Benefits of effective teamwork

Source: Ryan Hyde, Flickr, CC 2.0 This article distills what has worked best for my clients who have a problem with time management and procrastination. Sometimes foundational to the problem is that the person doesn't care enough to manage time well. They know that a productive life is better led than a slothful one, but are impeded by depression or having been beaten up in life’s first rounds, so it’s hard to come out for the next round. Or their life is in such disarray that managing time better feels insignificant, like polishing the brass on the Titanic. Of course, those are tough situations, but if that's where you are, your best shot is to defer thinking about time management and instead first take baby steps to improve your life, whether it's to clean a corner of one room, take walks, decide to cut back even a bit on your substance abuse, get a job you can easily get, even if it’s barista, see the dentist, or help someone worse off. That can boost your … [Read more...] about Time Management and Procrastination: What works

Click on almost any standard health site, such as Web-MD, and look up “depression” and it will report that depression is different than normal sadness. The site will normally proceed to proclaim that, unlike normal sadness, depression is a "treatable medical condition." Unfortunately, differentiating depression from sadness by describing the former as “a treatable medical condition” does not really explain what depression is; it only tells you that you need to see a doctor. So, let’s be very clear about what depression is and then proceed to see why we can characterize depressive episodes in terms of depressive reactions, depressive disorders, and depressive diseases. To start, let’s follow the lead of Web-MD and other medical sites by acknowledging that it is absolutely the case that, although they are related, sadness and depression are very different entities. Let me give a personal example. … [Read more...] about Three Kinds of Depressive Episodes

When I first heard of the proposed new childhood diagnosis of "Sluggish cognitive Tempo Disorder," I thought it was an April Fools Day joke and I wrote a Psychology Today blog asking this question. New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz soon disillusioned me. The proponents of the new disorder were some very serious people, he assured me, and this purported new disorder is no joke. Is Sluggish Cgognitve Tempo Disorder a Joke? In today's Daily Beast a pediatrician who writes under the name Russell Saunders wonders the same thing. Is this a joke? Taking a similar tongue-in-cheek approach as I did to this purported new "disorder", Suanders admits that he himself has the disorder, though up until now, he simply considered himself "scatter-brained," not mentally ill. As a kid he often turned in his assignments late, and even today he tends to forget about doing his paperwork on time. Suanders concludes that not every deviation from normal childhood is a mental disorder, though many doctors … [Read more...] about What to do when your Child is Scatterbrained