Your Mental Health is More Important Than Your Grades | Huffington Post Pursuing your degree? Feeling the pressure? It’s that time in the term, when the heat is turned up-between deadlines, exams and everything in between. If you are a student of today, you likely have a lot going on in the between. This isn’t the kind of stress that gives us enough juice to perform and stay on task (known as “eustress”). It’s no joke. Having taught at every grade level in education (yes, from Pre-K through doctoral students), and also worked with them in the therapy room, I’ve seen firsthand the perils we can face at each juncture of development. I started becoming worried about my students, who are professional adults seeking new and advanced degrees. It didn’t take long to discover some good and bad news. The bad news: Students were marinating in stress, and they weren’t worried just because of academic pressures, but mainly from their work and personal demands. 1. 2. 3. 4. Which of these lessons do you need to put into action first? Edward Honaker
The Demoralized Mind © Robin Heighway-Bury/Alamy By John Schumaker / newint.org Our descent into the Age of Depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for the first onset of depression was 30. Today it is 14. By contrast to many traditional cultures that lack depression entirely, or even a word for it, Western consumer culture is certainly depression-prone. Contributing to the confusion is the equally insidious epidemic of demoralization that also afflicts modern culture. Existential disorder In the past, our understanding of demoralization was limited to specific extreme situations, such as debilitating physical injury, terminal illness, prisoner-of-war camps, or anti-morale military tactics. Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. Research shows that, in contrast to earlier times, most people today are unable to identify any sort of philosophy of life or set of guiding principles.
13 Cognitive Biases That Really Screw Things Up For You | The Huffington Post The human brain is a natural wonder. It produces more than 50,000 thoughts each day and 100,000 chemical reactions each second. With this amount of processing power, you would think our judgment would be highly accurate, but that’s far from the case. Our judgments are often inaccurate because the brain relies on cognitive biases over hard evidence. Researchers have found that cognitive bias wreaks havoc by forcing people to make poor, irrational judgments: A Queensland University study found that blonde women earned, on average, 7% higher salaries than redheads and brunettes. A Duke study found that people with “mature” faces experienced more career success than those with “baby” faces. A Yale study found that female scientists were not only more likely to hire male scientists but they also paid them4,000 more than female scientists. Let’s explore some of the most common types of cognitive biases that entrench themselves in our lives. 1. 2. 3. 5. 6. 8. 9. 11. 12.
The Breakdown of Empathy and the Political Right in America Photo Credit: a katz/Shutterstock In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry that demonstrated the psychological importance of the earliest interactions between mothers and babies. The interactions of interest involved the playful, animated and reciprocal mirroring of each other’s facial expressions. When mothers stopped their facial responses to their babies, when their faces were still, babies first anxiously strove to reconnect with their mothers. When a primary caretaker (the still-face experiments were primarily done with mothers, not fathers) fails to mirror a child’s attempts to connect and imitate, the child becomes confused and distressed, protests, and then gives up. The worst scenarios are ones occurring in conditions over which children have no control, such as the dangers faced by the babies in the still-face experiments. This absence isn’t simply an individual matter.
Instability-in-Chief Psychiatrists are granted the authority to commit patients involuntarily to treatment based on three guiding principles: harm to self, harm to others, and evidence of significant mental deterioration to the extent that the individual is unable to practice self care in his/her own best interest. While the former risks can be ascertained by explicit threats made by the patient, the latter evidence is often gleaned from self-reported or eyewitness accounts of the patient’s concerning behaviors. To date, I have personally witnessed Donald Trump make threats against not just individuals but entire sovereign nations, and heard eyewitness accounts from individuals who report victimization at his hands. It is widely held public knowledge that he rarely sleeps, and spends the wee hours of the morning in fits of rage out of proportion to his perceived slights. And yet, we as a nation stand paralyzed and in awe of a slow moving train wreck in progress.
A Deep Dive Into the Blockbuster Study That Called Into Doubt a Lot of Psych Research Yesterday, Science published a blockbuster article about the state of, well, science. Since 2011, a group called the Open Science Collaboration, headed by the psychologist Brian Nosek, has been working to replicate 100 studies previously published in leading psychology journals — that is, to conduct these experiments again to see whether the same results would pop up. (The researchers set out to replicate even more, but for various reasons the final number was culled to 100.) What they found was rather alarming: In more than half of the studies the researchers attempted to redo, different results popped up, and among the ones that did replicate similar results, the findings were significantly less impressive than what was published the first time around. To understand why all this matters — and what it says about the exciting new science findings flashing into your news feeds seemingly every day — requires a bit of background. Here’s an explainer. Overstated effects? P-hacking? Yes.
The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America -- Society's Child -- Sott.net © reddit.com There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media. John W. We're creating a world of dummies.
Psychology History Compiled by Kathy Jo Hall (May 1997) Biography Theory Time Line Bibliography Carl R. Rogers is known as the father of client-centered therapy. Throughout his career he dedicated himself to humanistic psychology and is well known for his theory of personality development. He began developing his humanistic concept while working with abused children. Dr. Rogers is a leading figure within psychotherapy and developed a breaking theory of personality development. Rogers horizons began to expand when he encountered the Freudian psychoanalytic climate of the Institute for Child Guidance where he diagnosed and treated children. Rogers has authored over a hundred publications explaining his theory of personality development. Overview of Rogers Theory Theory of Personality Development Rogers' therapy was an extension of his theory of personality development and was known as client-centered therapy, since the basis of the therapy was designed around the client. 1.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. “Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.” A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted.
How to Stay Sane if Trump is Driving You Insane: Advice From a Therapist “I feel like I’ve lost faith in humanity, in our country, in myself,” a client told me recently. “Is this depression, or is this the election?” “Good question,” I replied. The truth is, individual psychology is hugely influenced by political realities. Many of us feel insane right now because our world is not sane. What made us so optimistic in the first place? From such elevated hope has come a long, hard fall. How can we integrate this crisis into our understanding of the world? Our anxious minds are caught in the dissonance between our belief in progress and our current political hellscape. Optimism is also a coping mechanism. Our American brand of Christianity has adopted this narrative as well. Such statements are offered as a salve for life’s inevitable pain, but they have downsides. There are times when optimism is not appropriate or possible, and this is one of those times. “The path out of hell is through misery. You might be wondering, “How can I just accept these things?
The Six Most Interesting Psychology Papers of 2015 Every year, psychologists publish a staggering amount of research—it’s impossible to read it all. Still, I gave it a shot—and here are the six papers I found most fascinating. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” from Science This paper isn’t really a study; it’s the outcome of an important movement in the field of psychology. Is that result bad or good? In other words, the desire for novelty drives researchers to overestimate the conclusiveness of their own work. “What Works in Inpatient Traumatic Brain Injury Rehabilitation? Finally, traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., is becoming a topic of conversation. Some of the findings are surprising: if you’re female or Asian, you’re less likely to be given a psychotropic drug, regardless of evidence for its applicability. “Best Friends and Better Coping: Facilitating Psychological Resilience Through Boys’ and Girls’ Closest Friendships,” from British Journal of Psychology Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia!
Neoliberalism Is Taking a Steep Toll on an Entire Generation's Mental Health: Study Photo Credit: pathdoc / Shutterstock Are you a millennial prone to self-criticism? Is your sense of worth inextricably bound to your professional standing and achievements? The source of your unhappiness may not be chemical or emotional but a product of our economic system. So what is neoliberalism, anyway? "'Neoliberalism' encompasses market supremacy—or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. As Meagan Day points out in Jacobin, meritocracy and neoliberalism often go hand in hand. "Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced things like public ownership and collective bargaining with deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group in the very fabric of society," Day notes. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, the authors of the study, attribute these feelings of inadequacy to a rise in perfectionism across the culture. H/T Jacobin Jacob Sugarman is a managing editor at AlterNet.
By mollycoddling our children, we're fuelling mental illness in teenagers | Jonathan Haidt and Pamela Paresky We talk incessantly about how to make children more “resilient”, but whatever we’re doing, it’s not working. Rates of anxiety disorders and depression are rising rapidly among teenagers, and in the US universities can’t hire therapists fast enough to keep up with the demand. What are we doing wrong? Nassim Taleb invented the word “antifragile” and used it in his book by the same name to describe a small but very important class of systems that gain from shocks, challenges, and disorder. Bones and the banking system are two examples; both get weaker – and more prone to catastrophic failure – if they go for a long time without any stressors and then face a major challenge. The immune system is an even better example: it requires exposure to certain kinds of germs and potential allergens in childhood in order to develop to its full capacity. Children’s social and emotional abilities are as antifragile as their immune systems. It’s not the kids’ fault.
Future - Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence’? You may not have noticed, but we are living in an intellectual golden age. Since the intelligence test was invented more than 100 years ago, our IQ scores have been steadily increasing. Even the average person today would have been considered a genius compared to someone born in 1919 – a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. We may have to enjoy it while we can. Can we have really reached peak intelligence? You might also like: • The perils of short-termism• Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? Let’s begin by exploring the ancient origins of human intelligence, from the moment our ancestors began to walk upright more than three million years ago. That comes at a serious cost. There are many potential reasons for this brain boost, but according to one leading theory, it was a response to the increasing cognitive demands of group living. For humans today, a lack of social understanding causes embarrassment; for our ancestors, it was a matter of life or death Take creativity.