Adolescence and Safe Dating
A reader asked: “Any guidelines for safe teenage dating?”Here are a few thoughts about safe dating for adolescent and parental consideration.To begin, in late adolescence (ages 15-18), roughly the high...
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How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
This blog is about the intersection of storytelling and psychological science. I became interested in psychology because, as a literary scholar, I wanted to understand why humans are so hopelessly...
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Anyone Can Go Psycho
I believe that anyone, given particular circumstances, could “go psycho.” Not everyone agrees with my assertion. My psychiatrist thinks I am wrong, but did not elucidate why. Thus I still think it’s...
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See Your Part
What's your own role?The Practice:See your part. Why?In situations or relationships with any kind of difficulty - tension, feeling hurt, conflicts, mismatches of wants . . . the usual crud - it's...
View ArticleWhat Is the Science of Luck?
Many moons ago, I moved back to the U.S. after a few years in Argentina. In a way, my timing could not have been worse: I returned at the height of the Great Recession. My friends didn’t tiptoe around...
View ArticleThe Chicken and The Ostrich
Climate change is real. As real as real can be. Be scared. Be very, very scared. The folks who deny the reality aren’t scared, or so they say. They’re brave enough to doubt, like the great...
View ArticleWhy I Entertain and Why You Might Too
My sweetie and I were sitting around in the debris of my annual New Year’s Day party, exhausted, happily mulling over the event. The perishable food, what little was left, was put away in the fridge....
View ArticlePain and Depression
I found this article recently and wanted to share it with readers, as I have many patients who fit this profile. In the Harvard Mental Health Newsletter (9/04), it is noted that, “Pain, especially...
View ArticleDating: Then and Now
The social rules for dating change from one generation to the next. There was a time when a proper young man and woman could not speak to each other unless they had been formally introduced. That...
View ArticleWe Are No-thing
Being somebody or something is very important in our culture. It is a major paradigm. My worth in society is determined by what I have accomplished. While there is value and joy that comes from...
View ArticleSocial Psychology’s Worst Idea
Overjustification is the worst idea I have come across in my professional career. By definition, overjustification is about giving someone a reward for a behavior or activity they like so much they...
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The Accidental Client
We’ve noted throughout the years that clients suffering from PTSD due to motor vehicle accidents sometimes go through setbacks in the therapeutic process due to the additional stress of having to deal...
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Real-Life Suicide Assessments: Who, What, When, How
In the 2005 film Stay, a suicidal client played by Ryan Gosling informs Ewan McGregor’s psychiatrist character, Sam, that he intends to kill himself in 3 days.McGregor’s character proceeds to freak out...
View Article10 Things Not to Forget When You Next See Your Doctor
Has this ever happened to you? You are at an appointment with your doctor. She asks you for something, say, the dosage of your cholesterol medication or the results of your recent blood draw you had....
View ArticleGwyneth Paltrow Stops Dieting?
Thank you Gwyneth for making it fashionable to stop dieting and start eating mindfully! According to an article in the London Telegraph, she announced about dieting, “Can’t do it — maybe later in the...
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Teens, Screens, and Metabolic Syndrome
When I first began looking into the research behind screens and the stress response a few years ago, there was one major study linking screen-time to metabolic syndrome (defined below) in adolescents....
View ArticleHollywood Insists on Calling Normal People Crazy
Hollywood people do some great things, but sometimes they get it wrong. I saw two films lately -- "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Lincoln" -- that I thought hit the nail on the head about "mental...
View ArticleOur Representatives Are Ensuring Another Newtown
My father used to say that all politicians are corrupt. Every single one of ‘em. When I was younger, and considered myself wiser than him, I disagreed. Now I find myself coming around to his way of...
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"Low T": The Latest Ad Campaign Targeting Men
Spend any significant amount of time away from the States, and you’re likely on return to notice a few things more sharply than before you left. Now, it seems, I can’t enjoy a single hour of MSNBC...
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Got Meat?
The goal of my previous posts on the Dalai Lama (this, that, and the other) was to understand his unique social status in today’s world. I concluded that the DL is in one sense correct when he refers...
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