The Rabbi Within Us
Everyone has an inner voice.
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Everyone has an inner voice.
There is a reason why you bring on the war time social worker into the clinical picture
In doing so, the crisis is really man made.
I have not gone about changing the way I handle things because I simply wanted to be spontaneous and change things up.
who are these webinars and conferences for anyway?
So, I want to pose a question: is a mental health disorder a disability? I suspect the answer to this question hinges on how disability is contextualized. There are several ways of going about thinking about disability. I want to focus on the purely academic conversation out there […]
So, I read an article today on the Mighty titled: “I’m not high functioning- and I’m okay with that”. So, this is more complicated than it seems, to quote the article. In the DSM 4, the GAF or Global Assessment of Functioning, attempts to capture the ability of […]
“In the future, further work should deconstruct categories of medicine, psychiatry, and social work and encourage strength based approaches that will supplant new-institutionalization and create a new gold standard in treatment” (Maxwell Guttman, Mental Health Diagnosis: Axioms, Continuum, and Future Directions) 2018 “Congratulations, Jacques, on your publication!” Jonas, […]
The peer world is divided. Okay, so that’s not news. Either are the divisions within the mental health community on how to best advocate and push for better health care. However, are we really as divided as it seems? Or are we overlooking fundamentally important aspects about providing […]
The next step in Contesting Admission seemed rather obvious to me. Pummel the English Department into submission. In the words of President George W. Bush, this will be “shock and awe”. The plan was simple. Bombard the department with paperwork over all kinds. Inundating them with busy work […]
The Kindness Rocks Project, founded by Megan Murphy, is about discovering the beauty and profound possibilities of hope in acts of kindness, and has become a grassroots movement. Megan Murphy is the author of A Pebble For Your Thoughts and goes on to explain her work in her […]
There is no mistaking it. The Revisionist, the third installment in the J. Peters series has run into excessive costly delays, and is now, fully stalled. This is not writers block. The story is simply unfinished. J. Peters life has not run its course yet, and the narrative […]
The dew on campus was moist with retribution. Jacques Peters kneeled on on the grass and felt the wetness of the grass between his fingers. “It’s over, I’ve won” Jacques whispered to himself. Jacques eyes were firmly fixed on the bottom of the Bartle Library tower by the […]
The success of Contesting Admission hinged upon my ability to make such waves in the English department that my status as a student could no longer be ignored. The department was resisting and defending their decision at all costs. This resistance included their decision not only to reject […]
Handcuffed in front of my house, with broken glass from my car all over the place, I knew I had entered into a whole new phase of contesting admission. This new phase would not only take all my strength, but new mental powers which seemed to be emerging […]
The time is upon us! I need to address the ongoing rumors circulating around my writing. Ever since I have announced a second novella, Small Fingernails, Even Less Love 💕 , there has been undeniable chatter in the literary world. Upon hearing the new novella was, in fact, […]
Research must be wholly beneficial to the public, it must be free and rife for regard for society. As a prosumer and mental health interventionist researcher, I have sought nothing but a bold new model that works for the masses. Therapy that is both targeted, yet beneficial to […]
If you are a patient, or psychotherapist, the odds are you have been encouraged to use metaphors in the therapy room. I teach family therapy at the university level, and have been a family therapist for a decade. I can say that this overemphasis on utilizing metaphors to […]
I am a very, very passionate learner. I believe in education, and anyone who reads my writing understands my love of learning. Partially due to a trauma suffered in my experience in higher education as an undergraduate, I learned to love the pursuit of higher learning, again, and […]
I am a rhetoric scholar and a person with lived experience with schizophrenia. I am also a prosumer. My identity aside, the status of Disability studies and narratives, memoirs, and stories that aim to reclaim the writers lost authorial voice are in demand. These stories offer catharsis—Upon reflection, […]
his writer has a profound fascination with attention-seeking behavior(s). Also, profoundly astute at capturing the attention of peers, family, and friends, this writer is also no stranger to these histrionic red flags into a possible personality disorder.
Let us be completely honest, some of know, without too much consideration and thought, exactly how to gain our peers, friends, and family’s attention. Conversely, some of us could not get the attention they were seeking if their life depended on it. The level and intensity of attention-seeking behavior begin and ends with the ability, tenacity, and creativity of the person seeking attention. Attention seeking behaviors can be attributed to various mental health diagnoses. To correctly identify which diagnosis, the clinician will need to evaluate the behavior very carefully closed.
For most personality disorders, including, but not limited to Narcissistic Personality disorder, Histrionic, and Borderline, the clinician will need to evaluate the intentions or motives of the person seeking attention. Motives, intentions, and the general goals of anyone seeking attention should be the primary indicators that someone is seeking attention is trying to make up for, or satisfy a character-logical deficit. I am suggesting that if the motive is clear, the intention purposeful, and the aim is to gain others’ attention. Then, satisfy an individual’s thirst and make up for their shorting comings or lack of insight into an interpersonal situation gone awry then beware.
In terms of NPD, the reason or rationale for seeking attention is probably, first and foremost, to satisfy a personal deficit in self-worth or self-esteem. For people carrying a diagnosis of Histrionic personality disorder, the aim is creating hysteria to mask whatever set of bad decisions or personal choices occur or require concealing and hiding to shift the focus to something more benign and innocuous. In terms of patients carrying a borderline diagnosis, the attention-seeking behaviors are aimed at splitting and causing such chaos around them, that the ability to take ownership or accountability takes a backseat to the clinician focusing primarily on the week’s crisis.
Nevertheless, these diagnoses are not the only ones in which attention-seeking behavior is by the patients who carry the mental health disorder. Thus, patients with personality disorders are primarily attributed to enacting attention-seeking behaviors above other less performative. We, as clinicians and friends of people carrying a mental health diagnosis, need to remember why? From an epidemiological standpoint, diagnoses are merely the markers of the incidence and distribution of symptoms in patients. From a mental health perspective, we clinicians and friends need to remember all humans seek behavior at different levels, even at cross-purposes, and always to connect with other people fundamentally. While this should be a given axiom in mental health, it is not! Only when these behaviors create extreme distress, for the person exhibiting or displaying the behavior, and the people in their social world is truly diagnosable and problematic.
As stated before, mastering grabbing the attention of peers and other colleagues is simple. After going through such extreme lengths to capture attention, and experiencing the police show up at the door. Rigor, persistence, and aim were so alarming and off the mark in terms of purpose that everyone was puzzled. Again, this is when attention-seeking goes awry. Over the years, since this writer has been in mental health and learning to scale back, and generally decrease the intensity and viability of behaviors. This writer is very good at gaining a peers’ attention without making it clear as day from when I began to enter the social scene.
As a society, we have begun to truly mark, identify those seeking attention, and shame them for such behaviors. Not entirely sure this is the right path or the best way to handle such behaviors. Collectively, we need to make it clear that such behavior is unwelcome, unwarranted, and not necessarily appropriate. We give the person seeking such behavior precisely what they are looking for when displaying such untoward or visibly obnoxious scenes.
I believe people need to take a more psychologically sound and driven approach when putting the blinders up. Actively ignoring and minimizing or better yet, making it clear through our body language and words, these sorts of displays are ineffective in capturing our attention and keeping it.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I am an overweight Jewish man from New York State with an active schizophrenia diagnosis. I have been committed to involuntary treatment numerous times for different length of stays at both local and state psychiatric hospitals across New […]
The ethics of the helping profession and helping professionals are constantly under the radar. Help seekers, colleagues, and other professions in vastly different fields continue to question the ethics, values, and intentions of therapists and other helping professionals. I understand this suspicion aimed directly at therapists. As a […]
There is no question people with a severe mental health diagnosis die on average of 15-20 years younger than the general populations. Studies continue to evidence further data suggesting the mortality gap is due to higher co-morbities with psychical diseases on account of unhealthy lifestyle choices. According to […]
Sometimes, school crises erupt on college campus’s unexpectedly. Other times, there is a slow build up of tension before the crescendo. The crescendo can be violence, hate speech, or any number of plausible incidents that can manifest on a college campus. Ten years ago in Binghamton, I was […]
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