In case you were wondering why the website was down yesterday, so was I. It seems that a hacker who called himself “anonymous3” somehow got into GoDaddy’s main servers, and took the whole thing (including e-mail accounts) down for most of the day. The motive may have had to do with his dislike of the… Continue Reading Anonymous Got Us!

Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, and Rep. Mike Quigley held a public hearing this evening in Chicago, on the current state of the Domenici-Wellstone Mental Health Parity and Substance Abuse Equity Act, which President Obama signed into law over two years ago.

Toward the end of Alfred Adler’s life, he published a book titled Social Interest – A Challenge for Mankind. About thirty years later, his colleague Rudolf Dreikurs published Social Equality: The Challenge of Today. It seems that mankind needs to be reminded of the importance of these two closely related concepts.

These days, it’s becoming more and more difficult to sort out what your personal values should be. This challenge, which psychologist Erik Erikson described in his “Identity versus role confusion” task, typically takes place when we’re about 14 to 17 years old, and usually involves moving from an identity based on group membership (e.g., the… Continue Reading Values – Custom Made or Off-the-shelf?

In the interest of being “media social,” fostering dialogue, and keeping things interesting, we’ve added a “Discussion” page to fitzgeraldcounseling.com. You will need to log in to become a discussion user… So it’s not anonymous and I can delete posts that are not appropriate. (This is equivalent to being moderated). Logging in to post can… Continue Reading We’ve added a Discussion Forum

I’ve spent the past few days trying to socially connect our website, after reading a lot of articles about how important it is to be socially networked online. For a counseling practice, that presents some challenges.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) has issued a new definition of “Addiction” as of August, 2011. This definition stresses the neurobehavioral aspects of addictive disorders and essentially defines them as “brain diseases.”

I appeciated an article in the New York Times this week, written by two researchers – one from the Harvard Business School – that reviewed a number of pieces of research and survey results about employee engagement and happiness at work. They found that employees who are more engaged – happier, but also participating actively in… Continue Reading Engaged Employees

Someone made a comment to me today that they guessed everyone I talk to must be pretty down about what’s going on in the world right now. I replied that no, actually, people have their own worries and troubles, for the most part. Some people who work in the financial sector are stressed about the… Continue Reading How not to let it bring you down

I don’t ordinarily like to bring my political views into this blog, but there are some examples (like the Florida law that makes it illegal for a doctor to ask if there are guns in a house with young children) that seem to cross from politics into ethical dilemmas. This blog post on Mother Jones’… Continue Reading Suicide shouldn’t be politicized, but…