Two Minds Blog

  America is experiencing a mental health crisis , with the most recent data (2022) showing a record high number of people who took their own lives. Drug overdose deaths also continue to rise, and are consistently related to problems with anxiety and depression. Worldwide, people report more "bad mental health" days and lower overall levels of happiness than they did 20 years ago, and the problem is particularly acute among young people . More people than ever are accessing psychotherapy , yet that hasn't fixed the problem. Standard approaches like cognitive-behavioral therapy, which encourage us to think our way out of our troubles, have not been successful against this challenge. Sources of Strength began as a statewide suicide-prevention program for teens in North Dakota, which in 1998 was seeing many young people die from suicide, along with overdoses and car crashes (two types of death that are also potentially related to suicidal feelings). In pooled results from ...

  College enrollment is not only declining in the U.S., but changing in substantial ways. Specifically, many fewer students are now interested in a humanities or liberal arts major, while many more are pursuing professional training in fields like health care or engineering. Record numbers of U.S. colleges are closing or dramatically cutting back their program offerings as a result. These nationwide trends relate to student concerns about employability, as well as employer demands for new hires with specific skill-based credentials rather than a broad-based undergraduate education. Badges and other micro-credentials (some offered by universities!) have emerged as a way to meet employers' and students' demands for specific content learning. What is lost when we don't have English and history majors available as a course of study? Some experts argue that these disciplines teach critical skills like problem-solving, communication, and discourse that are necessary across s...

  Wheat Field with Crows, V. Van Gogh (Auvers-sur-Oise, July 1890). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam I have written several posts about creativity ( here , here , and here ), all of which touched briefly on the common belief that great creative works are often products of a disturbed mind. In this post I will explore the idea in greater detail. Vincent Van Gogh is often cited as the exemplar of this linkage -- the painting above is one of his last. It conveys a certain eerie or threatening quality despite its beauty, and it was painted in the same month that he died by suicide at the age of 37. That was about a year and a half after the well-known incident where Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear and sent it to a cleaning girl at a brothel that he often visited, which resulted in his temporary institutionalization at a French asylum. Clearly Van Gogh was not mentally well. The supposed linkage of genius and madness, however, suggests that his mental illness was directly related to the...

In previous posts I have described Roy Baumeister's glucose theory of self-control , and how glucose depletion might explain the " Mardi Gras effect " in which a little bit of self-indulgence now might make it easier to resist temptation later on. But Baumeister also offer some advice on how to develop willpower so that we become less vulnerable to self-regulatory failures. Essentially, Baumeister views willpower as just one more skill that people can develop through intentional practice . People who have worked to build the skill may become less glucose-depleted in a situation that would challenge their peers, and therefore may be able to resist temptation longer and with reduced consequences for their mental state. Baumeister talks about the example of David Blaine, a British performance artist who specializes in feats of endurance. For example, Blaine once stood on an 80-foot pillar in New York's Central Park for 35 hours without sleep. On another occasion, Blaine...

Image: Young Mozart Giving a Recital, H. Pihnnero (19th century)   When I was young, everyone considered me to be "good at math." What do we mean when we use that phrase? It implies a certain innate ability, one that most people can't achieve. I had classmates who were told that they succeeded only by "working hard" at math, while for me the ability was supposedly inborn. My daughter Ruth is also good at math. At this point she has taken more of it than I ever did, she helps others with their math and physics homework at a tutoring center, and she is studying to be an engineer. She never had the stellar test scores that I did in high school, though, in part because it takes her a little longer to work through the problems on a timed test. Does this mean she isn't really "good" at the subject? I think not: On a recent construction project, I deferred to her better-informed calculations. As a culture we subscribe to the myth of genius : the idea of a...

We're leery of people lying to us, and often we are well-aware that we can have trouble sorting fiction from truth. That's in part because humans are social animals, highly attuned to what others might think of us, with corresponding pressure to get along and not question the honesty of others in our group. Con men and women are well aware of these facts, and rely on our credulity to take advantage of us, using various persuasion strategies that get around our rational decision-making capabilities. We worry that someone will take advantage of us in this way, and therefore we are highly motivated to detect dishonesty. Penalties for lying can sometimes be extreme, because a lie threatens to undermine the social order of the group. There are lots of proposed ways of detecting a lie, including the idea that someone who looks to one side when speaking isn't telling the truth, the proposal that people who seem hesitant aren't being honest, or the more scientific-sounding appr...

It's great when you are able to successfully make a change in a healthy behavior, like getting more sleep , improving your diet , or reducing your alcohol use. But what happens when you hit a bumpy spot, and things stop going so well for a while? One of the great paradoxes of behavior change is called the abstinence violation effect , also sometimes known as licensing , or simply feeling like you have permission to indulge yourself in an unhealthy behavior. The problem is that when people stop  a new, healthy pattern (for whatever reason), they sometimes really  let things go, and it can be even harder to get back on track than it was to initiate the new behavior in the first place. Let's look at each step in the sequence : First, people work hard to initiate a new behavior. This can take up to 3-6 months of conscious effort before the new habit becomes fully ingrained and automatic, and there are lots of opportunities to get lost along the way. People work hard at changing du...