The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker

The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker; narrated by Victor Bevine

In The Blank Slate, Pinker outlines three dogmas that he says are the prevailing views of human nature in modern philosophy: 

1) The blank slate, in which the mind has no innate (genetic) properties and, as John Watson boasted, through conditioning you could train a child to become anybody you want her to become. 

2) The noble savage, in which people are born good, and society forms them into deviants. Pinker suggested that Rousseau was a strong proponent of this theory, but according to Wikipedia (which is always accurate), Rousseau never used this term. 

3)  The ghost in the machine, in which people's choices are solely dependent upon their soul. 

Contemporary viewpoints on treating mental illness - psychology

This post will discuss the psychological causes and treatments of mental illness, as described in Butcher's Abnormal Psychology.

Psychological viewpoints consider humans not only as biological entities but as products of our personalities and experiences. There are three major psychosocial views on behavior: psychodaynamic, behavioral, and cognitive-behavioral. 

September 2015 Update

Favorite picture of the month
my brand new niece Leilani

This has been an incredibly busy month for me. I started my second class of the semester (now I'm taking Abnormal Psychology and an EMT certification class). These, together with my full time job in a nursing home and my volunteer work at a crisis hotline, keep me feeling pretty darned overwhelmed. 

A History of Abnormal Psychology

Chapter 2 of Butcher's Abnormal Psychology is a bit harder to summarize than Chapter 1. It covered the reactions of people towards  the mentally ill throughout history. There were lots of names mentioned, and trends galore. But I will try to focus on the ones that I found most interesting.