Who Loves You

Music

I’ve been having fun listening to this song lately. I think the top YouTube comment on the music video (written by a user named White Noise) is especially charming:

“I was 8 years old when this song came out. One day, while my Mom and I were sitting in our Gremlin in a bank drive-thru this song came on the radio. There were six lanes, everyone had their car windows down and playing this song. It was like a Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons concert. All four tellers were cashing checks and dancing to this song in unison. Such a great memory brought back. Thank you for posting this awesome video!”

John Steinbeck on Falling in Love

Quotations

I’ve long admired this letter John Steinbeck wrote in 1958 to his eldest son, who had just admitted to falling desperately in love with a girl at boarding school. Steinbeck writes to his son with wisdom, warmth, tenderness, and respect. I hope you like this letter as much as I do.

…

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

…

(With thanks to Brain Pickings for a copy of the text.)

Quotations

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

Proverbs 13:15

Toward a Continuum of Mental Health and Disorder

Scholarly

A short paper I wrote for a class on clinical psychopathology. 

Mental health has long been considered as a separate entity from mental illness. Indeed, in many ways the field of psychopathology seems built on the assumption that “normal” behaviors are discontinuous with “abnormal” ones – and that the line dividing them acts as a strict and impenetrable barrier. But failures to capture the nuances of mental disorder in clinical practice have awakened resistance to this assumption. We have instead begun to wonder, as developmental psychopathologist Dante Cicchetti (1993) proposed, whether “the mechanisms responsible for abnormal behavior may be only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from those that cause normal variability.”

So far, we have conducted little systematic research testing the hypothesis that abnormality represents the extreme of a continuum of normal variability in behavior (Rutter & Sroufe, 2000). But our attempts to respond to this idea probe deeply into philosophical questions about the very nature of mental health. And our conclusions will shape decisions about nosology, diagnosis, and treatment, while shedding light on such persistent problems as the “medicalization of normality” (Craighead, Miklowitz, & Craighead, 2017). The implications – for society, research, and clinical care – cannot be overstated.

In this paper, we will briefly review the history of dichotomous, discontinuous thinking about psychopathology and then describe its gradual evolution to a more continuous, dimensional approach. We will also contemplate the structural and subjective implications of this change as our field moves forward.

Read More“Toward a Continuum of Mental Health and Disorder”

Pictures
Winter walk with Lucky.

Random Snippets

Poems

Can you, the wind, behold a greater thing
Than this, your mount’nous celebration king?
I don’t recall how fast the towers cracked
But, lo, the sound was mighty with the fall.

…

The wind was howling but you couldn’t hear. People were stuffing their homes with corncob pipes and cellophane wrappers. What is the sense in that?

…

Love, how quickly you render me a fool.
Never has there been a more passionate or painful school.
Love, how quickly you render me a fool.

Look how the mind slips under your rule—
Helpless to withstand the quiet care.
Love, how quickly you render me a fool.

Longing heart and burning stare—
Despairing, hoping, hope, despair.

 

Quotations

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

I love this quotation. I think it captures the truth so well – and it feels like a motto I could live by. Bonus points if you know where it comes from! (Check the tags on this post – or click here – if you want the answer.)

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