Reading Time: 6 minutesBipolar disorder type I (BP-I) is considered by the DSM-V to be a cross between a psychotic disorder because of the tendency towards obsessive fixations and a mood disorder due to the wild and often sudden presentations of emotional affect (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). BP-I includes periods of mania marked by increased creativity, hyperactivity, distractability,…
Dear NSA: Please Don’t Put Me on a Watch List
Reading Time: 3 minutesSometimes writers have to research things that could be considered… interesting to the sorts of people who use spiders, scrapers, and keyword alerts to determine who goes on a watch list.
Addiction Is Not a Moral Failing – And It’s Not a Disease, Either
Reading Time: 8 minutesAddiction is neither a moral failing (a personality flaw) nor a disease (a medical affliction). Instead, it is the maladaptive response to intense emotional trauma, and it should be addressed appropriately with compassion.
On Support of Psychological Dysfunction With and Without Pharmaceuticals
Reading Time: 7 minutesAdequate support for ADHD, depression, and other psychological dysfunction often requires both pharmaceutical and material intervention; one or the other is rarely sufficient.
Shifting Gears
Reading Time: < 1 minuteDue to a few factors far outside of my control, I have elected to stop my graduate school pursuits for the time being and focus on other things. I am still passionate about contributing to the burgeoning understanding of autism and neurodiversity, and I am still dedicated to developing methods of accommodation and accessibility even…
Moving Beyond Autism as a Pathology
Reading Time: 16 minutesOne of the key milestones for autism begins in the earliest stages of language acquisition and cognitive structuring, manifesting as a divergence of how language is coded as part of the social script. Unfortunately, the pervasive linguistic culture has been defined by allistic standards, which means that layers of implicit meaning and subtext are normalized in social engagement, especially with language games…
Thiside of Anywhere, available May 1, 2024
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs of May 1, 2024, you can get a copy of “Thiside of Anywhere” in Kindle, paperback, or hardcover on Amazon!
A Brief Aside about Watson, Skinner, Bandura, and Behaviorism
Reading Time: 8 minutesIn point of fact, the ethical sins that Skinner gets popularly saddled with fall more squarely on Ivar Lovaas and John Watson. Both Lovaas and Watson presented behaviorism as a method of training (I refuse to call their version “learning”) that used positive and negative forms of reinforcement (applying or denying) and applied both rewards and punishments (pleasant or unpleasant things)…
Journalistic Integrity Versus Fake News
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis post first appeared in the JRN200 course in the University of Arizona Global Campus. Fake news is broadly defined as a story presented in credible-looking media that is not just written with false information but does so with the intent to influence readers 1 . These pieces are usually written with a tiny core…
Open Access to Information Is a Democratic Imperative
Reading Time: 3 minutesThis piece first appeared as a discussion post for the course JRN200 at the University of Arizona Global Campus. …a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to…