Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00 About three-quarters of the way through Robert Whitaker’s expose of the psychiatric drug industry, Anatomy Of An Epidemic, I found myself beginning to worry. Whitaker’s claim is that contrary to what [...]
Read more...ANTI-STORY
A note about language as behavior
My interest in language as behavior (rather than as we normally think of it, as something that simply describes the world) began quite abruptly back in early 2005. That was when I discovered a relatively new kind of talk therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT.
Read more...Wayne Dyer vs. The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007
I have never been religious, but like so many other people I wish often that I had faith. By faith I mean a sense of transcendence, of connection, of the world being more than a junkyard filled with quarreling humans or a machine to be explained by scientists. A world bigger than our definitions of [...]
Read more...Repealing the Law of Attraction
I picked a friend up from the bus stop the other day to drive them up to the art colony run by my girlfriend. This friend asked how I was doing, and being in a self-deprecating but decent mood I said something I hoped was witty: “Oh, smelly, grouchy, and broke, but I’m okay.” My [...]
Read more...No plum blossoms for us
Something I’ve been musing about for awhile is the strange way we in the West, including many of us interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, choose to convert spiritual work into psychological work.
Read more...ACT Observer Exercise
About a year or so ago, I came across a particularly neat-sounding exercise for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. It’s called “The Observer Exercise,” and it consists of a script for a therapist to read out loud to a client. The bare bones are pretty simple: the client sits in a relaxed, meditative pose [...]
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