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On Therapy

• [article] Why do people kill themselves? — 16 Aug 2024
  Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
• [article] Overengineering 'calm down' — 21 Mar 2024
  Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.
• [article] The Value of Brain Waves — 19 Feb 2024
  Brain waves are subject to the same pop-psych fluff as everything else brain related. There’s no harm in it, but looking a little more carefully actually makes them a useful tool for understanding behaviour.
• [article] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
  Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
• [article] On managing magic mushroom experiences — 29 Jul 2023
  Mushrooms change the balance between inside-out forces (the all-consuming neural networks that support the ‘self’) and outside-in forces (the environment and world around us). This model seems most useful in explaining the mushroom experience.
• [article] Knowledge is just easy measurement — 31 Jan 2023
  We often rely too heavily on the easiest measurements for a thing, calling that knowledge and then waving away the evidence that there is more to be known. The shallowest data points become the only ones we consider, and we often don’t even notice.
• [article] Obscuring Banalities — 16 Dec 2022
  We often use complicated-sounding words to dress up simple ideas about the human experience. But this isn’t just self-indulgence. It’s also a desire to conform to the right ‘ways’ of knowing as well as a desire for something to point at—an enemy, so to speak.
• [article] Trans-opportunism is boring — 22 Nov 2022
  Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.
• [article] A Science of Discontent — 31 Oct 2022
  We regularly create ‘psychic predators’, choosing to concentrate on the uncontrollability of events or concentrating on events we can’t control. A far better way of approaching this is to exercise our ‘psychic muscles’.
• [article] Useful Pharmacology — 28 Jul 2022
  We absolutely love some drugs. Others terrify us. The difference is familiarity more than any other single thing and the result is confusion. A much more principled framework for thinking about drugs is thinking of them as tools.
• [article] The five stages of grief are a lie — 12 Apr 2022
  The five stages of grief were never supposed to be an orderly process, despite the common wisdom of many clinicians. Rather, anyone can experience any stage at any time, and the best support recognises this.
• [article] Insight and the Sciences — 21 Apr 2021
  Varela’s gestures of awareness—suspension, redirection, letting go—align with cognitive science findings on insight, emphasizing their value in understanding human thought and experience.
• [article] Varela's Gestures — 10 Apr 2021
  Neuroscientist Francisco Varela’s “gestures” of awareness—suspension, redirection, and letting go—are an incredibly simple guide to understanding the connection between the brain and the phenomenon of insight, both those mundane and profound.
• [article] Existential Therapy — 13 Feb 2021
  Existential therapy seems like an ideal way to go about psychological healing, given the philosophy it grew out of. Unfortunately, like existentialism it suffers from ‘great man’ syndrome—a huge number of idiosyncratic practices that make it difficult to know how good it really is.
• [article] States of Mind — 5 Dec 2020
  There is no such thing as an ‘altered’ state of mind. Or rather, all states of mind are ones that are altered. Preferring the familiar ones provides a dangerous sense of safety, and avoiding the profound ones obscures some of the greatest benefits.