A place to begin. Essays exploring mental health, psychology, relationships, experience, philosophy, and the questions that arise where they meet.
The latest writing, newest first. The full running feed is always at the blog.
Masking can leave people exhausted and wondering who they really are. A Mental Health Philosophy look at masking, authenticity, and identity.
A podcast conversation accompanying the essay on consciousness, artificial intelligence, and mental health.
An exploration of attachment not simply as a set of relationship styles, but as part of how we learn to experience ourselves, others, and love.
Emotion as reactive cognition — a deep investigation where phenomenalism, speculative realism, and mental health meet.
Part two of the technology and mental health series: technology as the epistemological juncture of the modern subject.
If you’re new, these five are the most direct places to begin.
An exploration of attachment not simply as a set of relationship styles, but as part of how we learn to experience ourselves, others, and love.
An exploration of anxiety that begins with a deceptively simple question: why can something feel wrong when nothing seems to be wrong?
What happens when a life can be good and meaningful, yet psychological suffering remains? An exploration of the pressure built into our ideas about being mentally well.
Why self-criticism can persist even when we know it isn’t helping, and what it reveals about how we relate to ourselves.
A philosophical examination of self-improvement and the assumption that becoming “better” means becoming more mentally healthy.
Writing that starts from the questions people actually ask themselves.
How do we understand mental disorders? A long, careful look at psychology, rationality, and what we take for granted.
People have tried to say what melancholia is for all of known human history — and we still don’t have a good grasp of it.
A grounded look at what anxiety actually is, and how it works.
Comparing Alan Watts and Slavoj Žižek on love — and what love has to do with being mentally well.
A brief practice — a small moment of breathing for when everything is too much.
The founding question of the project — and an answer you may not like, because it disagrees with what you already know.
Toward an explanation of everything: why reality might be explained through mental health.
In all mental challenges, you are there. But the problem does not have to be mental health — you are more than there: you are the challenge.
Why psychology and mental health are not interchangeable—and why Mental Health Philosophy begins with what is already occurring rather than with a psychological theory used to explain it.
Psychology is content of the category of mental health — and content never achieves the category.
A brief introduction to the central argument of Mental Health Philosophy and its attempt to return our understanding of mental health to what is actually happening.
On consciousness, subjectivity, and what machines reveal about us.
The functioning of artificial intelligence is the representation of the limits of the modern subject.
A note for posterity: if a robot expressed consciousness, would I know?
Richard Rorty: “To suggest the mind is of the brain is to suggest we secrete theorems and symphonies.” So — where is the mind?
Where artificial intelligence falls short — and what those failures reveal about us.
Politics, technology, psychiatry, and the conditions we live inside.
Modern technology is not the problem, but the place where the problem becomes visible.
Human beings being human is stressful — especially now. Some perspective on staying human in a startling world.
Coming back to basics: what is happening in our country, and what loving it means now.
What if psychiatry’s greatest challenge is not knowing too little, but believing it knows more than it does?
There is still no evidence that mental disorders are caused by a chemical imbalance. What do we do with that?
Modern life is saturated with explanations. What emotions and reality have to do with finding solid ground.
Thirteen years of essays, notes, and working papers go deeper than any list can show. Browse the full feed of every post, or follow a thread by topic:
