What Happened To Our Shared Understanding of Mental Health? Thoughts From a Preeminent Psychologist
·Early in my training as a therapist I attended a workshop by psychologist, professor and author Nancy McWilliams. The subject (What Happened To Our Shared Understanding of Mental Health?) took aim at how the mental health profession has largely embraced the medicalization of human problems, with a much greater emphasis on what can go wrong—disorders—than on what a healthy psyche consists of. As a result, mental health treatments tend to focus on the removal of the disorder,
The Importance Of External Validation
I would like to write about an issue that comes up frequently in my sessions, namely, the question of where a “healthy” adult should derive their sense of worth (or self-esteem, loveableness, intrinsic value—there are many more names for it). The answer is obvious, right? We have all been told that psychologically and emotionally healthy people derive their sense of worth from inside themselves, not from external sources. I am often struck by how often clients get down on the
