In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for […]
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Collective Illusions by Todd Rose explores the creation and maintenance of social lies that are fuelled by false assumptions, conformity, silence, and a lack of questioning. Drawing on social psychology and neuroscience, this book shows just how skewed these norms can be from the reality of what most people actually think. Collective illusions occur when
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Stigma is a big deal for those of us dealing with mental health issues. I’ve written about it in my latest book, A Brief History of Stigma, but there are a lot of other people talking about it too. Here are some great quotes on mental illness stigma that I’ve come across. “The problem with
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at paraphilic disorders. Paraphilias involve atypical patterns of sexual arousal. Paraphilic disorders are a more extreme version of paraphilias, involving arousal patterns that are a) intense and persistent and b) cause significant distress or functional impairment or
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Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness by psychologist Lucy Foulkes explains why it’s so hard to define what mental illness is and how it happens. The author herself has experienced mental illness, and while this is not a major focus in the book, I thought it was great that she did bring
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The incel (a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) phenomenon, at least in its present incarnation, has emerged in the last decade and a bit. It’s come into the public eye through acts of violence committed by the likes of Elliot Rodger (in 2014 in Isla Vista, California) and Alek Minassian (in 2018 in Toronto, Ontario). Misogyny,
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is melancholic depression, also known as depression with melancholic features. The word melancholia comes from the Greek for black bile, part of the ancient four humours medical belief system. In the 5th century BCE, Hippocrates first identified melancholia as
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Relationship OCD by Sheva Rajaee is written from the perspective of a therapist who herself has dealt with relationship OCD (ROCD). What a perfect combination! I love that more and more mental health professionals are willing to talk about their own mental health challenges. Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the importance of learning to
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Safe, Wanted, and Loved by Patrick Dylan is a memoir about the author’s wife’s experiences of mental illness, how that affected the family, and the difficult journey in the direction of recovery. The book’s powerful opening line is the author’s wife, Mia, saying “Pat, I am going to prison.” At that point, she was first
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Complex Borderline Personality Disorder by Daniel J. Fox is aimed at people who have borderline personality disorder along with a co-occurring mental disorder. It describes how these combinations can present and how to manage them. The co-occurring conditions that it addresses are bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, ADHD, and PTSD/complex PTSD. The author refers to BPD
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