The following is a guest blog from one of my favorite psychiatrists, Dr. Ronald W. Pies, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. An old ethnic joke tells the story of the grandmother who is walking on the beach with her young grandson. Suddenly, she looks around and sees the boy a...
Back in the mid-twentieth century, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and they stuck. Heck, I just wrote about them last month. According to Susan Berger, researcher and practitioner in the health and mental health fields for over twenty-five years, those five stages may work well for the dying...
“On Wednesday, I will leave my husband of twelve years. He is a depressive. He uses prescribed medication and has available to him a phalanx of good therapists. But he also self-medicates with alcohol. He disdains therapy. He refuses to confront his disease.” She communicated this partly as a response to my MLK piece (on...
In his New York Times bestseller, Getting the Love Your Want, psychologist Harville Hendrix explains why people who grew up in homes — well, a little like the one in the 2006 flick Little Miss Sunshine — without proper emotional nurturing seek dysfunctional relationships as adults. He explains the low brain — our more reptilian...
As I read through the comments posted throughout Beyond Blue and on the discussion threads at Group Beyond Blue, I realize that a lot of readers are mourning the loss of special relationships. This prayer, by Henri Nouwen, articulates this process so beautifully, and calls us to stay with our pain, because, believe it or...
