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Providing Negative Criticism: The Newest Guidelines

Readers of this blog well know that I often discuss immature and mature ways to provide negative criticism. Originally, I presented a post titled PROVIDING NEGATIVE CRITICISM: FIVE LEVELS OF MATURITY.  There, in addition to providing an outline of what I believed was a good starting point to think about this topic, I asked readers for suggestions on how the outline could be improved. Many…

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Psychiatric Name Calling: Is it Helpful?

Today I offer a follow-up to my earlier post titled “Name Calling by Psychiatrists: Is it Time to Put a Stop to it?” Among the points that I had tried to make is that psychiatrists falsely claim that the names they use to describe patients are “diagnoses.”  In actuality, all that they do is convert someone’s expressed concerns into medical jargon. I received a great deal…

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Women and Criticism

On this blog, I often discuss immature and mature ways to deal with criticism. The advice that I offer is designed to be helpful to males and females alike.  But recently, in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Tara Mohr argues that when it comes to criticism, women can benefit from advice specifically targeted to the unique cultural situation that they find themselves in.   The…

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Psychiatric Name Calling: Is Science to Blame?

A couple of weeks ago I raised the question, “Name Calling by Psychiatrists: Is it Time to Put a Stop to it?”  In response, some blamed the insurance companies and other third party payers for the name calling. Because it is true that these payers do require the pathologizing of people seeking mental health services, in last week’s article, I took a close look at that issue….

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Psychiatric Name Calling: Are the Insurance Companies to Blame?

Last week, I posted an article titled “Name Calling by Psychiatrists: Is it Time to Put a Stop to it?” It created quite a stir and it’s currently challenging my two previous most popular posts—“Teaching Children How to to Deal with Criticism” and “Is it Wise to be Assertive?”—for the number one spot. The article points out that by using the term “diagnosis” in psychiatric terminology…

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Name Calling by Psychiatrists: Is it Time to Put a Stop to it?

On one fine spring day, I was sitting on a Central Park bench and two women were sitting one bench just to my right reading their newspapers.  Suddenly, one of them cried out, “Sophie, can you believe this!  The story I’m reading here, oh my God!  This young boy, seventeen years old mind you, the same age as my Jonathan, he’s struggling with ideas about…

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Internet Meanies

One day I happened to be flipping through the New York Times when I came upon a story titled Dealing With Digital Cruelty by Stephenie Rosenbloom.  It had been a year since I had written a post about a particularly sad incident of internet cruelty.  Back then, 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick had leaped to her death after being cyberbullied by a coterie of 15 middle-school children…

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Conflict Resolution and The Wisdom of Abraham

Sometimes we observe people doing things that seem terribly wrong. We may then find, welling up from within, an urgent desire to provide negative criticism. In earlier posts, in an effort to provide some guidance on how to avoid expressing our concerns in a form that can potentially make a bad situation far worse, I provided a description of 5 levels of maturity for providing…

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My Answer to the Question, Are People Who Cry When Criticized Immature?

Recently, I wrote a post titled, “Responding to Criticism by Crying: Is it a Sign of Immaturity?”  In that post I explained that I had, in earlier posts, put forth a model of how to respond maturely to criticism. To help readers to rate their own skill level, and that of others, I had outlined five levels of maturity. Level 1 was viewed as the most immature level, level 2…

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Responding to Criticism by Crying: Is it a Sign of Immaturity?

by Jeffrey Rubin, PhD

Readers of this blog know that I have put forth a model of how to respond maturely to criticism.  To help readers to rate their own skill level, and that of others, I have, in earlier posts, outlined five levels of maturity. Level 1 is viewed as the most immature level, level 2 is viewed as a little more mature, and so on. Let’s take…

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