21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari was recommended to me by Nick of Fiction & Ideas after I wrote about Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny. This will be even less of a review than I usually do; more of a mental chewing over what I read. The opening line was, “In […]
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As human beings, each of us is more alike than we are different. In fact, we all share 99.9% of the same genes, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Despite all of this sameness, we pay a lot of attention to differences… but only some differences are socially significant. The rest, we don’t
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is moralization. The term moralization was introduced by psychologist Paul Rozin in the late 1990s to describe the process by which people’s preferences are transformed into values. Rozin’s research looked at how, for some people, vegetarianism had become
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Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness is written by Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University. Autism and cross-cultural psychiatry are listed as areas of expertise on his faculty page. He’s the father of an autistic daughter, who he refers to a number of times throughout the
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People with mental illness can come up against stigmatized attitudes within mental health care, but having a mental illness diagnosis can also make it difficult to access appropriate care for physical health issues. A recent CBC News story provides an example of a man whose physical issues were written off because he was just a
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is psychological construct. In psychology, constructs are ways to describe patterns of behaviour or experiences so that they can be explored, investigated, and discussed. It’s a way of putting a name to things that don’t exist in a
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Bottled Memories by David Ritter is a short book (40 pages) of poetry capturing both active addiction and the process of recovery. While the poems relate to his own experiences, there are themes many others will relate to, including the lure of “one more,” “praying to the porcelain throne,” and doing the walk of shame.
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Honesty is the best policy, right? I say no, no, no, no. And let’s add on one more no, just for good measure. I would also like to propose two kinds of “honesty”, only one of which I think actually involves honesty. Objective truths First, you’ve got things that can be answered or described objectively.
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is double depression. This post uses a lot of abbreviations, which are summarized down at the bottom of this post. The term double depression is sometimes used to describe the state when two types of depression (major depressive
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In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Maté offers powerful insights into the vulnerable, human side of addiction. It draws on his encounters with patients while working as a staff physician at the Portland Hotel, an ultra-low-barrier supported housing building in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, Canada’s poorest postal code. Ultra-low barrier housing like this
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