Lisa

Thank you for this post. In my NLP practice one of my goals is always to assist the client to get to a place where they are “at cause” for their emotion rather than “effect.” A “cure” does not mean perfection but that the client can take effective action to be in charge of their own change.

I appreciate knowing about Morita Therapy

Keep up the good work,

Mark

Massachusetts certainly has had problems with courts assigning guardians to people who could make their own decisions, though. I’ve heard most about it with regards to the elderly, but there seems to be a court in Northampton that deals very poorly with the mentally ill. This may be my age, also, but most of the horror stories I hear are from people under eighteen, where parents are in total control. State law hardly even comes into play for kids.

The Treatment Advocacy Center isn’t happy about the state of the law in Massachusetts, which seems like a good sign to me.

The laws and criteria do matter, but yes, the lack of adequate representation and due process matter just as much if not more.

I hope you manage to defeat those new measures in Virginia. The ones in New York have already lead to barbaric practices.

Good luck.

I wish and fight for the day when people with psychiatric diagnoses have the same rights as people with other diagnoses but it sure isn’t here yet and we’re about to go backwards in my state, Viriginia.

That said, I would guess that it doesn’t have a huge impact. What I’m describing here is a biological phenomenon - I give money to my favorite charity, and a happy part of my brain lights up. This is really cool*, but it doesn’t imply any sort of evolutionary causality. I could easily argue that a human tendency to help others exists because that helps the giver, in the end. My brain might simply be priming me to give because people who give more tend to get more from other people.

Or, uh, giving to charity is sexy, and so the charitable givers tend to pass on their genes. I don’t know. Does it really make a difference? What I see from this is that people are motivated to give to others even when they don’t necessarily get something in return. The evolutionary reasons why this might be are almost beside the point.

L

*Seriously, isn’t it awesome? I mean, really.