Note: I have readers from all over the world and many of you may not be fans of US college sports, much less basketball, but please be assured that, as always, there is a positive mental health theme here. The key word is loss, and the message is about how to handle loss, no matter the venue: basketball or your ... Read More »
It’s mid-March. The sun was shining and it was 70 degrees in Lexington yesterday. After a brutal six weeks of record breaking temperatures and snowfalls in Kentucky—in Lexington we hit -18, and that’s not wind chill; and we saw nearly 30”of snow fall accumulate in two arctic blasts. We also had motorists stranded on Kentucky Interstates for 24+ hours and ... Read More »
As always, like to do a top ten list at the end of the year. Top ten best theories to explain why you are unhappy . . . 1) Attachment theory: A subset of Freudian theory. In a nutshell: your parents are to blame and that’s why you can’t form healthy attachments to others. A good theory for those times when ... Read More »
Marilyn vos Savant is a national columnist and author and has been listed in Guinness World Records for “highest IQ” (both as a child and an adult). I was reading her Q&A column in Parade (Sunday newspaper magazine, readership 79 million) and was delighted to see a mental health question. The reader asked why, if we could hypnotize people to ... Read More »
A client, “Janine” recently shared with me the abuse she’d undergone at the hands of her father when she was growing up. The beatings were relentless until finally, after turning 18, she escaped by leaving home. What followed were some difficult teen years, two marriages for the wrong reasons, affairs, and alcohol abuse. She was, as Freud would say, continuing to “act out” the ... Read More »
I never post links to other articles, websites, pages, blogs, or images in the body of my blog posts. Why? For one of my of my blog posts, I reviewed a book titled, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. (June 2: “What Do Boko Haram, the Internet, and Books Have in Common?”) The ... Read More »
I recently read, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton & Company). Hint: It’s making us shallow. The author makes a good case, backed up by solid evidence, that the Internet is causing us to think less deeply (less concentration, contemplation, and reflection). Instead we are becoming more ADHD, as we flit ... Read More »
Los Angeles Times reporter Karen Kaplan reported on a longitudinal study published online last week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health that proved that arguing leads to early death. The study looked at middle-aged adults who frequently fought with their spouses and found that they were twice as likely to die young when compared to their nonfighting or ... Read More »
One of my clients, Charity (not her real name), mentioned her son’s recent diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactive disorder. (ADHD) She had been resistant to the diagnosis at first, she shared, but she soon gave in, after realizing that in fact, she and her husband both suffered from ADHD as well. In the end, it was good news. An occupational therapist ... Read More »
Let’s start with weather woes. The polar vortex. Our new word for winter 2014. Wind chills of 20-30 below zero in Kentucky. Kentucky! It was so cold; my daughter said she understood how people die of hypothermia. It was so cold; I wanted to cry. Our garage was 32 degrees one morning, then 22 degrees the next. The garage! Once ... Read More »