Diet culture puts unrealistic pressure on everyone — children and adults alike — to live within a narrow range of false and dangerous ideals. It does not accept that healthy people can come in many shapes and sizes. Diet culture sends the wrong message that people need to be in thinner bodies in order to be valued, and mistakenly pressures people to value being thin even when thinness may be disconnected from any real health benefits.
How do we fight an invisible enemy that requires us to go against our basic values, to change our behaviors, our way of life.
We Americans are having a tough time making this transition. In order to succeed against this invisible enemy, we must change our perceptions and behaviors. We must re-structure our concept of freedom and we must change our behaviors.
Since the pandemic started earlier this year, I’ve found myself in the interesting position of not only using theme hints to establish common language between myself and my individual clients, but in using the SAME themes across different clients in order to navigate what seem to be very common concerns among the majority, if not the entirety, of my caseload: coping with an increased sense of isolation, anxiety related to the uncertainty of the future, an increasing sense of powerlessness regarding one’s circumstances, and the mind-numbing sameness of the day-to-day in this “new normal.”
In 2015, the American Psychological Association (APA) released a task-force technical report on video-game violence with a concurrent resolution statement linking violent games to aggression but not violent crime. The task-force report has proven to be controversial; many scholars have criticized language implying conclusive evidence linking violent games to aggression as well as technical concerns regarding the meta-analysis that formed the basis of the technical report and resolution statement.
Have you heard? Nancy Pelosi diverted Social Security money to fund the impeachment inquiry. President Trump’s father was a member of the KKK. Far-fetched as those statements sound, they were among the most shared fake news stories on Facebook in 2019, according to a report by the nonprofit organization Avaaz, which concluded that political fake news garnered more than 150 million views in 2019.