Mental health
fromPsychology Today
2 days agoThe Question Behind the Question
Emotional questions often underlie technical inquiries, highlighting the need for addressing patients' emotional needs in medical conversations.
Devon Hase states, 'People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty - and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles.' This highlights the pressure couples feel in the age of social media.
Again. It was happening again. Not even three weeks ago, federal agents murdered a mother of three named Renee Good. A few days before that, another federal immigration officer shot and killed Keith Porter, Jr. in Los Angeles. Daily, our city network of concerned citizens is documenting the injustices happening against our neighbors. Pittsburgh - like America itself - would not exist without immigrants, yet we watch them be dehumanized and terrorized hourly in what has long been known as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. It was bracing language for an 8-year-old. Not only was I unclean, but even my best attempt at goodness was filthy.
Your consciousness can connect you with the entire universe, a groundbreaking study suggests. Experts from Wellesley College in Massachusetts claim that traditional connections in the brain cannot fully explain how we are aware of our existence. Instead, they argue that quantum physics taking place within our skull is what generates awareness. This includes the idea that particles can exist in multiple states and locations at the same time.
Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them to navigate, learn from, and connect with the world around them. Yet it's not particularly difficult to imagine life without it. After all, many nonhuman animals live in lightless environments. However, as Gideon Koekoek, an associate professor of physics in the research group Gravitational Waves and Fundamental Physics
A few years ago, I climbed over a gate and found myself gazing down at a valley. After I'd been walking for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the sky, there was a shift in my perception. Everything around me became intensely real. The fields and the bushes and trees and the clouds seemed more vivid, more intricate and beautiful.
Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he'd learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked Frantisek Baluska, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluska paused, before answering: Yes, they should feel pain.
In a recent talk in Zurich, German psychoanalyst Konstantin Roessler surveyed the current state of dream research. Tracing some of the earlier scientific studies on dreams, he made a renewed case for the importance of dreams. Even formerly skeptical neuroscientists have now begun to see the meaning, purpose, and value of dreams for everyday life and overall psychic health. Dreams as Meaningless "Content"
I regret using that term now somewhat, not because I have changed my mind, but because the term immediately provokes a defensive reaction and makes a neutral evaluation of my arguments more difficult. I saw a comment, in a response piece to my post by Nino Kadić, that they were immediately annoyed and could not move far beyond the title, and perhaps this is unsurprising.
One of my earliest cognitive therapy patients asked if we'd spend time exploring his past. He thought we might find patterns that would explain his depression. I was taken aback. I had just discovered a set of powerful, active techniques that helped people change how they felt in the here-and-now. As a psychiatric resident, I had seen that endless venting without specific techniques for change led to little or no relief.