Brief Politico-Therapies: A Tour Of The Psych-Bloggers

Once again gentle readers, it is time for a tour of the Psych-bloggers, that intrepid bunch of mental health professionals as we take a look at their take on politics, the human condition and anything else that catches my eye. Our usual bunch of suspects include: Dr. Helen, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, neo-neocon, Assistant Village Idiot, One Cosmos (Gagdad Bob), Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, Iron Shrink. and last, an old friend re-connected with Dr. James Sutton who blogs at Its About Them. Dr. Sutton and I met at a workshop several years ago and have recently re-connected. He is a child psychologist writing about "them" our kids and our future.

So, without further ado, lets begin with Dr. Sutton. He's posted a moving post on the shootings at Virginia Tech:

The April 16th, 2007, event that is being called “The Massacre at Virginia Tech” exposed one more time the degree of devastation one person can create if they are willing to surrender their own life. Words fall pitifully short of explaining it to ourselves, let alone to our children.

“How do we protect our children from the ugly side of human behavior,” someone said to me in recent email. I wish I had an easy answer. I don’t."

Dr. Sutton's writings are moving and on target, I suggest you add him to your favorites or sidebar blog rolls if you are a blogger.

Next up is my friend, my early in blogging mentor and an all around good person Dr. Sanity. Doc comes up with a look at Hugo Chavez' recent moves against freedom of speech and the almost total lack of anything more than perfunctory (and mild) condemnation from the left:

I wonder if they will open their eyes when Chavez starts killing his own people like Saddam and all the other thugs in history have done.... Or, when he moves to take over other radio and TV stations that don't toe the socialist line."

Continuing on the tour, we now come to another of my favorite people, Gagdad Bob writing in One Cosmos On Sacrifice, Transcendence and Vertical Recollection:

We remember our heroes because they illuminate the eternal realm of the heroic, a realm that we must treasure and venerate if we are to survive as a culture. Not only is the hero a transcendent archetype, but he is only heroic because he has sacrificed something in defense of another archetype -- truth, liberty, beauty, the good, etc. In the absence of this true formulation, neither the heroic nor his sacrifice make any sense at all."

Now we turn to Dr. Helen who looks at the connection between stress and a heart condition. All you type A personalities ought to read this:

Now, as a psychologist, you would think that I would know that there is some link between stress and heart problems and I do intellectually, but emotionally, it finally sank in that perhaps my job and the subsequent stress of dealing over a number of years with patients with severe mental illness and anger issues might have contributed to my heart attack..."

Sigmund Carl and Alfred weigh in with The SC&A Friday One Thousand Words Project. I won't excerpt it, you just have to see it; and of course, seeing is believing.

The Assistant Village idiot has written TWO posts that I think are worthy (I've never highlighted two before - AVI, you are a FIRST). The first of the two is Robert Fulghum is Dangerous:

Robert Fulghum, the All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten author, persists in that paternalistic tone of his years later. He uses that cute “we,” when he means “you,” just like I did with the boys when they were little. “We should pick up our toys.”

A delightfulread. Also chosen is AVI's well written thoughts on the departure from the political scene of Cindy Sheehan:

I never thought the common explanations for her behavior, pro and con, adequately explained her motivations. We like things to be simple in our public figures, enacting the myth that we have assigned to them so we can put them in a box. It’s intellectually and emotionally tidy that way.

It has been an interesting exercise for me to look at the explanatory power of the various simplifications of Cindy Sheehan and where they fall short, in order to find a combination which covers the waterfront."

We now turn to neo-neocon and her take on the parole of Jack Kevorkian - Dr. Death:

Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” back in the 1950s, well before he became known for his willingness to help non-terminally ill but suffering patients end their lives. It comes as no real surprise that his medical specialty was pathology, and indications are that he evinced a deep and unusual a fascination with death even for pathologists. His interest in prison predates his own sojourn there, as well; he was asked to leave his medical residency at the University of Michigan back in 1958 for wanting to experiment (consensually) on convicts as they were being executed."

Shrinkwrapped takes a look at Over Valued Selves and Overvalued Ideas:

We live in a very dangerous world, a world in which empowered individuals and small groups can cause great damage. In such a world, attention to one's environment, which can at times border on paranoia, can be seen as a trait enhancing survival. In such a world, those who overvalue their own self and their own ideas place themselves and others at risk.

When I describe an idea as overvalued, I mean that an idea has acquired significant affective importance and meaning for a person. The person loses the ability to adequately "reality test" the idea and the idea escapes the usual moment to moment comparison with the state of reality that allows us to discard ideas when they fail the test."

And, last, but never least, we turn to Ironshrink who takes a look at how much of our brain power do we really use?

The idea that we only use 10% of our brains is alluring. Why, just imagine what we could do if we somehow switched on the other 90%. Telekinesis! Mind reading! Time travel! Forging an army of zombie slaves! Who wouldn’t trade their crystal balls for powers like those?"

And there you have it boys and girls, another tour through the amazing Psych-Bloggers. Until next time then...

Posted by GM Roper at June 3, 2007 03:51 AM | TrackBack