease also causes mental illness?… or is it that mental illness caused heart disease (perhaps through heightened stress pathways)?? Think about what hypothesis you…
Description: Psychologist Oliver James, in a recently released book entitled Not in Your Genes: The Real Reason Parents Are Like Their Children (2016), argues that there is no evidence for the claim that genetics plays any sort of role whatsoever in core disorders such as schizophrenia or manic-depression. The article linked below points out some… Read more »Mental Illness and Parent Blaming: Here We Go Again??
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