Atychiphobia- Fear of failure This is a far more common issue that has presented itself to my office over the past several years. With the economy being far less than perfect and the fear of redundancy being widespread, people develop … Continue reading →
Acousticophobia Fear of Sound or Noise When considering what direction to take my blog entries, it occurred to me that I have worked with a plethora of different and interesting phobias over the past 30+ years. Whilst it would not … Continue reading →
Smart Phones vs Therapists Recently, former Labour Health Minister Lord Darzi has put forward the notion that due to a lack of therapists, smart phones could be used to help people with mental health issues. Whilst apps can be a … Continue reading →
What evidence is there for the idea that human sexuality is fluid? So when in 1966, John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, advised the anxious parents of David Reimer that their accidentally castrated little … Continue reading →
False Memory Syndrome Risks Great care needs to be taken when dealing with the past, especially when working with regressed clients. What the client remembers is only their understanding of the situation. They may be viewing the event from the … Continue reading →
Problems with nationality labels The US Government often uses the terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ to group together people who speak Spanish. Officially these labels describe regions of origin and not a person’s race. The term ‘Hispanic’ is derived from ‘Hispania’ … Continue reading →
Dissociative disorders These are uncommon – so uncommon that they may not even exist (Lynn 2012). He states “Conventional wisdom holds that dissociation is a coping mechanism triggered by exposure to intense stressors. Drawing on recent research from multiple laboratories, … Continue reading →
Does it matter if you attach descriptive labels to others? In an experiment it was shown (Bandura A, 1975) that individuals behaved differently towards others if different labels were attached. The operators were asked to help students from another college … Continue reading →
Matching and mis-matching Human beings have the ability to recognise patterns and hence discern similarities and differences. In medicine there are agreed templates describing collections of symptoms and signs. These define diseases and mental illnesses such as in the Diagnostic … Continue reading →
Margaret Mead Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, and her subsequentSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) revealed the ethnocentrism of previous thinking, and allied increasingly influential feminist theorising with the Standard Social Science Model. … Continue reading →
