Bonjour tout le monde (an English message will follow). L’automne dernier, j’ai eu l’honneur d’agir comme hôte de notre 6e édition de l’École Mini-Psy de l’Institut Douglas, une série de présentations qui s’adressent au grand public. Les vidéos des présentations se trouveront sur notre site web à partir du 1er juin, à raison d’une nouvelle vidéo [...]
Category Archives: Depression
How blue is blue: Understanding depression and burnout
Hi folks, Every year the Douglas Institute hosts a series of lectures for the general public called the Mini-Psych School. We then produce DVDs of these lectures and post them on line. In 2009, I gave a lecture entitled How blue is blue? Here it is in two parts. You might want to keep a [...]
Abuse begets abuse
Today’s column was inspired by the many clients I have met with over the years who felt abused of neglected by their parents. In exploring their histories, the question of what made their parents into the people they became always comes up. Often the impact of an abusive experience can last far longer than one [...]
Love me, love my broccoli
It’s always amazing to see what triggers someone off. Every once in a while a seemingly innocuous event or statement can really get to us, resulting in a strong emotional reaction (anger, depression, anxiety, etc.). In most cases, this emotion is stirred not so much by the event as it is by the assumptions it [...]
What made me so happy?
What question teaches us more: “What went wrong?” or “What went right?” “What the hell happened there?” is a question I often find myself asking when the golf ball I just hit goes sailing off into the forest. More often than not I just scratch my head and really have no idea. On the other [...]
The judge, jury and witnesses were all paid off
Prejudice is easy to detect in others. It’s much harder to see in ourselves. This is because our attitudes just seem to fit our observations, or perhaps more accurately, our observations happen to fit our attitudes. Of course, trying to figure out whether experience feeds attitudes or attitudes feed experience may be a chicken and [...]
Am I smart or just lucky?
We are constantly facing new challenges. Yet while some of us seem to be better at dealing with them than others, skill and intelligence are not the only qualities that set people apart. Two people with the exact same abilities will have radically different experiences when facing new challenges based on their attributional style and [...]
Haiti: Can help really help?
Every time a tragic event occurs I receive a call form someone in authority and am asked if I, or a team of my colleagues, can provide some psychological help. Whether the events are local (the suicide of a patient, the collapse of a highway overpass, the accidental death of a circus performer) or international [...]
Standards of happiness
Is there a secret to happiness? Well, I can’t say for sure but if you like to get your psychology from pithy aphorisms there are plenty of secrets out there. One secret to happiness that recently came to my attention was the following: Lower Your Standards! The psychologist in me says YES! I cannot think [...]
Distorted self-perceptions
As a psychologist, I sometimes joke that most clients fall into one of two broad categories. The first group (the majority) are those that think very little of themselves. For these people, my job is to try to convince them they are not as bad as they believe. Then there are the rest, the ones [...]
