A Conceptual Revolution

The creative side of culture change

Lois Holzman Ph.D.

The Paradoxes of Good Therapy

We have to be completely responsive to clients' ways of talking and simultaneously join them in developing new, opportunities and performances in their everyday lives.

Embrace the Unknowable, No Matter How Grim

What can we do when anxiety is our constant companion?

We Need To Talk! Or Do We?

How are these questions related: Do you talk—really talk—with your therapist, and do people really want to dialogue across differences?

Being True to Yourself Is Harder Than You Think

Sometimes it's helpful to remind yourself where the "self" came from.

How to Add Some Spark to Your Relationships

If you don't act as a knower, your conversations can take unexpected turns that can build healthy relationships.

Being Weird Is Good Teaching

Every day, our culture reinforces the biases and hierarchies that maintain inequity and injustice. To be truly culturally relevant, educators must change that.

The Communication Trap

Information begets more information and opinion. Opinion begets more opinion and information. Where is communication taking us?

A Fresh Take on “Stages of Life”—It Can Change Your Life!

Creating stages for development is the greatest gift we can give to young people.

The "Golden Rule" For Better Relationships: Say "Yes-and..."

Are your conversations filled with denials, rejections, and negations of what someone says? Do they get tense, lead to bad feelings, turn into an argument, go nowhere?

From STEM to STEAM to Developmental Learning

Will STEM education be just another fad? Not if Dr. Jim Martinez has anything to do with it.

Mad in America—Let Me Count the Ways

Can we de-medicalize misery and suffering? Many are trying, including award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker.

We Have to Take Our Chances on Development (and Democracy)

Social therapist Fred Newman says that while we might agree on how we'd like to develop ourselves and the world, there are no guarantees when it comes to development or democracy.

Play as if Your Mental Health Depended on It

Play helps us belong. Belonging helps us move about and around feeling alone, isolated and victimized. Playing is how we become part of existing communities and create new ones.

Is Mental Health Strictly Mental?

“Mental health” and “mental illness” mischaracterize neurodivergence by locating it as a problem, and a problem in the head, and nowhere else.

A Fresh Take on Asperger's

Whether Asperger's is a disorder is a matter of context. Disorder is relational and situational, not absolute and irrevocable, as terminology and everyday assumption suggest.

What Makes for a "Happy School?"

It's a simple idea, really. Children learn when they're happy. And they're happy when they have control over what and how they learn. Meet Sugata Mitra, who makes it happen.

What’s the Opposite of Play?

Play might well be the cure—for loneliness, depression, social isolation, and more. What happens when we play, play at, and play along? Watch!

Your Autistic Child May Have a Secondary Disability

Challenges for people of difference should be related to as social, regardless of any biological or neurological characteristic. Otherwise, we can be making things worse.

Why We Play the Blame Game

The notion that we are either this or that — that we’re either smart or not, racist or not, sexist or not, good or not — is fundamentally undevelopmental.

Community as a Heart

Is the cruelty of the world getting to you? Are you seeking a haven?

The Diagnostic Debate, Continued

How are people impacted on by the pervasiveness of the biologically-based diagnostic model? Ongoing international survey shows people are grateful to be asked what they think!

Enhanced Interrogation: Is it Psychology’s Only Scandal?

The largest professional body of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, may be weathering this latest storm, but the exposure of its decade-long supoort of torture—despite vehement member opposition—has some psychologists calling for an examination of all the “epistemological and material” violence that psychology inflicts on masses of people.

How I Learned I'm More Than My Pathology

Being the "queen of self-pathology" didn't give me or anyone around me very much to relate to or make a life with. I learned I didn't have to be a victim of the world’s craziness, but could play with the craziness, build with it, and grow.

Tim Hunt, Sexism and the Cult of Science

Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt 's comment that "girls" shouldn't do science with men went viral.—and opened up an important dialogue on the institutional sexism of the natural sciences and medicine. But that's not the whole story...

How Do You Think About Emotional Distress? Take the Survey!

What would happen if we could talk to a professional about the pain we're feeling without being boxed into the illness frame? Or choosing a diagnosis? What would we say? What would we learn? Participate in this national survey and be part of the discovery.

In the Name of Knowledge, Schools are Stupid

People in schools are trapped in an authoritarian educational bureaucracy beholden to corporate and political interests. But they’re also trapped by a culture that insists we (especially the professional knowers among us) must know what we’re doing or we wouldn’t be doing it.

Is a Broken Heart Like a Broken Leg?

What will be the future of mental health? That's the question confronted by leading experts who are working to broaden what it means to help those in emotional pain, inform the public of options that already exist, and create new tools for leading a happier life.

Note to Self: How I Plan to End My Life

If you've "lost your memory" have you lost your personhood? Your humanity? This is a critical question in discussing ways to humanize dementia care.

Is Treatment Helping? Can We Ever Know?

What is a normal, garden-variety human being? How does one go about being human? Without robust answers to these questions, discussions of abnormality or psychopathology will be fatally constrained in their ability to bring about lasting and effective solutions. Finding normal & understanding how it is achieved & maintained is perhaps the most pressing issue of our times.

How to Improve Your Emotional Health in 2015

Is it really better to give than to receive? What if all you have to give is your pain? Always playing the getting game instead of the giving game keeps us alone and deprived.

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