Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
Last year I wrote about a police wellness check gone wrong, in which a young woman was dragged half-naked in handcuffs through her building by a police officer, While the woman was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, a story about the matter in the Kelowna Daily Courier used the word "arrested" multiple times, including… Continue reading Homelessness & Addiction: Embracing Stigma in a Third-Rate Newspaper
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect, first described by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, is a type of cognitive bias that causes people to feel confident that they have greater knowledge or competence in an area… Continue reading What Is… the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Recently, I was looking on Debate.org for some Holocaust denier-related willful ignorance, and I figured why not see what the crazies of the non-psychiatric variety had to say about us crazies of the mentally ill variety. Debate.org seems to attract a lot of willfully ignorant blowhards, so this certainly isn't reflective of broader public opinion.… Continue reading Willful Ignorance and Mental Illness Stigma
The Hall of Names at Yad Vashem – David Shankbone / CC BY-SA from Wikimedia Commons Yesterday, I saw that the Holocaust was trending on Twitter. It turns out that it was because of new survey results. Claims Conference released the results of its U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, which surveyed 18 to… Continue reading The Holocaust and the Failure of the US Education System
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a type of social group bias in which members of a social group privately disagree with a certain belief or behaviour, but they publicly go along with what they perceive to be… Continue reading What Is… Pluralistic Ignorance
geralt on Pixabay There are certainly some good things about social media, but it also provides an opportunity for stupidity to get much greater exposure than it deserves. Some people would likely have a platform to reach large numbers of people even if it weren't for social media. But the average science-naïve person who thinks… Continue reading Should You Challenge or Ignore Ignorance on Social Media?
As U.S. states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia are passing laws restricting abortion and gearing up to challenge the Roe v. Wade decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, I look on from north of the border with dismay and disgust. I wouldn't want to live in a country where limited reproductive rights could mean that… Continue reading Reproductive Rights: My Body Is My Own
I did a post a while back Gems of Ignorance From Quora with some of the frighteningly ignorant questions asked by people on Quora, a sort of free-for-all website where people can post and answer questions. Here are some more tidbits I've come across. Some people seem to have a genuine interest in gaining some understanding… Continue reading More from Quora on Mental Health
One of the ways that I try to fight misinformation and stigma around mental illness is by answering questions on Quora. For anyone who's not familiar with it, Quora is a sort of free-for-all where anyone can ask or answer questions on any topic under the sun. Some of the questions are blatantly absurd, but… Continue reading Gems of Ignorance from Quora
