Tag: mental-health

The constituents of ‘flow’ experience suggest that loss of self and time consciousness balances facing new challenges with willingness to learn, allowing neither to rest in stasis.

March 7, 2025

Prompt questions like this assume the virtue of loss of self, and even of coordinates of such concepts in constructs like time and space. The chief architect of the development of that virtue- into a concept he claimed his research participants themselves used called ‘FLOW’ – is Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi in bis book, pictured below: I … More The constituents of ‘flow’ experience suggest that loss of self and time consciousness balances facing new challenges with willingness to learn, allowing neither to rest in stasis.

Drinking to ‘leave the world unseen’ or drinking ‘life to the lees’

February 14, 2025

Hippocrene source on Mount Helicon By GOFAS – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11613794 Like everyone else I fancy a sip of the Hippocrene. Above is a photograph claiming to be the real source of the river on Mount Helicon, long famed in mythology as the haunt of the Muses – those nymphs responsible for … More Drinking to ‘leave the world unseen’ or drinking ‘life to the lees’

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Or do they?

February 5, 2025

There are good reasons for avoiding this question. I am 70, but though there is roughly a 21 year gap between my birth date and that of my parents, that gap matters so little now they are gone. At 70, they were though still doing line-dancing and facing the world in retirement. Yet, as I … More “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Or do they?

How many therapists does it take to change a light-bulb?

January 17, 2025

The answer is, of course: ‘One, but FIRST the light-bulb has got to WANT TO CHANGE’. This story was told to me when I first trained as a social worker but it was not told in a spirit of antagonism or resistance to what therapy does in meeting the goals that a therapist might help … More How many therapists does it take to change a light-bulb?

‘Fictile worlds’: a business in the interests of pretensive human well-being aimed at consumers we know to be the ‘most fingent plastic of creatures’.

January 2, 2025

The choice of vocabulary to describe the world we are always trying to shape around us and our needs – either in societies, groups or as individuals – is sometimes the most urgent issue in those worlds. This may be because our chief business as meaning-makers and users of meaning is to get things done … More ‘Fictile worlds’: a business in the interests of pretensive human well-being aimed at consumers we know to be the ‘most fingent plastic of creatures’.

Relationships of Causation or Correlation: Some playful ‘statistical rigour’ about event categories and their impacts on oneself.

December 21, 2024

This prompt ties itself up in knots. It is the nature of WordPress prompts, so to do, in order perhaps to draw ouf variants in response, or, in the worst case scenario, because they rely on assumptions about commonsense definitions of complex words. First of all, they nearly always invoke indeterminate categories, such as ‘impact,’ … More Relationships of Causation or Correlation: Some playful ‘statistical rigour’ about event categories and their impacts on oneself.

The ethical ideal is not to tamper with living things but does that extend to living tissue used in experimental study of brain connections? The example of laboratory cultured  models of brain systems from living tissue

December 18, 2024

The ethical ideal is not to tamper with living things but does that extend to living tissue used in experimental study of brain connections? The example of laboratory cultured  models of brain systems from living tissue in the laboratory in order to test what the variables are that might affect mental processes, as we think … More The ethical ideal is not to tamper with living things but does that extend to living tissue used in experimental study of brain connections? The example of laboratory cultured  models of brain systems from living tissue

The ‘happiness Tsar’: the ideology of well-being despite every circumstance.

December 12, 2024

Photo by Rick Pushinsky of Richard Layard: the ‘happiness Tsar’ under the Tony Blair regime from Annie Maccoby Berglof article in ‘The Financial Times’ ( September 12 2014) available at: https://www.ft.com/content/b1d0b140-3386-11e4-85f1-00144feabdc0 We hear much less of ‘happiness’ since the termination of the Blair-Brown government but perhaps it will return under Keir Starmer, who needs an ideology to … More The ‘happiness Tsar’: the ideology of well-being despite every circumstance.

Expectations, illusions and realities. The issue of the ‘first day’ at something.

December 4, 2024

The Indeed website is an online job search and career placement service, describing itself as the ‘#1’ of its kind. About this I can’t comment on, although their own description is below (part of it at least): Detail of: https://www.indeed.com/about However, I noticed that it raises the issue of the first day at a new … More Expectations, illusions and realities. The issue of the ‘first day’ at something.

If I didn’t sleep, and sleep off unregulated fantasy and vision, I might create. I might!!!!!!! But that is not for many: so I enjoy my sleep instead.

November 17, 2024

The Sleep Foundation (at this link and not related to the commercial ‘infographic’ above) gives seven reasons why we need sleep. They are given below without the trusted sources of information that their web page does have (I have given a link above) to the scientific evidence behind some of these claims. Sleep is needed, … More If I didn’t sleep, and sleep off unregulated fantasy and vision, I might create. I might!!!!!!! But that is not for many: so I enjoy my sleep instead.