Mental Health Notes by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
Envy I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who didn’t feel envious. Not you, of course. You are a very kind, generous, loving person, and you are very content with what you have, very grateful, not boastful, all that good stuff. I even know that you are aware that even the most glamorous, successful, seemingly happy people have their troubles and woes, that the grass... Read More
Is Anybody Happy? by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
I am much too young, and so, undoubtedly, are you, to actually remember Ted Lewis, the band leader whose catch phrase, Is everybody happy?, spoken in his high-pitched madcap-ecstatic voice, furnishes me with the ironic title of this month’s essay. Be that as it may, the conversations I have these days, socially and professionally, range in mood from, oh, say Shostakovitch’s... Read More
Ups and Downs, by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
I had a great vacation this summer. My whole family did. We relaxed, we had fun, we had a great change of scenery, great activities, great food, great people to be with. It was perfect. And then we got back to JFK on a Sunday evening and only Dante could do justice to the infernal torment that ensued for the next 5 or 6 hours. I will spare you the gruesome details. Suffice... Read More
Mourning, by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
Back in 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote one of his best known papers, Mourning and Melancholia, in which he introduced an idea that has since become common knowledge: that if a grave loss is mourned well, one can expect, in a reasonable amount of time, to get on with one’s life. But if mourning never ends, and a loss becomes a source of unending grief, then melancholia, or depression,... Read More
The Control Paradox by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
Humans start needing to have some measure of control fairly early in life—possibly from about the time we draw our first breath. It is ironic, then, that uniquely among all living creatures, we alone are aware of the inevitability of our eventual death, and completely without any control whatsoever over when that will happen. This may explain to some extent why control issues... Read More
