Articles & Workbooks
ARTICLES -- Teach Mental Health via Wise Consciousness & Skilled Habits. Mentally healthy people embrace their experiences of trauma and their unpleasant feelings that occur naturally in life. They manage these adversities without dwelling in the mental states of anxiety, worry, procrastination, or depression. These four mental states are the quartet of self-doubt that often are identified as psychopathology, chemical imbalances in the brain, and diagnosed with mental illness.
Mental health diagnoses are based on the medical model (study diagnose and treat) and the disease model (a discernible set of symptoms and a predictable course). Licensed clinicians assess the patient's presenting symptoms as compared to disease criteria and take the patient's history of symptoms. Science is not able to verify mental illness diagnoses with laboratory and scan results. Iatrogenic illness is disease caused by the healer, often resulting from from pathogenic diagnostic labeling. Labeling theory informs identity and behavior is influenced and can be determined by the terms (labels) used to describe or classify people. Labeling is associated with the concepts of self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotyping. Psychiatric patients also suffer side-effects, drug reactions, and dependence from one or multiple psychotropic medications.
Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits are teachable, thus Mental Health is learnable. Clinicians, academics, researchers, and policymakers should examine current theories of mental illness that are dominated by the medical and disease models and the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, these scholars should give consideration to the etiology of mental suffering as learned deficits in Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits that occurred in childhood and adolescence, during our neurobiopsychosocial development. Consequently our understanding of mental suffering is compromised by theories and practices favoring illness models and psychoactive medication of symptoms subjectively diagnosed.
ARTICLES and WORKBOOKS educate mental health by remediating unwise consciousness and unskilled habits that diminish basic trust, cause insecure attachment schema, and complicate identity integration and emotional regulation. WORKBOOKS provide how-to practices that develop the wise conscientiousness and skilled habits that embrace trauma and natural adverse experiences of life while strengthening intact identity, emotional regulation and healthy interpersonal attachments.
ARTICLES for CLINICIANS Educate clinical methods and strategies to develop or enhance the clinical practice of Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits that encourages self-healing and mental health.
POLICY ARTICLES focus on public policy transformation from psychopathology, mental illness, pathogenic diagnoses, and psychoactive medication. To an educational model with mental health clinicians teaching wise consciousness and skilled habits embedded in our social institutions.
Fees for articles and workbooks vary due to the length and research complexity. Members receive a 20% discount.
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Article Summaries
Now Moments and Moments of Meeting in Relationships - A PowerPoint Summary
Now Moments and Moments of Meeting in Relationships:
A Simple Way to Build Intimacy and Secure Attachments in Relationships This seventeen (17) slide PowerPoint illustrates common co-created relationships and displays a blank pallet of “Relationship Stuff” to visualize the space, not to scale, that intimacy occupies. You are shown a graphic of intimacy as a pulsing organ and see the forces that grow and those that shrink intimacy. Some esoteric considerations of the definitions of “Now” and “Present” are addressed, followed by Einstein’s classical diagram “Future and Past Cones of Light on The Hypersurface of The Present.” Some quotes from Einstein’s discussion of the present in his Special Theory of Relativity season your understanding of the diagram. A three-component model of the “Now Moments and Moments of Meeting” practice and a graphic of the growth practitioners can expect are illustrated. The fee for this PowerPoint is $5.00.
Buddhist Psychology Applications To Western Psychotherapy
This article presents a pdf version of a 37-slide PowerPoint presentation rich in content and case examples. Psychotherapy practice based on Buddhist Psychology and Western Psychology is examined and summarized with a side-by-side comparison. The Medical Model is the framework for Western Psychology’s approach to mental health practice. Buddhist Psychology’s foundation for mental health practice is a simpler, more positive approach that embraces natural suffering with wise consciousness and skilled habits. Western cultures socialize people to loathe and avoid natural suffering creating the unwise consciousness and unskilled habits that cause the unnatural suffering that Western Psychology calls psychopathology. This PowerPoint proposes twenty-seven generic practices that can be tailored to transform unwise consciousness and unskilled habits into the wisdom and skill that brings inner peace and creates a path to happiness. The fee for this PowerPoint is $10.00.
Workbook Summaries
Feeling & Mood Workbook Summary
This 12-page workbook references my Blog: “Feelings” An Ironic Song Describing and Prescribing Dysfunction. The “Feelings” Blog discussed the difference between feelings & emotions. The workbook considers how language effects our ability to skillfully address feelings, needs & desires. Parents direct children to “Use your words.” Throughout adult life we should keep: “Using better words.” This workbook provides a 288-word vocabulary of feelings, a glossary of 16-common moods, and a practice tool that: 1) Enables you to assess your feeling vocabulary. 2) Encourages a practice to improve that vocabulary, 3) Enhances ability to convert feelings into expressive language, 4) Differentiates pleasant from unpleasant feelings and moods, 5) Increases understanding of the relationship between feelings and moods, 6) Improves awareness of mood & suggests corrective practices to improve mood. The fee for this workbook is $10.00.