In the end, this round of antidepressants didn’t do me much good. I tried the latest kind, upped and downed the dose with my doctor, and stuck with the most promising for a year and a half before deciding to ditch them at the end of the summer. Maybe there were days when they evened…
I have dyslexia. Spelling and pronunciation are, for me, nonexistent abilities. While spell-check is a blessing, I recently gave a “mediation” rather than a “meditation” at church – spell-checking programs do not correct a wrong real word. And I must be careful when speaking not to confuse people with my pronunciation of more complicated words….
In his book, Daniel Bowman Jr. describes wanting to crawl out of his skin when someone touches him without warning at church. Altar call, coffee hour and “popcorn prayers” are equally hard – a “gauntlet of unspoken rules and expectations requiring vigilant navigation” (p.112). We asked Bowman to elaborate on what churches can do differently….
Imagine a university-aged youth who has just experienced his first episode of psychosis, a common symptom of psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia. Let’s call this young man Ben. Research has shown that early intervention treatment programs in young people with a first episode of psychosis can have a huge positive effect on the trajectory of…
When prompted to think of someone with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder), most people imagine an overly active child, usually a boy, bouncing off the walls in class, unable to retain any bits of information. When prompted to think of someone with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), most imagine a quiet, perhaps non-verbal child (also usually…
Last spring, I had the chance to participate in a Writers at Work program at the Hay Festival, a large book festival in Wales. It was an amazing experience: for ten days, I was one of ten early-career writers treated to a full schedule of private masterclasses and events with some of the biggest names…
Chaim Potok would call it “seeing between the blinks.” He says an artist does this. And God. I believe my nephew does, too. He sees what the rest of the world misses. It started with a strawberry. One day we were on the grass in our front yard and my nephew told me he hated…
Brazilian State Legislator Andréa Werner runs a one-of-a-kind office. “Our working hours are flexible, most of the team works from home, we changed the lighting in our offices to be less bright than other offices, and we also create processes to make sure people have the resources they need,” says Werner. “My team is very…
In 1998, I was teaching middle school students in Minnesota. I wasn’t aware that Australian sociologist Judy Singer and American journalist Harvey Blume were discussing the idea of individual differences in brain variation and neurodiversity. What I did know at that time was Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach. His words, written then, echo…
“Kill yourself!” The client repeated this countless times throughout our counselling session. This tic had been observed and discussed as evidence of the client’s experience of tourette’s syndrome, and now neither of us bothered reacting to its presence. Instead, it functioned as an indicator of the client’s stress level – utterances would increase as we…
I am sinister. How gauche! Yes, I‘m left-handed. Both “sinister” and “gauche” mean “left” in other languages (Latin and French, respectively). This reveals the latent prejudices of the past. I did not receive the ruler slap in school for writing left-handed. In kindergarten I told the other kids that the scissors with writing on them…
My wife is pretty sure I have ADHD. She’d know; after all, she’s got an ADHD diagnosis as have two of our kids and I’m a lot like them (perhaps unsurprisingly). My mom, however, is less persuaded. I was a restless kid but I always did fine in school and wasn’t any more disruptive than…
|
Uploaded
Failed
|
 |
