The following articles are related to ‘Psychiatry’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life.
Reading about the state of institutional care for mentally ill people in Mexico brought to mind an experience of my own from a pre-internship training practicum in the early 1980s at a hospital in the United States.
The difference between a clinical sign, an outwardly observable indication of an underlying condition, and a symptom, a person’s subjective report of their discomfort, is crucial to understanding how the system can fail to “connect the dots” in time to prevent tragedy.
There’s definitely a connection — but it’s not what you might be thinking. You’ll have to try out the latest additions to our psychological quizzes to be sure.
For better or worse — no, actually for better and worse — psychology has developed a huge number of labels for classifying and describing human behavior. It’s up to all of us to make sure these labels are used constructively.
What happened in Tucson is no doubt a genuine tragedy. But it will be an even bigger calamity if we don’t learn from it and start attending to our systems of mental health care so that individuals with serious problems can secure help before disaster strikes.
While so many things are chillingly accurate, there is one thing that bothers me about the portrayal of psychpathy in US television drama Dexter: it’s the way the writers seem to explain how such people get to be the way they are.
Much of my practice over the years has involved treating individuals with significant disturbances of character. What they need most is to learn self-regulatory skills and self-discipline, but quick-fix medications rob them of the opportunity to make meaningful investments in personal development.
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