Why do we need matter, the physical universe as described by science, to tell us that we matter, that our lives have significance and meaning? Consider what happens when someone faces a crisis of meaning. They might turn to religion for assurance that a divine creator...
THE ARCHITECTURE OF AMERICAN MADNESS Leadership Dynamics, Economic Imperatives, and the Epistemological Crisis of Psychiatric Diagnosis By Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S Clinical Director, Taproot Therapy Collective "The DSM is not a description of nature. It is a...
The Archaeology of a Label: What We Forgot About Diagnosis and Why It Matters Now By Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S | Clinical Director, Taproot Therapy Collective Part II of A Critical Investigation into the Document That Defines American Mental Health Contents...
A Critical Investigation into the Document That Defines American Mental Health—and Why It May Have Already Failed By Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S | Clinical Director, Taproot Therapy Collective Contents Introduction: The Controversial Bible Part I: The History of a...
You've tried therapy before. Maybe it helped a little. Maybe you spent months talking about your childhood without anything changing. Maybe you learned coping skills that worked until they didn't. Maybe the therapist was nice but you left each session feeling like...
An exploration of the dark laboratories where psychology, paranoia, and national security collided—and what these forgotten experiments reveal about the ethics of the therapeutic profession. The Fever Dream of Cold War Psychology For those of us who practice...
The history of psychotherapy isn't a clean scientific progression. It's a bloodbath. Fifteen feuds that shaped everything you do in the therapy room—and the verdict on who was actually right. The Dialectic of the Cure The history of psychotherapy reads less like a...
The unitary nature of consciousness is the most persistent intuition of human experience. We feel like a single protagonist in a continuous narrative. Yet, for the trauma survivor, this intuition is often a lie. As therapists, we are often the first to witness the...
A critical deep dive into the hidden history of psychotherapy, exploring how the personal traumas of founders like Freud and Jung collided with societal forces to shape modern mental health. Drawing on the works of Adam Curtis, James Hillman, and Sonu Shamdasani, this article traces the shift from the “architecture of the soul” to the “technocratization of care,” exposing the impact of profit motives and algorithmic logic while proposing a metamodern path forward for the profession.
From the ‘Stoned Ape’ to the ‘Lizard Brain,’ fringe psychology is full of mistakes. But theorists like Julian Jaynes and Terence McKenna offered metaphors that still heal.