Mental Health

For the most part, popular psychology isn’t exactly positive on your ability to really change your core personality, your default way of being.  Sure, it accepts that you can learn new coping skills and occasionally better ways of responding emotionally, bu...

I grew up at a time when I was gone hours a day, and my parents didn’t have any way of finding me.  One summer before I had a driver’s license and a car, I rode literally hundreds of miles on my bicycle in the town of Bay City, Michigan.  It’s a time ...

There aren’t many members in the moral leaders club. For that reason alone, when two moral leaders – The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – gather to share deep discussions of morality and, in this case, joy, it’s worth investigating. The Book of ...

I was drawn to Chasing the Scream: The First and the Last Days of the War on Drugs   through an article that I was forwarded. The article spoke about alcoholism and criticized the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous which I had seen be very successful f...

While compassion is the subject of many books, self-hate is not frequently discussed.  Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair seeks to map the relationship between the two and how compassion can heal self-hate.  I came to the book because o...

I’ve made it no secret that I am a Christian. I’ve also made it no secret that I’m interested in learning more about other religions and other great thinkers no matter what religion they practice. I picked up The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness: How to L...

It never made sense to me, DBT – dialectical behavior therapy.  Where was the conflict?  That and many other mysteries were solved by DBT Explained: An Introduction to Essential Dialectical Behavior Therapy Concepts, Practices, and Skills .  Marsha Line...

I was in a darkened room listening to two presenters with their different vantage points on opiates in the workplace, and during the talk, they mentioned the book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic . I disagreed with what seemed to...

Why is addiction of all types on the rise in our society today? If the pharmacological theory of addiction is true – that demon drugs take over the minds of users after only one use – then why is it that there are other, non-drug addictions? How does tha...

When I was reading Switch  I was introduced to the metaphor of the elephant, the rider, and the path for thinking about how to motivate people (including ourselves) but the book referenced The Happiness Hypothesis  as the origin of this model. Despite the...

Recovery is more than the abatement of symptoms.  Recovery from mental illness returns us to a place where we can have a full and meaningful life.  That’s what Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health is about.  It’s changing our defini...

I’ll be the first to admit that my reading list isn’t always the most mainstream. I can’t tell you how few people would find a book on effectiveness in psychotherapy interesting – but I know that it’s possible I’m in the minority here. However, I’ve been t...

Martin Seligman is the father of positive psychology. In The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism , he chronicles his life and the life of positive psychology. While I’m not generally prone to reading biographies or a...

What would you do if you worked in a profession that ignored its own best practices? What if your industry claimed to be able to do things that they simply couldn’t do? How could you move a profession forward when you knew that most of your colleagues w...

What makes a child successful in life? In my review of Emotional Intelligence  I mentioned that tests of emotional intelligence were generally more indicative of long term success than measures of intelligence. However, emotional intelligence – as it ...

I’ve read much of Brené Brown’s work, but it wasn’t until I read I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”  that I made it back to the beginning. I had previously commented in my review of Th...

While working on a community project to help teens who are struggling with life, I had the pleasure of talking to some real professionals who work with teens every day, and one of them shared one of his techniques for having dialogues with teens in trouble....

Occasionally, I get the chance to review a book before its release. Such is the case with Rick Hanson’s Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness . I’ve read some of Rick Hanson’s previous works, including Hardwiring Happine...

It would be nice to be perfect.  The idea that we’d never make a mistake, never be wrong, and never have to apologize has its appeal.  For most of us, it’s just an appeal.  For some of us, it is an expectation, and it’s one that leads us to a perpetua...

I’m not a clinician. I didn’t play one on TV. I didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. However, I did read Positive Psychotherapy: Clinician Manual . It’s a toolbox for counselors and clinical psychiatrists for want to help clients reach th...

On the surface, it would seem like math would have very little to do with psychology. However, when looking at Kurt Lewin's work in Principles of Topological Psychology , it's clear to see how mathematical models influenced his thinking on psychology...

Sometimes you stumble into things, and you’re not quite sure how. I used to have book deals sent to my email and occasionally there would be a discount that made the book interesting. That was the case with Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions . I ...

To say that sometimes my reading list slips off into the odd is an understatement. Sometimes I’m reading some really clinical research based books. I’m trying to make sure that I’m really understanding a topic and I realize that I may be reading more ...

There’s a running joke in the National Speaker’s Association (NSA) . Someone addresses the members and asks if they’ve heard about NLP, and then says, “Wait, of course you’ve heard about NLP: this is the NSA.” In other words, understanding NLP – or, Ne...

It’s an odd title for a book. Why would a psychologist title a book Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health ? The answer lies in the belief that drugs are not the answer to all of the mental health problems of the day, and that in...

In this final installment of my three-part review of Sapolsky’s book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers  we walk through the causes of stress and what we can do to “cure” stress by minimizing its impact on us. We started this review with The Physical Impacts of...

It seems like an odd thing to want to know. Why don’t zebras get ulcers? Is there something magical about zebras like unicorns that protect them from ulcers? As it turns out, it’s more than just zebras that don’t get ulcers: most of the animal kingdom doesn...

In this three-part review of Sapolsky’s book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers , we walk through the psychological and neurological differences between humans and zebras – at least some of the ones that are important. We started this review with The Physica...

Loneliness is a problem for the social creature called human.  The shame and secrecy of mental illness has created a Gordian knot of spiraling issues and reinforcement, the only solution to which is for us to end the silence about mental health in the ...