Archive for the ‘human interaction’ Category

Support Our President

January 20, 2010

Keep in mind that the year hasn’t gotten of to a good start.  A devastating earthquake hit Haiti.  Try to imagine how it feels when one person you are close to dies. Now start multiplying.  Sarah Palin has decided to join Fox News, meaning that the most popular media is now fully controlled by a single ideology. The very same people who fear a fascist takeover are in fact enacting an ideological takeover.   Unemployment remains high.  Large banks appear to be the only people with money.  Lots of people don’t have health care. As a provider of mental health care services, there are some very fine and hard-working people who can’t get care because they don’t have the money, or were sick before, or mistakenly sent a COBRA check a day or two late. With all of the difficult problems we are facing why are so many self-appointed experts naysing our President? How about a letter of support instead,  empowering President Obama in his moment of need so he can do the job we elected him to do?

(more…)

About Mental Illness: Biological Process in Sociocultural Context

January 12, 2010

mongabay.com, copyright 2001-2009.

Ethan Watters wrote in the NY Times that the importation to other cultures of American models of mental illness actually creates new symptom patterns as people replicate what they are taught about themselves.  This intervention of American mental health models sometimes obliterates local forms of understanding and healing.  He writes, “When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.” American mental health models may also be disorienting this country.

There is, however, another view of mental illness that derives from relational psychologists and psychoanalysts. This model can cross cultural boundaries without disrupting indigenous meanings.  It suggests that the  interaction between biological processes and sociocultural contexts produces personality, and that mental illness results when there is a poor fit between them.  Let me explain.

(more…)


Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started