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Self-Awareness: A Key to Emotional and Relationship Health

Love & Life Toolbox

When new therapy clients sit down in front of me for the first time, my curiosity is always piqued around not only who they are and what kind of help they are seeking, but also their level of psychological awareness. Even if this type of awareness is clearly lacking, this doesn’t mean good work cannot be accomplished together.

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Mood Tracking: My System for Reducing Psychiatric Hospitalizations

Mad in America

It’s about learning to self-regulate, so that, if and when mental storms pass through, they no longer require such harsh societal intervention. Efforts at Self-Regulation Being placed in psychiatric hospitals at a rate of almost once per year was greatly disturbing, and it provided me with motivation to get my situation under control.

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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.

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Reframing Mental and Emotional Pain from a Buddhist Psychology Perspective

Mad in America

This hindrance refers to the almost constant drive to seek pleasure and comfort while avoiding pain and discomfort. Ill will and aversion can be directed internally (negative self-talk, self-harm) or externally (hurtful words, violence). Awareness of this and all hindrances also reveals their transitional nature.

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

Mad in America

Insel is a prime example of a top psychiatrist with exuberance about psychiatry regardless of his awareness of the reality of its repeated failures. “I Rush is often referred to as “the father of American psychiatry,” and his image long adorned the seal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists.

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The Trauma Craze: How the Expansion of Trauma Diagnoses Fueled Victimhood Culture

Mad in America

In her twenties, from an affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood, she was referred to me by her family doctor. While expanding trauma criteria is often justified as necessary for inclusivity and compassion, critics contend that these expansions may be driven, by some, out of self-interest.

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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.