I’m talking with Lynn Nanos, a Massachusetts social worker specialized in evaluating serious mental illness. Lynn has worked in emergency mental health care for over ten years, and recently she wrote Breakdown: A Clinician’s Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry. We’ve previously talked about the basic problems with…
I’m talking with Lynn Nanos, a social worker specialized in evaluating serious mental illness. Lynn has worked in emergency care, including in-home evaluations, for over ten years, and recently she wrote Breakdown: A Clinician’s Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry. Not many professionals are willing to speak out…
I’m talking with Lynn Nanos, a social worker specialized in evaluating serious mental illness. Lynn has worked in emergency care, including in-home evaluations, for over ten years, and recently she wrote Breakdown: A Clinician’s Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry. We’ve had two great conversations about why it’s…
Happiness is like oxygen.
It is invisible and almost impossible to define in a satisfactory way. In description, it appears passive: contentment, well-being, satisfaction. You can feel air if you wave your hand through it, and you can feel happiness simply by forcing a smile, and holding it long enough…
I want to share with you my cool opportunity to talk to an expert on what goes wrong when families try to get help for their loved ones with severe mental illness. You may know that in 2013, my family suffered the ultimate breakdown: my son with untreated severe mental…
Animals amaze us by knowing all kinds of things without any way to learn them. When we can see learning, we’re interested but not amazed: okay, so flocks of geese learn from each other how to migrate. Cool. But what’s really freaky is when there clearly can’t be any learning.
During their first week of life, kittens start lining up to nurse in the same order, but puppies never learn that. It’s obviously more efficient to have it all worked out and not keep fighting at every meal, so why don’t puppies learn it too?
I’m far from being an…
I’m watching video of an orphan kitten who was adopted by a mother cat with a litter about the same age. (Thanks Kitten Academy!) The orphan, named Chai, arrived at about two weeks old, having been bottle-fed by an animal shelter until then. Could Chai learn to nurse with the…
Nobody wants to own it. It’s senseless, gory, unpredictable, and always gut-wrenchingly sad. I wouldn’t want to own it, either, but I do. It’s the violence of insanity. How should we think about it? Does mental illness cause violence, or doesn’t it?
Lots of harm comes from thinking that all…
