Author: Chris Cooper, PhD

Guns and People with Mental Health Disabilities

There is news from Capitol Hill which underscores the notion that there is more to fear in Washington, DC than just the  the White House.  According to an article in the NY Times on February 15, 2017. Congress has acted to reverse and Obama administration rule requiring the Social Security Administration to add about 75,000 people, currently on disability support, to the national background check database and deny them gun purchases. These individuals suffer schizophrenia, psychotic disorders and other problems to such an extent that they are unable to manage their financial affairs and other basic tasks without help. An article from The Hill  reports a statement from House Speaker Paul Ryan after the shootings in Orlando.  Ryan stated  “that many of the shooters are mentally ill and therefore a reform of the mental health system is the right response.”I don’t want to keep saying the same thing over and over,” Ryan said after the fourth question in a row about actions to take about mass shootings. “But one of the things we’ve noticed: There are mental health issues here.” But we shouldn’t prevent mentally disabled people who have financial conservators from having guns? In rebuttal, Republicans have stated about…

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Emotions Are Like Dogs

Emotions are Like Dogs: On the Difference Between Emotional Regulation and Stuffing It When I think about emotions and emotional regulation, I often think about a dog who was my friend.  Her name was Tasha and she was half Siberian Husky and half German Shepherd.  She and I shared a living space for sixteen years and she was just about the best possible companion.  She loved to run outdoors and at the time we lived in the woods in a small town so she could range wherever she wanted.  She would always come home after a good play in the woods, check her bowl, and plop down in front of the fireplace for a good nap.  This ability to run and wear herself out, I think, helped her to be as mellow as she was at home.  The local kids could pull her ears and her tail and she would softly redirect them.  The new kittens would jump on her back, and she would carry them around for a while without complaint. She had some quirks, though, and one of them was that when people came to the door she would rush to them with her tail wagging wildly.  She…

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Cooking Slowly – A Tale of Ever-Changing Times

There is an old adage that if you put a live frog in a pot of water and heated it gradually, that frog would just sit in the water and not jump away (even though it could) until the water boils and it is thoroughly cooked.  It may or may not be true (no one has really tried it since the late 1880s), but either way it is an excellent metaphor for certain things. Some authors have been concerned about the replacement of people with robots, automatic tellers, and other types of automation in the workplace because of the associated loss of jobs (1).  This is one concern, but I want to focus on another.  It is about humanity and interpersonal connection and how dealing with machines instead of people all day may be changing us and our culture.  Changes slowly creep into our lives unnoticed, and before we realize it, like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly warming water, we become cooked (or otherwise harmed). Ten years ago, when I first occupied the office I am in now, I would drive to the parking garage and greet the guy in the booth who handed out tickets to…

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Addictive Internet Games

The Washington Post online had an interesting piece recently about teens addicted to online games and the havoc such an addiction or obsession can cause in a person’s life. There is, of course, a lot of research and concern about this issue.  The author, Caitlin Gibson, quotes psychologist Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Internet Addiction. As saying the number of kids affected by such an addiction might (modestly) be estimated at “… 5 percent. But 5 percent of American kids is a lot.” The article points to some resources, such as the Center for Internet Addiction and a residential facility called reSTART.  reSTART, the article states is “…the nation’s first therapeutic retreat devoted specifically to Internet addiction.”   Last month reSTART :…launched a new adolescent program…after receiving a barrage of calls from parents desperate to separate their children from video games, consoles, computers and smartphones..” Here in Pasadena, CA a colleague, Dr. Joe Dilley has published a book entitled The Game Is Playing Your Kid:  How to Unplug and Reconnect in the Digital Age which is a book for parents giving them a three-step program to help prevent or handle this problem.  I can recommend this book as having…

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Hyperbolic Geometry and Daily Life

This story begins with an almost unbearable 10th grade Geometry class — unbearable because of the attitude of the teacher. He shall remain nameless, but if he reads this (unlikely to say the least), I’m hoping he will recognize his part. It was 1963 and I was a good and reasonably devoted student. Our teacher, however, stated often that girls just couldn’t learn math very well, so he walked around the class during exams whispering hints and answers to them. However, the powers of the universe (whatever you believe them to be) provided, as they often do, recompense for this disaster of a learning experience in the form of a Mr. Peter Drees (whose name I shall happily mention). Mr. Drees was, I believe, the math coordinator for the school district, and he got it into his head to discover whether he could teach a group of undistinguished 15-year-olds Hyperbolic Geometry. Mr. Drees was successful at getting a few of us to entertain the concept of a non-Euclidean universe with curved space. He didn’t get many of the details across, but, to my mind he taught something even more important. The geometric version goes like this (with apologies to any…

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