Abstract Viktor Frankl has the best answer to the mental health crisis during COVID-19, and we ignore him at our own peril. His dialectical and paradoxical self-transcendence (ST) model emphasizes that we can find our true self only by letting go of the old one. He defines meaning in terms of ST and propose […]
Frontline workers keep us safe. Police officers, firefighters, emergency medical services, emergency department teams, doctors, nurses, long-term care aides, outreach social workers and corrections staff work in risky settings, even without the added pressures that accompany a pandemic. Every day and every shift they may be called upon to deal with life-threatening dangers and injuries—and […]
At the facility where I work, we define addiction as a result of living a life that lacks personal meaning. The solution is, thus, obvious: Help clients begin the process of pursuing a meaningful life. But how to accomplish this? We’ve been working for more than a decade answering that question. One conclusion we’ve come […]
Addiction psychologists generally believe that shame is a bad thing for someone suffering from addiction. Philosophers disagree.
The play, Equus, has stirred the imagination of many psychologists—mainly because it raises doubts about what we do in the therapeutic hour.
The opioid crisis and fentanyl, the opioid most responsible for drug overdoses, has once again brought addiction into focus. In British Columbia, where the crisis is at its worst in Canada, the overdose death rate from illicit drugs has been rising since 2008.
Dr. Laura Armstrong, Ph.D., C.Psych., is an Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychologist, and researcher at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, in the School of Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Spirituality.
Changing Environments Over the past decade, “meaningful work” has become a phrase I see more frequently in management and leadership circles. Google Scholar searches for the term “meaningful work” yields 16 items between 1981 and 1990, 38 between 1991 and 2000, 140 between 2001 and 2010, and 297 between 2011 and 2018. I am quite […]
Using a model researched and developed by Human Dynamics Inc., entitled The Agile Business Leader (ABL) Leadership Development Program, this session is designed to provide leaders with a primer on practices and tools for functioning in a world of complexity, chaos, interdependency, and ambiguity. This leadership development program creates strategies for success by leveraging existing […]
My life’s work has been an intellectual, creative, and lived exploration of healing and existential meaning at the intersections of mind, body, and dialogue. Provocative questions in medical ethics brought me to the fields of philosophy and medicine, but it was sitting with patients as a psychiatrist and listening to their life-stories that invited a […]