We are talking a lot about mental health and associated stigma. The consensus seems to be that mental health stigma is on the run, especially when we talk about workplace mental health. I’m not so sure. I found myself asking, how far have we come with mental health stigma? Roughly 25 years ago I got a call from my mother. “It’s your dad. He’s in the hospital, and he’s crazy and I don’t know what to do.” It was clear…
“The sins of the fathers are to be laid upon the children” (from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene V). And so it goes when we start to talk about mental health in the US, and the US workforce. My social media advisor would tell me not to use the article I’ve linked below. It’s an old article (2013), it’s critical of Ronald Reagan (a third rail, although he might not mind that so much), and it’s just…
We love to complain about work. It’s water cooler talk – we connect over the shared misery that we often don’t actually feel. Why?
Suffering is inevitable, misery is optional In last week’s post, I wrote on suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhist philosophy. Blog posts don’t do it justice but it’s worth whetting appetites if I can. I also wrote that suffering is inevitable, but misery is optional. Alas, we’ve gotten it entirely backward. We desperately want to believe that misery is natural – in fact, we wear misery with pride. We also think that suffering can somehow be defeated by believing…
Suffering is inevitable, misery is optional I am a “glass half-full” kind of guy. Most of the time I find the good in people and in my circumstances, no matter how bad things seem. I just naturally believe that although suffering is inevitable, misery is option When Gabriel died, through all the heart-rending tears there was magic and a great outpouring of love in the world. You can read about that here. On getting fired (euphemistically, “down-sized”) I got a…
The last four years have been like living in a house with an alcoholic parent. The trauma isn’t that you have a parent who’s a drunk; it’s that you never know what outrage is coming next.
Yesterday Trump tweeted to his followers, “always remember this day.” It may be one of the few things on which we agree.
I can barely contain my tears today. Is this the genuine heart of sadness? I wrote that, and much of what follows, this morning in an email to a friend of nearly 50 years. Now I write it for you. All of you. Everyone. Even, maybe especially, those of you with whom I disagree about things that matter When I woke Monday to the news from Las Vegas, I remember feeling first the suffering of all those people injured.…
Life is just too short to waste a moment of it. Really. Really, really. Too. Damn. Short. Let’s get this in perspective: if the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth were condensed down to a year: Humans (the genus homo) appeared today, about 4 hours, 52 minutes ago Archaic humans (subgenus homo) appeared 1 hour, 10 minutes ago Anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens) appeared 23 minutes, 21.6 seconds ago The average human lifespan in the US, as of 2015, is…
Every year I tell myself I’m going to write a new post about losing a child. I never do. A couple of years ago, I realized that in this post, I left it all on the table. I republished it with a few minor changes, and today I’m doing it again. Because whether or not it needs saying, I want to say happy birthday to our angel and 5th of our 6 children, Gabriel. What follows is desperately sad, but…
