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 Case Against Vacation
Summer is the time in the U.S. when we come closest to relaxing. This is partly cultural, partly environmental and partly commercial. Culturally, we recognize–(though to a much lesser degree than Western Europe )–that taking extended periods of time away from customary stresses and responsibilities is good for our mental health. The environment affords longer and warmer days. We are saturated with glamorous images of beaches, palm trees, bronzed bodies and exotic cocktails, a
The Grand American Happiness Myth
I think a lot about the #work #culture #happiness #money #stress
The Unexpected Reason Why Work-Life Balance Is So Hard to Achieve
America has a productivity problem, and it isn't that we aren't working enough. In fact, the opposite tends to be true: Americans work more hours than most industrialized countries (although that is beginning to shift). A new study sheds light on an unexpected reason why we work so much. According to this study, the drive to accumulate more than we consume - even when it makes us unhappy - may be deeply ingrained in us. There may be an evolutionary imperative to accumulate a
