Brain Shrink, Think.

(Image Credit:  Adam Rhew) Two weeks later.  Where are we? A little over a 2 weeks ago, the CMPD shot and killed Keith Scott.  (NPR, 09/16) Ever since then there has been a public reawakening of old southern pains in a city striving to be the new face of the south. After the violent rioting, peaceful protests, release of videos, and a very vocal city council meeting, where are we, two weeks later, as the citizens of Charlotte? The streets are back to normal. The curfew is lifted. The state of emergency (for the protests) is over. If you did not see the news for a week or two, you might have not known anything ever occurred. I think there are few separate, but important issues that are often conflated in this incident: Structural racism, Socioeconomic class, and believe it or not --- the segregation of Charlotte's schools. Charlotte is a city going through growing pains. It has experienced great economic prosperity in the last decade, but that prosperity has not reach

Five years ago I interned at a correctional facility as a young mental health therapist in New York. I wrote a blog post about my experience during that internship. If you want to check that out before reading this, check it out in the link below. "Experiences in the Correctional facility"  Since then, I have worked with individuals involved in the criminal justice system from children to adults. Recently, I have been working in a county jail for the last 2 years. Jail is not prison. It is a purgatory. People in jail are innocent until proven guilty. It's hard to keep track of that day by day. I have seen more about the process of mass incarceration. I have heard and sat with thousands of people at this point. The lives of these individuals are complex. Why they end up in these situations are often more complex. But the way we as society view them --- down to the coloring scheme of their jump suits are simple. Good or Bad. Orange and Black. Before I got involved

I am Agnost ic and I have been for a long time. I grew up in a rural area in South Carolina.  Many of the individual’s in my town were generally warm hearted and caring about other people. There was interdependence among the members of the community. I think this was largely due to “your distress is mine” type attitude. This was largely taught in the Church setting. Most individuals generally went to church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The pervasive religion in South Carolina is Christianity, primarily Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian denominations.  I have no doubt that a religious upbringing influenced me in a lot of ways. Growing up in the Christian south has made being Agnostic something of an issue. Religion, especially Christianity, is baked into the way of life. It is just as integral as sweet tea, fried chicken, or polo shirts. To be --- or to identify as anything but religious is to often to be seen as a leper in a sense. This is not even including bei

As of this writing, I do not know of a therapist who actively accepts Medicaid insurance within the Greater - Charlotte region. The mental health care system in North Carolina within the last few years has undergone significant changes   (North Carolina Health News) . How services are provided to consumers has been changing as well as the distribution of those services. North Carolina is attempting to move more towards community-based care in lieu of institutions. However, in 2012, "... North Carolina changed how it provides mental health care for those on Medicaid. The state put 11 regional organizations, called MCOs, in charge and gave them less money to work with."  ( WFAE ); This has mirrored the trend nationally where states have shifted cost into the community without properly funding them "... the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, promised that 1,500 small community mental health centers would be constructed—but this ideal never materialized.... &

Over the last few months I've been getting a lot of questions to why I became and stayed a vegetarian. This year is my 10 th year of being a vegetarian. These questions, while I often answer and small soundbites, are actually very complex in nature. So I decided to write a post about my personal experience to why I became and why continue to be a vegetarian. I originally became a vegetarian for health reasons. I was sitting in my lunchroom with my friends when we were eating some chicken nuggets. We joked about how the chicken nuggets were not “real meat”. It was then that I told my friends I was going to stop eating meat. I took up the challenge to stop eating meat. Little did I know how hard it would be. Growing up in the rural South, all I knew was meat. Meat is a very intimate part of Southern living. Growing up and working on a farm provided me ample opportunities to know the meat that we eat. Deer hunting is a seasonal thing. Growing a chicken from a small egg to a

I haven't updated this in a while, because I have been busy working. That came to an end five weeks ago, when I was unexpectedly laid off. I have never been fired from a job, especially one where I was performing quite well. However, given the recent changes in the mental health care system in North Carolina along with some of the organizational challenges my last job was facing, it was not out of the realm of the possible. Still, working one minute and the next being told you are no longer an employee is quite jarring. It shakes your identity and leaves you in an existential vacuum as you renegotiate a part of your identity. In a lot of ways, this is a follow up from my post almost two years ago. Working in the social science field as a clinician is quite draining. Therapy is a profession which taxes not only the analytical prefrontal regions of our brains, but the midbrain and base brain as well. Our emotions, our reflections of our emotions, mirroring the mental states of ot