There is no more accurate representation of the fractured nature of the psyche than those balls you see hanging from the ceiling of the dance floor. Everyone’s psyche is fragmented to one degree or another, and the most important contributing factor to this by far is the environment we grew up in as children. If…
In an unusual turn of events, my partner Warren and I are hosting a diving trip to the Cayman Islands this coming May. We realize that the water on this trip won’t be frozen, and that small waves are a distinct possibility. To compensate for this, we chose a resort that boasts the best bar…
Of all the phases that one must go through on a healing journey, forgiveness is the most difficult as well as the one most fraught with misconceptions. To forgive is to “give away” the past, to cease allowing painful events to stay alive in the present. Another way of putting this is that you no…
One of the things that I learned through my decades of depression is that our bodies are like batteries: they are largely comprised of water and salt, and rely on the sun as their exterior energy source. This phenomenon goes a long way in explaining why we feel so energized after a day at the…
A child is born, and in the whirlwind of his parent’s lives he feels isolated and alone. The only time he feels connected to his mother is when he makes her laugh, so he develops his sense of humour and comes to rely on her laughter as his strongest bonding experience. His body grows along…
I can’t fail to notice how events like mass shootings continue to capture the public imagination, as though they come out of nowhere and are one-off occurrences. Nor can I fail to notice how each time one occurs, the masses of the citizenry are more than eager to define the perpetrator of such an event…
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a Butterfly.” – Richard Bach Personal transformation cannot occur while we are busy conforming to a status quo, because deep transformation happens in the wilderness of our psyches, in that place beyond the social programming of our culture. It takes courage to transform,…
At the age of twenty-two I stood at one of the most important crossroads of my life: on the one hand I was being diagnosed manic-depressive by my psychiatrist and offered pharmaceutical drugs to deal with my condition, while on the other hand I had just read a convincing book that stated that my depression…
They say that every character in a Woody Allen film is a reflection of his neurotic self, and Blue Jasmine is no exception. Kate Blanchett gives a superb performance playing a woman who goes from “super-wealthy socialite” to “broke middle-aged divorcee” after she calls the FBI on her real-estate mogul husband when she finds out…
It’s one of the greatest philosophical debates in the world, and THE fundamental question in the mental health field: Is mental illness a hardware problem (faulty wiring), or a software problem (running faulty programming?) In the first instance, there is no cure except drugs, which is not really a cure because when you take the…