Thursday, March 12, 2015

Medical Causes of Psychological Illnesses

Missing The Diagnosis: The Hidden Medical Causes of Mental Disorders
by William Matteson, Ph.D.


If you are interested in the reasons why mental health professionals need a huge base of knowledge about how medical conditions cause/mimic mental disorders, this is a great-looking Continuing Education course - and a GREAT ARTICLE on the topic just below the course information.

In the process, William Matteson, Ph.D. explores the biases in medicine, and within the mental health community, that perpetuate myths and fail to investigate each individual's emotional, health and medical background sufficiently to understand how to help them.  Holistic and Integrative Medicine principles look beyond the medical diagnosis because the same symptoms can be caused by many different factors in a given individual.  As a result, the diagnosis of a constellation of symptoms is actually less important to the treatment of the individual than an understanding of how they came to be afflicted.

I highly recommend this course - and the article that appears on the website!

Wednesday, March 4, 2015


Here is a classic Awareness Test, like the one used by Jon Kabat Zinn to demonstrate how human perceptions are biased by our expectations and because we tend to focus on one thing to the exclusion of others.  As a result, we completely miss other important things that are happening.


ABC News report on Milgram's Experiment and follow-up studies confirming that humans are weak-minded when confronted with authority figures.  This is an important feature of human behavior that we tend to ignore, and we do so at our peril. 

This is one reason human systems are NOT self-correcting.  The "Libertarian" model of the strongly rational human, as in Ayn Rand's ideology, is a fantasy that serves to empower elites and aggressive people to exploit others. It is not true.  Peer pressure, social dominants and media elites control far more of our behavior than we are comfortable admitting.