Cannabis-Induced Psychosis is No Reason to Keep Pot Illegal
by Thaddeus Camlin, PsyD As cannabis crawls toward federal legalization, the 11th hour panic push is in on. Last week saw the introduction of the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, which seeks to federally legalize cannabis in the U.S. For those opposed to legalizing cannabis, ‘cannabis-induced psychosis’ and ‘ultra-high potency THC products’ are the buzz words working most […]
America Celebrates the Drug War’s 50th Anniversary
by Thaddeus Camlin, PsyD Let’s call a spade a spade. The war on drugs is a euphemism for a war on personal freedom. The hypocrisy inherent in a war on personal freedom in the self-proclaimed land of the free is more than a tad embarrassing (insert cringe emoji here). The number of lives ruined with criminal scarlet letters […]
Radical Acceptance
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) places a primary focus on improving distress tolerance. One of several tools DBT offers for tolerating distress is radical acceptance. The context of using any of the distress tolerance tools is the recognition that life will have distress, and that we need to learn how to […]
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): A Brief Overview
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an approach to psychotherapy designed for individuals who are highly emotionally sensitive, who struggle with depression and anxiety, and who may at times become suicidal. DBT tools, which focus on distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and mindfulness, can be helpful to anyone. You can […]
Dialectical Dilemmas
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP Dialectical is a word with a long history (back to the Greeks), but for now let’s define it as “focusing or acting on the interaction of opposing forces or ideas.” Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) identifies and addresses three common dialectical dilemmas, in order to improve emotional self-regulation, one of the […]
Managing Interpersonal Boundaries, pt. II
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP Interpersonal boundaries are part of the rules we establish about how we interact with other people. In this blog we focus on protecting ourselves from the outside. In a parallel blog we focused on keeping inside what needs to stay there. In both cases we can compare interpersonal boundaries to […]
Managing Interpersonal Boundaries, pt. I
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP Interpersonal boundaries are part of the rules we establish about how to interact with other people. We can compare interpersonal boundaries to being in a house. The house protects us from the outside, and on the inside we protect our warm or cool air, our possessions, and our privacy. Houses […]
Drugs Don’t Cause Addiction
by Thaddeus Camlin, PsyD Saying drugs cause addiction is like saying clouds cause tornadoes. Tornadoes are caused by a complex combination of factors including warm, moist air, changes in wind direction and speed, and an unstable atmosphere decreasing in temperature rapidly with height. Similarly, addiction is caused by a complex combination of factors, not drugs […]
Addiction Treatment is Sick, Not the People Treated
by Thaddeus Camlin, PsyD Labeling people who’ve been traumatized as sick, is sick. There’s nothing pathological about being severely affected by the worst of life’s horrors. There is something deeply pathological when natural reactions to unnatural situations are described as sickness and disease. There’s nothing sick or diseased about someone experiencing post-traumatic stress after catastrophic events then easing the aftershocks […]
HBO’s Euphoria TV Show Goes 0/2 on Addiction
by Thaddeus Camlin, PsyD The latest installment of HBO’s Euphoria is chock-full of harmful addiction myths and contradicting information. The show’s main character, Rue, is a young and intelligent woman with a history of severe trauma. Her father died young from cancer, she was drugged and nearly raped, and she was cheated on and heartbroken by her first true […]