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The World’s Rapidly Growing Need for Mental Health Professionals
The World’s Rapidly Growing Need for Mental Health Professionals The demand for mental health workers is rapidly increasing all over the world. The types of assistance many people need start at the survival level. As defined by the first two (which organizes needs into levels of importance with physiological needs on the bottom and self-actualization needs on the top), these are physiological needs and safety needs. Mental health workers can use their skills to help guide clients in meeting these as a foundation for further treatment. The advocacy organization United for Global Mental Health speaks about rapidly increasing awareness of mental health’s importance on a global basis, but with a…
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Psychedelics as a Scientific Tool for Mental Health
An Interview with Marvin Däumichen, MA, co-founder of the MIND Foundation Psychedelic drugs might become the next big therapeutic tool to fight depression and other psychiatric disorders as “changes in self-experience, emotional processing and social cognition may contribute to the potential therapeutic effects” (Vollenweider & Preller, 2020). Classical psychedelics like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) that are administered with appropriate guidance and in a controlled therapeutic setting that includes preparation and reflexion upon the experience were shown to enhance mental health (Walton & Liknaitzky, 2020). We talked to Marvin Däumichen who is a co-founder of the MIND Foundation about the history and potential of psychedelics as a…
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How to Score a Perfect PhD
Finding a perfect PhD is somewhat like dating: there is no such thing as a soulmate-PhD, but some are still better than others; the number of options seems overwhelming at first, but most of them crumble once inspected carefully; and, of course, once committed, the choice will significantly influence the rest of your life. To make it even more challenging, the soulmate-PhD problem is also expected to be dealt with at the most vulnerable point in the lifetime of a student—as if by Murphy’s law, the deadlines usually land somewhere between the final in the sequence of many exams and the Masters thesis defense. Under such conditions, even the most…
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Open Science in Times of Corona
How research has changed through the pandemic Let’s talk about the movement towards connected and open science that has happened and is still happening right now due to the pandemic that the corona virus brought upon us. You may have noticed as well that research has started to stretch its boundaries remarkably in the presence of the virus. Facing death, the fear of losing people close to your heart and the threat of our very own existential foundations has turned not only our personal but the economic and scientific world upside down. Open Science in times of Corona It is evident that the more data researchers can access, the more…
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Exploratory and Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing
Introduction The replication crisis has spread all across the scientific community. In the field of psychology, scientists were not able to replicate more than half of previous findings (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). For a long time this problem went unnoticed, but a critical moment occurred when Daryl Bem published his now infamous paper on humans’ ability to quite literally predict the future (Bem, 2011). Many readers doubted his findings as there was no logical basis for the ability to predict the future and years later Daniel Engber summarized it nicely when he wrote: “(…) the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. (…).…
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Editors’ Picks: Summer Reading List
Your semester has ended and you are already bored by how much time the holidays freed up? Do you want to dive deeper into issues around psychological science, but did not know where to start? For the next weeks, we are going to be sharing our editors’ recommendations for your summer readings & listenings on different psychological topics. These will include all sorts of media, from newspaper articles or podcasts to journal articles we thought you should definitely read. We will be continously updating this list over the summer and have decided to group our suggestions broadly by topic. These topics are (in order of publishing): -Open Science -Philosophy of…
