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We Are Amidst the Age of Behavioral Alchemy

Mad in America

My anecdotal explanation is that psychologists and psychiatrists are more concerned with self-preservation and their own ego, despite the latter actually being medical doctors. THE STATE OF PSYCHOLOGY AND MENTAL HEALTHCARE TODAY I routinely rummage through all the biographies of professors at leading universities. Why is this?

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Everything About Us Without Us

Mad in America

And therein is a critical lesson for todays mental health system, and how it should strive to ensure that everything about us is with us, not without us. 1921 Survey This survey was commissioned because of dissatisfaction with how the mentally ill were being handled, and to plan for future need.

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How to Explain Top Psychiatrists’ “Dr. Strangelove Exuberance” Unchecked by Reality

Mad in America

In the twenty-first century, there has been no higher-level psychiatrist then Thomas Insel , director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015. Insel is a prime example of a top psychiatrist with exuberance about psychiatry regardless of his awareness of the reality of its repeated failures.

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Modern Psychology and Its Colonial Legacy

Mad in America

It reeks of colonial saviourism, perpetuating the modern rhetoric that mental health was ignored in traditional societies and that only modern societies, with their enlightened ways of looking at the self and the world, give importance to it and therefore, should serve as the champions of expanding this cause worldwide.

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What Are Waking Dreams, and Why Should You Care?

Mad in America

Waking dreamsallowus to dream while awake, significantly enhancing self-awareness, creative problem-solving, andthe ability to findmeaning in life experiences. Waking dreams are natural phenomenathat occurwhen people experience dreamlike mental activities while awake. I grew up in China and immigrated to the U.S.

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My Story of Surviving Psychiatry

Mad in America

It will be easier to dive into the depths of darkness and despair that I went through as a mental health patient if I start with a story of hope. I am typing this blog in the back of a taxi wending its way to the airport through the hilly landscape of Sardinia, my beautiful daughter sleeping in the seat beside me.

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Dostoevsky: A Psychologist We Can All Learn From

Mad in America

His intuitive grasp of how childhood trauma could repress and obliterate memory, fuelling the repetition compulsion of self-destructive patterns of behaviour, was central not only to psychoanalysis, but also our modern understanding of psychological trauma. The anti-hero of the novel holds a preference for the perfect conception of himself.