Image Credit: Photo by Sameer Srivastava on Unsplash For many of us, a sense of purpose is a fundamental psychological and existential need. Indeed, decades of health psychology research link a strong sense of purpose in life with less illness and a lower mortality risk (Alimujiang et al.; Shiba et al.; Boyle et al.)….
Category: Mind, Brain and Behavior
Take a Hike: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical practice was famously romanticized in the Enlightenment period by the…
It was there in front of me: Trauma Art in Don DeLillo’s “Zero K”
What art works would adorn the place where the ultra-rich go to die? Zero K (2016), a more recent work by the American writer Don DeLillo, perhaps best known for his novels White Noise (1985) or Underworld (1997), offers a sardonic answer: art that represents the traumatic conditions of how we live now. The novel…
Raymond’s Rule: Asking Questions that Matter Morally When They Matter Most
In his 1965 book, The Teaching of Reverence for Life, the nineteenth-century German-French polymath Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) thematically suggests that, in the evening of life, we must all confront the deep and painful question of whether we have given everything we were able to, and been everything we might have been, to the persons we…
“Beautiful” sacrifice/Unseen burden? Navigating emotional labor as a healthcare clinician, woman, and mother
Smile, nod, smile, nod. There is both sincerity and effort in these offerings. After all, behaviors affect thoughts affect emotions affect behaviors. How quickly, it seemed, that the childhood version of myself learned to blur the lines between what I felt and what others expected me to portray. How quickly that appropriate outward presentation became…
Contextualizing Twenty-First Century Schizophrenia Memoirs and Graphic Memoirs: Between Self-Help Culture and (De)Stigmatization
Schizophrenia is one of the most misused and contested psychological terms in medicine and culture (Carlson). Consequently, myths have proliferated since Eugen Bleuler built on Emil Kraepelin’s concept of “dementia praecox” to define schizophrenia as the disentanglement of psychic functions resulting in ambivalent feelings, autism, and abnormal affectivity (Frith and Johnstone 28–30). For example, schizophrenia…
“Intelligence If Anything is a Handicap”: How Elizabeth Bowen Reimagined Cognitive Difference
// Early in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel Eva Trout (1968), two adults meet to discuss the strange behavior of the eponymous young protagonist: her guardian, Constantine Ormeau, put in charge of her care after the death of her father, and Iseult Arble, Eva’s former teacher with whom Constantine has placed Eva as a payed guest, until…
Leonard Woolf and the caregiver’s point of view
That Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life is well documented, including in her own writings, which depict illness from the patient’s point of view. In the memoirs of her husband, Leonard, we find an account of mental illness from the caregiver’s point of view – the view of someone who is not…
Can Physical Symptoms Serve as a Medium for Traumatic Transmission?
The struggles and traumas of our ancestors are rarely confined to their generation alone: their learned behaviors, emotions, perspectives, and even epigenetic modifications can carry over and affect their descendants even decades later (Yehuda). Scholars describe this process as intergenerational trauma, in which the second-generation is affected by the remnants of the previous generation’s traumatic…
The importance of social connection for well-being: Insights from patients, the science of pain, and a “Remarkably Bright” octopus
It seems intuitive that connecting with others is a valued part of life. Still, in periods of challenge, in grief, in illness, in the universal experience of aging, the ease of social connection naturally ebbs and flows. How much, then, should we prioritize the pursuit of consistent social connectedness, in order to thrive? How important…