It is possible to live a full and satisfying life even when your life has been turned upside down by chronic pain and/or illness. Recently I’ve been learning more about how, from the experts: three people who are doing it themselves, and are pointing the way to...
This post offers some solutions – short-term and long – to the problem identified in my last post: trying to find a therapist or doctor who will accept your health insurance for mental healthcare. Long term, the only reasonable fix to our broken...
Just listened to an illuminating KQED Forum report on how difficult it still is for people to obtain mental health services, despite the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity laws. If you’d like to listen, it’s here:...
Let’s talk about shame. Let’s not run from it, trying to avoid its pain, or hide from it, pretending we don’t have any, or allow ourselves to be bullied by others who believe they have the right to make us feel shame. Let’s drag it out into the open, take a deep...
A koan is “a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the ‘great doubt’ and test a student’s progress” (Wikipedia). While I’m not a Zen practitioner, I enjoy pondering koans that others pose as well as posing my own. Here...
A client asked me recently about something he’d heard on NPR, that there are medications which can cure alcoholism. I listened to the podcast, and indeed they made it sound that way – and implied that there’s some conspiracy to keep people from obtaining...
In anticipation of beginning this blog, I’ve been collecting ideas from news articles, books, and other sources over the past year. Here’s my Top 10 list of the important ideas or trends that I am seeing in the fields of mental health and addiction...
