Psychosis sounds like one of those dramatic words TV writers throw around right before a character sprints into traffic. In reality, it is less about Oscar-level breakdowns and more about your brain turning on extra features most people keep in the off position. Think of it as the premium subscription to perception. There are extra...
What Is Consciousness? Consciousness is that little voice in your head that says, “Hey, I exist.” Not the voice that reminds you to buy milk or tells you your ex’s new haircut looks like a failed hedge sculpture, the deeper one. The voice that knows you are you. Without it, you are just a well...
People love to think cults only happen to uneducated people. Then they meet someone who read Freud or Jung once and now explains the entire universe with it. Same brain. Better vocabulary. Cults aren’t a failure of intelligence. They’re a failure of humility.1 Freud and Jung both understood how easily thinking turns into believing. Their...
They’re not. Cults are about what happens to perfectly normal brains when certainty starts feeling safer than thinking.1 Which explains a lot of family dinners. WHAT A CULT ACTUALLY IS A cult is not a belief you dislike. That’s just the internet being the internet. A cult is what happens when a group trains your...
Most people think music is entertainment. It is not. Music is the nervous system’s favorite loophole. It gets past defenses that would slam shut if a therapist, partner, or friend gently said, Maybe you should talk about why you melted down in the Trader Joe’s parking lot.Music hits before meaning. A chord progression goes straight...
I have lost count of how many times someone has asked me,“What do you think about this because you’re a psychiatrist?”1 Or, “Are you analyzing me right now?”2 Or my personal favorite, whispered like I’m scanning their soul with airport security equipment, “You people frighten me.”3 People imagine psychiatrists diagnosing strangers the way botanists identify...
If you’ve been online for more than 11 seconds, you may have noticed that everyone now thinks they have ADHD.Everyone: Your friend, your cousin, the barista with the septum ring, the dog-walker with a PhD in crystals from Naropa, the guy on TikTok whose entire personality is “neurodivergent aesthetic,” and your coworker whose main symptom...
If you have ever wondered why everyone looks like a zombie who overslept the apocalypse, it is because sleep is basically extinct. Insomnia is now so universal that when a patient tells me, “Oh, I sleep great,” I immediately assume they are lying, enlightened, or possessed1. Humans used to sleep in two peaceful chunks surrounded...
“Baseball is a gentle game. Football is war.”1George Carlin (comedian, pointing out that two things can look totally different and still be the same category)Exactly like ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Football and baseball: both sports which involve a ball. ADHD and ASD: both neurodivergent. They just behave like they were coded by different interns....
Most of us do not listen to songs. We inhale them. They move through us like weather fronts. A chord progression hits your chest, your eyes leak for no reason, and you think, “Wow, nostalgia.” Except it is not nostalgia. It is your brain being hacked by someone else’s unresolved emotional catastrophe.If you have ever...
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