You walk into a meeting room and something feels wrong. Nobody has said anything inappropriate. The agenda appears reasonable. Your colleagues seem professionally composed. Yet somewhere beneath conscious awareness, your body has already made a decision. Your...
A Look Back: Three Chapters from The Running Wild Anthology Number One About ten years ago, when I was just starting out as a social worker, I wrote a series of interconnected stories. At the time, it was simply a way for me to process the heavy, often unseen...
There is a small but revealing detail that most of us have already forgotten. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, using the internet required you to think like a machine. If you wanted to understand why Christianity became the dominant force in medieval Europe, you did...
Here is a pattern I see constantly in clinical practice: an autistic client accurately identifies an injustice at work, in their family, or in society. They name it clearly. They expect others to recognize the obvious problem and act accordingly. Instead, they're...
The Crisis That Created the DSM Before 1980, American psychiatry was dominated by psychoanalysis. Diagnosis was secondary, almost administrative. The clinician's task was understanding the patient's underlying psychological mechanisms and unique narrative. Mental...
You're sitting across from a patient. They're talking about something ordinary. Scheduling conflicts. Work stress. Nothing obviously emotional. And then you feel it. A heaviness in your chest. A tightness in your throat. Something is coming. Thirty seconds later,...
In 2014, a researcher in India thought the word "Hola." Five thousand miles away, in France, another person perceived a flash of light in their peripheral vision. Then another. Then nothing. Then another flash. The pattern meant something. The receiver decoded it. The...
Who was John Gardner? John Gardner's "Grendel" is a postmodern retelling of the Old English epic poem "Beowulf," which explores themes of existentialism, nihilism, and the nature of evil through the eyes of the titular monster. Published in 1971, the novel is a prime...
When Trauma Looks Like Schizophrenia: What I Learned Working with Psychosis The line between "broken brain" and "shattered self" is far blurrier than psychiatry admits. Key Points: Up to 80% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia have histories of severe childhood...
