Highly Sensitive People in an Insensitive World

Given how insensitivity is running rampant around the world now, I think its time to take another look at the Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP. When I say running rampant, just look around you. People get promoted in corporations by being insensitive to those who get in their way. Others gain fame by trampling the … Continue reading Highly Sensitive People in an Insensitive World

Shyness vs Everything else |the problem with diagnoses

When I was a boy, I was intensely shy, more avoidant than anyone else I met then in any of the schools I attended. No one in the working-class neighborhood of the North-American steel town where I grew up had heard of 'autism', but my behavior fit autism pretty well. If I got myself assessed … Continue reading Shyness vs Everything else |the problem with diagnoses

Is Anxiety Natural?

In the Jan/Feb 2014 edition of The Atlantic, journalist Scott Stossel told about his own lifelong debilitating anxiety, then discussed the nature of anxiety, ending with this: Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and many modern psychopharmacologists would have it? Or is it a philosophical problem, as Plato and Spinoza and … Continue reading Is Anxiety Natural?