Rethinking Psychology

How to shed mental health labels and create personal meaning.

by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.

Cosmetic Changes to the DSM-V

Today I’m presenting a guest post from Lois Holzman, Ph.D. Read More

If I am a non-salaried mental health professional in a capitalist society (that is, if I am an entrepreneurial independent professional in the United States) I need patients or clients in order to make money. That’s just how it is. Read More

The Smart Gap

It's natural to experience emotional pain when we recognize that the work that we would love to do is, if not completely unavailable to us, just unavailable enough to make it doubtful that we can proceed and just unavailable enough to make our efforts feel like torture. Read More

The Human Cost of Diagnosis

Many mental health professionals are speaking out about their fears and doubts related to the proposed revisions to the DSM. The following is an invited piece by Lois Holzman on the subject. I think you'll find it interesting and eye-opening.

The Human Cost of Diagnosis

By Lois Holzman, Ph.D. Read More

Win Infinite Meaning!

New World Library, the publisher of my new book Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning, is running a free Rethinking Depression contest where just by entering you can win my instantly-accessible Infinite Meaning class where I introduce noimetic psychology, the new psychology of meaning. It's a deal you can't beat! Read More

The Punishing Personality Type

I am in the first few weeks of talking about my new book Rethinking Depression and its publication coincides with the efforts of the mental health labeling task force to re-label grief as "depression." I'll say more about that re-labeling obscenity in a moment. Read More

Rethinking Depression

There is something profoundly wrong with the way that we currently name and treat certain human phenomena. When we call something a "mental disease" or a "mental disorder" we imply a great deal about its origins, its treatment, its intractability, and its locus of control. Read More

Art and Meaning

In addition to psychology (and noimetic psychology) my interests include creativity, meaning, and activism. I've written at length on subjects like "engaged creativity" and when I train creativity coaches we spend a lot of time on the subject of "meaningful creative work." Read More

"Biological" Is a Trick Word

Everything that is human has a biological component to it. To say that your breathing, your dreaming or your belching is biological in nature adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. Read More

The Noimetic View of Meaning

I'd like to propose a national "Shed Your Depression Label" day. How about Monday, March 12, 2012? Let's put it on our calendars.

On that day anyone who is tired of "having a mental disorder" called depression and who would prefer to be as humanly sad as he or she happens to feel would join in the festivities, maybe by marching through town, maybe by slow dancing in the streets. Read More

Who Knows Why Joe Lied?

In a given case a person's motivation may look simple: for example, Joe, having been caught stealing, might lie to protect himself. Of course, it's an open question as to whether we got that right or wrong; maybe Joe lied to protect his comrades, maybe Joe lied because he's gotten into the habit of always lying, or maybe Joe lied for some other reason. Read More

The Best Test For Original Personality

Many of you were interested in the noimetic view of how original personality, formed personality, and available personality relate, as described in this past post. Let me continue that discussion in this post. Read More

Freud and Meaning, Part 2

In my last post I introduced Judith Levy's ideas on contemporary psychoanalysis and meaning. This post completes Judith's contribution. Judith is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and can be reach at jslphd@aol.com and visited at http://www.JudithSchweigerLevy.com

You can find the first half of Judith's contribution here: Read More

Freud and Meaning

One of the chief distinguishing features of noimetic psychology is how much attention we pay to the ways in which human beings demonstrate what matters to them, decide on what matters to them, and experience meaning. Read More

Should We Divide Homo Sapiens into Subspecies?

If you are a biologist, botanist, zoologist, taxonomist or speciation expert, you see it as part of your job to create categories of subspecies when you see what you consider to be significant or telling differences among the members of a given species. Read More

Why HMOs Should Pay for Talk

The very idea of psychotherapy is among the many things in psychology that I believe should be rethought. Noimetic psychology has a very different view of the provision of mental health services from the prevailing views. Read More

What Is Your Original Personality?

The noimetic point of view on personality is that we are born with a personality. That hardly sounds like a radical statement and yet it is. Every parent knows that her children are born with their idiosyncratic personalities and anyone who has ever watched kittens or puppies knows that each kitten and each puppy comes with an individual personality. Read More

Viktor Frankl and Noimetic Psychology

I am proposing a new psychology, noimetic psychology. It is more accurate about our human experience than previous psychologies and is desperately needed. Read More

What Do We Mean by 'Normal'?

It is past time that we rethink what we mean by the words "normal" and "abnormal" as those words apply to the mental and emotional states and behaviors of human beings. Indeed, it is a real question as to whether those words can be sensibly used at all, given their tremendous baggage and built-in biases and the general confusion they create. Read More

Labeling You a Mental Health Patient

I am advocating that we rethink the whole field of psychology. As we embark on rethinking what we mean by normal, what we mean by mental health, and what we mean by psychotherapy, a first step is removing the labels that we give to people who look for help with their "mental health problems" or who are sent for help for those "problems." Read More