We Have to Take Our Chances on Development (and Democracy)

Social therapist Fred Newman says that while we might agree on how we'd like to develop ourselves and the world, there are no guarantees when it comes to development or democracy.

Play as if Your Mental Health Depended on It

Play helps us belong. Belonging helps us move about and around feeling alone, isolated and victimized. Playing is how we become part of existing communities and create new ones.

Is Mental Health Strictly Mental?

“Mental health” and “mental illness” mischaracterize neurodivergence by locating it as a problem, and a problem in the head, and nowhere else.

A Fresh Take on Asperger's

Whether Asperger's is a disorder is a matter of context. Disorder is relational and situational, not absolute and irrevocable, as terminology and everyday assumption suggest.

What Makes for a "Happy School?"

It's a simple idea, really. Children learn when they're happy. And they're happy when they have control over what and how they learn. Meet Sugata Mitra, who makes it happen.

What’s the Opposite of Play?

Play might well be the cure—for loneliness, depression, social isolation, and more. What happens when we play, play at, and play along? Watch!

Your Autistic Child May Have a Secondary Disability

Challenges for people of difference should be related to as social, regardless of any biological or neurological characteristic. Otherwise, we can be making things worse.

Why We Play the Blame Game

The notion that we are either this or that — that we’re either smart or not, racist or not, sexist or not, good or not — is fundamentally undevelopmental.

Community as a Heart


The Diagnostic Debate, Continued

How are people impacted on by the pervasiveness of the biologically-based diagnostic model? Ongoing international survey shows people are grateful to be asked what they think!

Enhanced Interrogation: Is it Psychology’s Only Scandal?

The largest professional body of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, may be weathering this latest storm, but the exposure of its decade-long supoort of torture—despite vehement member opposition—has some psychologists calling for an examination of all the “epistemological and material” violence that psychology inflicts on masses of people.

How I Learned I'm More Than My Pathology

Being the "queen of self-pathology" didn't give me or anyone around me very much to relate to or make a life with. I learned I didn't have to be a victim of the world’s craziness, but could play with the craziness, build with it, and grow.

Tim Hunt, Sexism and the Cult of Science

Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt 's comment that "girls" shouldn't do science with men went viral.—and opened up an important dialogue on the institutional sexism of the natural sciences and medicine. But that's not the whole story...

How Do You Think About Emotional Distress? Take the Survey!

What would happen if we could talk to a professional about the pain we're feeling without being boxed into the illness frame? Or choosing a diagnosis? What would we say? What would we learn? Participate in this national survey and be part of the discovery.

In the Name of Knowledge, Schools are Stupid

People in schools are trapped in an authoritarian educational bureaucracy beholden to corporate and political interests. But they’re also trapped by a culture that insists we (especially the professional knowers among us) must know what we’re doing or we wouldn’t be doing it.

Is a Broken Heart Like a Broken Leg?

What will be the future of mental health? That's the question confronted by leading experts who are working to broaden what it means to help those in emotional pain, inform the public of options that already exist, and create new tools for leading a happier life.

Note to Self: How I Plan to End My Life

If you've "lost your memory" have you lost your personhood? Your humanity? This is a critical question in discussing ways to humanize dementia care.

Is Treatment Helping? Can We Ever Know?

What is a normal, garden-variety human being? How does one go about being human? Without robust answers to these questions, discussions of abnormality or psychopathology will be fatally constrained in their ability to bring about lasting and effective solutions. Finding normal & understanding how it is achieved & maintained is perhaps the most pressing issue of our times.

How to Improve Your Emotional Health in 2015

Is it really better to give than to receive? What if all you have to give is your pain? Always playing the getting game instead of the giving game keeps us alone and deprived.

Holiday Warning: Giving Can Change Your Life!

What does it mean to give in a world that rewards getting? Combine some sociology with therapeutic wisdom for the answer.

"The Grand Prix of Hallucinations"

In this community, people don't try to silence the voices they hear or keep them to themselves. They socialize them, study them, play with them, and gain the courage to live joyously.

Why Ask Why?

Most therapy (of both the talk and drug varieties) is built on the assumption that discovering why you’re feeling a certain way is the secret to feeling better. It’s time to examine this assumption—in therapy and the rest of our lives. We might be surprised at how we feel when we loosen the hold causality has on us.

Do You Need a Diagnosis to Get Some Help?

"Do we need to relate to people in emotional pain as having brain disorders or a chemical imbalance?" Therapists are going out on the streets to ask ordinary people what they think about diagnosis. Not everyone's bought the mental health establishment's package.

How Does Your Therapist Perform?

Exciting developments are afloat in the ongoing challenge to give practitioners and their clients more choices in how to deal with emotional distress than biologically-based diagnosis. They're coming from psycholgoists themselves and from a new breed of performance activists.

How Do You Deal With Despair?

“One does not cure neurosis, one changes a society which cannot do without it.” How are we doing at that? What can we be doing?

Is Psychology Missing the Play Revolution?

TEDxNavesink was all about play. Play and mental disorders. Play and video games. Play and trauma. Play and human development. Play and human connection. Play and school achievement. Is this ground-breaking research passing psychology by?
Danger! A Frightening New Mental Illness

Danger! A Frightening New Mental Illness

The makers of illness have done it again. Their new diagnosis of "sluggish cognitive tempo" is as frightening as it is silly. Diagnosis as a way of life is controlling our lives.

Rate Your "Emotional Talent"

Psychology and education too often have a lopsided view of talent. Lev Vygotsky tells us, "Love can reach the same level of talent and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus." Take the emotional talent poll.

What’s Critical Psychology? Look It Up!

The new Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology tells you everything you never knew about psychology. Written by dozens of international experts, this impressive work uncovers and analyzes the political and cultural underpinnings of mainstream theory and practice—and presents alternatives. What empowers us? What diminishes us?

Does Our Obsession with Knowing Keep Us from Living Fully?

With information at our finger tips and every other person an expert on something, everyday talk is often a citing of facts and figures, sharing what you know rather than building intimacy and expressing love. A famous playwright sheds light.