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A Psychologist's Thoughts on Clinical Practice, Behavior, and Life

The Creation of Advancing Technology and Art

While producing advancing technology and art both demand creativity, they differ greatly. The conceptual creation of a Google-type enterprise requires a broad, expert knowledge of technology, including its current use in society, and its products advance societal development. But the motivation for artistic creation is to partially resolve the author's emotional  Read More 
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President Obama's Proposal of Free E-books Reflects Naive Psychology

President Obama's proposal to provide free E-books reflects naive psychology since there are already free books available through school and local libraries. What is needed is for parents to read to toddlers and to speak with rather than to their children (i.e., explain why something shouldn't be done rather than saying, "Do  Read More 
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Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder Explained Briefly

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms reflect the mind's healthy attempt to heal itself, to re-integrate and, in this way, to regain the adequacy of functioning that it possessed before experiencing unbearable stress. PTSD also reflects that the mind has limited capacities.
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Stage Fright

It has long been stated that the greatest fear is of public speaking: having to appear before an audience and "deliver." I can still remember my terror when speaking before a high school school class and likely most have shared this experience.

In later years, when public speaking became important in my career, I learned  Read More 
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Confused Child/Disabled Adult

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and AD/HD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) have been widely used terms to diagnose children's problematic behavior for the past fifty years though the particular symptoms that they comprise have been noted for two hundred years ("mental restlessness").

Fifty years ago the symptoms were believed to reflect MBD (Minimal Brain Dysfunction). Yet rather  Read More 
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After a Relationship Ends

People instinctively know, despite how they might then feel, that their life is not over when a relationship ends: that the abused wife can move on, and the battered teenager can find a better home.

Or two sisters may relate pathologically, being hatefully tied to each other with their love being overlain by envy or  Read More 
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Deception and Self-Deception in War and Life

During World War I, the British General Sir Douglas Haig presided over the greatest slaughter of that country's armed forces in history. Virtually every family had a member who was killed or wounded and the grief nearly led to revolution. There were over a million dead, a half-million missing, and two million wounded. This  Read More 
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Why A Financial Journalist Should Resist Giving Parenting Advice

Several years ago The Wall Street Journal published an article by a financial columnist on how to discipline children, using his experience with his teenage son as an example.

Basically, his advice was to take away something which the child likes but not something which would impact their future ( Read More 
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The Illogic of Diagnosing Youth with Bipolar Disorder

It is both clinically and logically incorrect to diagnose a child or teenager as suffering from Bipolar Disorder since this diagnosis is classified as a personality disorder and requires an adult mental structure which youth, by definition, do not possess.
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The Fallacy of the "Healthy Troubled" Adolescent

Parents and others often consider adolescence to normally be a period of strife. They believe that all teenagers have personal difficulties and will behave in odd, inexplicable ways but this is false.

The normal teenager has no greater difficulty coping with the tasks of adolescence than they did with the demands of earlier developmental periods. Then it  Read More 
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