Were Carl Rogers and Michel Foucault the same person? You make the call:

Moyers v. Stewart

I saw the Bill Moyers program ‘Journal’ online last night. He was interviewing Jon Stewart from the Daily Show. One of the items that was discussed was Stewart’s interview with an Iraqi author where they discussed how it was o be in a state of almost constant loss. The Iraqi author stated that most people that could leave the country did. So I wonder ‘who is left over there?’ The other point that was made, and which was also made on Morning Edition today, was that the press put so much attention on the Virginia Tech murders, yet the Iraqi people are murdered at a far greater rate each day over there. The idea occurs that the Iraqi people are depersonalized; I am not sure if that is based on race, distance, thoughtlessness, religion or what. How does one grieve in a war zone? How does our country not grieve those people?

Drugs are Good Money.

While I was doing more research on these two papers I am writing, I came across an article which claimed that more than 50% of the authors of the DSM had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. While this is sadly unsurprising to me, it still carries a certain amount of gravity. Since many symptoms of so called disorders are measured subjectively, the influence of big pharma on the evolution of this science/art must be enormous.

what to do, what to do?

Lately I have been thinking that a staged approach to change might be the way to in almost all areas. The first stage would involve a behavioral emphasis and the second stage would involve an existential approach. The idea would be that if the patient had some pressing problem with a set of behaviors that she wanted changed, then that would be addressed immediately with a behavioral approach. The guiding theory underlying all of this would be that eventually the pursuit of meaning would be addressed in session, and extensively.

Life Coaching

I talked to a friend of mine who does life coaching this week. He says that the whole idea of it for him is to come from a place of strength instead of a place of deficit. He said that with life coaching the belief is that the client has all the answers within them, a la Rogers. The process he described sounded similar to solution focused therapy.