What’s Next for the Health Care Debate?

A Demand for Process and Transparency

While the Senate was voting on the motion to proceed with the straight repeal plan that would eliminate coverage for millions of Americans, I was in the exam room of my doctor’s office, and using my newly-acquired Medicaid for the first time. How did I feel? Suffice it to say that ...
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What’s Next for the Health Care Debate?

The Visibility of Value

Thoughts on the Seen and the Unseen

There is a superstition of modernity which declares that nature contains no properties that are not countenanced by the natural sciences. By “superstition” I mean: no one knows how and when this was proved nor has anyone shown how it helps us to live better. On the presumption that natural ...
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The Visibility of Value

Evil is Not a Psychiatric Illness

A reflection on Dr. Steven Reisner’s message

Since the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy, media has been glutted with op-eds suggesting he is unfit for the role of presidency because he is “mentally ill,” with doctors and psychiatrists intentionally violating the Goldwater Rule by attempting to diagnose the new president without having had any clinical contact. At ...
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Evil is Not a Psychiatric Illness

The Insanity of Narcissism

Exploring Narcissism in Today’s Politics

Mental health practitioners generally agree, since the Goldwater days, that it is not appropriate to offer psychoanalytic diagnoses of public figures we’ve never actually interviewed or treated. However, many of us, myself included, are chomping at the bit these days. It’s especially tempting for me, since I’ve been writing and ...
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The Insanity of Narcissism

Mental Wealth and Hellbeing

Pitting the productive against the human

When the Scottish Government announced its ten year strategy on mental health at the end of March, bureaucrats would have known exactly how it would be received. The first draft mapped the next 120 months of life for citizens affected by mental ill health, and ran 12-pages. It was roundly criticized for ...
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Mental Wealth and Hellbeing

The Disability Paradox

Further thoughts on inequality, disability, and the imaginal

Do you have a disability? Do you want to work? This seemingly innocent pairing of questions should immediately raise a red flag, for it is technically oxymoronic: in the United States, the disabled, by definition, are those who cannot work, at least in any significant sense. Granted, ...

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Invisible Privilege, Unspoken Racism

From street transactions to the NYSED disability campaign

I spent most of my summer on the Italian coast, in the little town where I was born, as I do almost every year. The difference, this time, was that I had not been back to my home country for a whole year. This gave me some sort of a ...

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