Health plans for state and local workers can opt out of the federal law requiring them to treat mental health like other medical conditions.
from Abelson, R. (2021, August 31). Teachers, Police, Other Public Workers Left Out of Mental Health Coverage. The New York Times.
Our great teacher [at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center], Elvin Semrad, actively discouraged us from reading psychiatry textbooks during our first year [of training]. Semrad did not want our perceptions of reality to become obscured by the pseudocertainties of psychiatric diagnoses.
I remember asking him once: “What would you call this patient — schizophrenic or schizoaffective?” He paused and stroked his chin, apparently deep in thought.
“I think I’d call him Michael McIntyre,” he replied.
from Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. …Imagination gives us the opportunity to to envision new possibilities — it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.
When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
Matthew M. Sholler, Psy.D. 
