the limping shrink

It doesn't take a genius to know that there are different types of people. We only need to think about our own family. Or about the patients we will be seeing in today's clinic. How each person has their own striking qualities and their own (to us) annoying tendencies. It is evident to anyone with enough experience of people. Some of these qualities have been systematically proven as reflecting real physiological differences between people. Highly sensitive people, and introversion vs extraversion spring to mind. So why is psychiatry practised as if differences of this fundamental kind are irrelevant to their mental health and recovery? Why are we apparently reluctant to systematise these qualities and investigate their relationship to mental health issues and their treatment? None of us can see ourselves Jung (a psychiatrist himself) had an interesting take on this. In his 'Psychological Types', in the very first page of the introduction in fact, he notes that ' In...

  https://www.piqsels.com/en/public-domain-photo-zbxum/download/1280x800 Twelve Retirement Challenges Retirement is something many of us look forward to with increasing impatience as it gets closer. Like a long-awaited holiday we chafe against the daily grind and get excited and make lots of plans, not expecting life after work to be a walk in the park. But when we finally get there we may find that it's a bit more like a walk in the mountains. It's not all downhill, there are some demanding climbs and some bleak crags to negotiate too. Apart from financial issues, which are covered ad nauseam in almost all the other blogs about retirement, there are certain challenges that are not so often discussed in any detail, that many if not most people find need some attention. In early retirement, many of us will find one or more changes to or uncertainties in our lives that are potential obstacles to our retirement joy.  1. Learning to relax into our new freedom We may have been thin...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_baby_in_a_Moses_basket_(AM_75894-1).jpg This is my first memory:  I'm 4. My father and grandmother are at the dining table talking about names. What shall we call him? I don't remember ever seeing them talk to each other before. And they've certainly never sat at the dining table when it wasn't a mealtime before. My mother is asleep upstairs, well out of the conversation.  I go through the door to the drawing room, a door that sticks and has a metal handle with a dent in it. I like it in there - it's usually the warmest room and it has a rich red Turkish carpet that makes it feel warm even when it isn't. I sit on my haunches in front of the fire and feel it turn my front to melting jelly and my back to frosty glass. Some time I will need to back off an inch or two but for now I watch the way the flames hover and melt above the logs. The conversation next door continues. My grandmother is old and wise and even...