Silence is for fools. Communication is for leaders. Justice is for those brave enough to not stand another moment dealing with people that feel the solution to any problem is through cold indifference because of their lack of courage and insecurities.

Although the terminology implies scientific endorsement, false memory syndrome is not currently an accepted diagnostic label by the APA and is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Seventeen researchers (Carstensen et al., 1993) noted that this syndrome is a “non-psychological term originated by a...

Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the things they dislike (notably religion) and refusing to apply their skepticism to the things they do like (notably Darwinism). On...

Labels bias our perceptions, thinking, and behavior. A label or story can either separate us from, or connect us to, nature. For our health and happiness, we must critically evaluate our labels and stories by their effects.

When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out their new gun on an intruder.

When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is...

I existed on my own terms. I was different my entire life. Some called me divergent, wild, crazy, unpredictable and unconformed—an apostate to the rules of the majority. I called myself God’s creation and found purpose in the madness. When that day came, I didn’t allow other people to dictate how I should feel or...

Sometimes you can’t figure out the truth because you’re asking people that are emotionally or socially invested in you to be brutally honest. Often family or friends will tell you what you want to hear, or what they want to believe because of their emotional investment in the situation. Instead of circling the drain with...

He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts...

Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.

Mirrors lie.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take...

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds’ public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own discomfort.’Peter Freyd is my brother, Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and sister-in-law,’ he explained. Peter and Pamela had grown...

The world is a place of constant change. If we are open and ready to consider everything while remaining unbiased, we will be ready to accept these changes and utilize them to improve our lives.

Scientists are human—they’re as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.

We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it.

The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.

Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it’s “tradition.

Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words?

It’s time for the Boy Scouts to open its membership to LGBT adults once and for all. Only then can they claim to have anything to teach our children.

When your family dies, that’s a bummer, but that’s life. When my family dies, it’s a tragedy and the world is unbalanced and biased.

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, “had made both sides see themselves as they are.

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren’t biased as well–they certainly are–but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is...

We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced—and sometimes strongly—by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military – or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway – in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie...

The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.

Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.

The consideration of the quantity often takes the precedence over that of the quality in many significant activity of the society as the ordinary minds are in the great majority and the extraordinary brains are in the giant minority.

Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is sleeping or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring into it.

Being different will always threaten the institution of understanding of a closed mind. However, evolution is built on difference, changing and the concept of thinking outside the box. Live to be your own unique brand, without apology.

There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.

There is always a storm. There is always rain. Some experience it. Some live through it. And others are made from it.

Truth’s nakedness is not concerned with whom it strikes – painfully, or with pleasure; responding appropriately to its ingenuous temperament, however, rewards perceptions of unbiased transparency.

I had people saying ‘it’s all in your head’. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?

Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public...

from: The Portrayal of Child Sexual Assault in Introductory Psychology Textbooks – Elizabeth J. Letourneau, Tonya C. LewisOne of the central questions surrounding the debate on memories of CSA is how often false or repressed memories actually occur. The APA working group (Alpert et al., 1996) and other experts (e.g., Loftus, 1993a) noted that no...

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

Holding one’s self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor....

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth’. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as ‘functionaires’, functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become...

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no...

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.

We find comfort among those who agree with us – growth among those who don’t.

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

…[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. … Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization...