These are uncertain and often frightening times for many people.  While none of my clients have thus far suffered any major emotional setbacks, the holidays are quickly approaching and I expect to see more depression and anxiety.  Since money is very tight and many have lost their homes and/or jobs, while others now have extended family living with them, this holiday season will be more of a challenge than most of us are comfortable dealing with.

How will you cope with the upcoming season?

Here are a few tips to inspire further thought and planning:

What would you do in this situation?

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug.

Abstract

An exercise performed in class one fall afternoon to demonstrate the helplessness of the terminally ill has left me with much to ponder.  If I knew in advance that death was near, what five things had been most important to me in life, and which of them could I do without?  

We were asked to write each of these on individual note cards.  I listed the following things of greatest importance to me, and in no particular order, they were:

• Spirituality (not religion)


• My nuclear family


• Honesty


• Wisdom


• Sanctity of life

I was born in the latter half of the 1950s, which means I'm old enough to remember a lot of stuff but still young enough to be taken semi-seriously.  I remember watching our neighbors build bomb shelters, duck-and-cover drills in elementary school, and air-raid sirens.  Growing up for me then included the very real possiblity of nuclear annihilation.

Thinking that my generation's attitudes were influenced primarily by events, I decided to investigate this phenomenon with a Jungian emphasis.  A small study was performed, the results of which I will offer here at the conclusion of any discussion.  What follows is my reasoning and "evidence".  Please share your thoughts with me.

Evidence in Support of a Cataclysmic Archetype

How do you feel about assisted suicide?  Would you choose it for yourself?  Would you choose it for a family member?   What would be your criteria for making such a decision?

Two cases from my early days as a paramedic immediately come to mind about this subject, and though seemingly tangential, they have served to form my opinions.

The first was a woman who had jumped in front of a train and had been brought to the ER for pronouncement.  Her body was so mangled that it was only from identification papers that we discovered her age and gender.  Her suicide was very hard on all of us – even for my battle-hardened friends from the fire department.  I remember mentally asking, “Why didn’t you just come to see us?”

Although possessing an undeniable bias against consciousness and mood altering drugs, courtesy of the 1960s and 1970s, I was curious to see what progress had been made utilizing these same substances to treat addictions.  Allegorically, we have vaccines derived from pathogens to prevent disease, thus grudgingly but also with a bit of morbid fascination, I can admit that hallucinogens and their derivatives might be effective in treating some individuals with certain addictions, and precedence seems to support this hypothesis.

This is a funny question to ask.  Funny in that no one has ever asked this of me before, and yet a few moments of reflection reveal how utterly important such a question is.

The simple answer is that no, I am not living the life expected or wished for.  As a child of the 50s and fan of “Dr. Kildare” and “Ben Casey”, I wanted desperately to be a surgeon.  Before I was 10 years old, my plans were laid – I would work at a big hospital and save lots of lives regardless of ability to pay.  I took the Hippocratic Oath to heart and believed in it completely.  Although I retained the intention well into my 20s, an assault endured at 10 years of age effectively put an end to that idea.

Although the apparent increase of deviant sexual behaviors is of great concern to many, few crimes inspire a more impassioned response than pedophilia.

Proponents for decriminalizing pedophilic predation are equally as ardent as those who would seek the most severe penalties for such behaviors. On a global scale, the inability to reach a consensus concerning sexual involvement with children requires that science determine why some individuals are sexually aroused by children.

Only with definition can we categorically declare pedophilia as criminal behavior, else the debate will continue and more than likely conclude as a civil rights issue – with the rights of adults taking precedence over the rights of children.

In a unique study of four previously convicted adult male pedophiles (Mage = 33.8, SD 9.7 years), utilizing structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and imaging genomics (neuroimaging combined with genetic analyses), the authors propose that small variations in genotypes are responsible for paraphilic phenotypic expression (Tost, Vollmert, Brassen, Schmitt, Dressing, Braus, 2004).