Dr. Payton

My wife and I were visiting my son and daughter-in-law and 2 month old grandson after my son had just started sole daytime responsibility for his son. I offered to stay with my grandson (who was sleeping) while my son went on a run. He agreed and then stood not talking and after a couple…

I recalled “just sayin” when what I was thinking was validated by what happened. So, just sayin is like giving advice and then repeating the advice indirectly with this phrase and reminding the other person that you were right. So many problems with the attitude that “just sayin” seems to promote. Foremost,  it fools you…

The recent Beta Theta Pi magazine has an article about preventing suicide and refers to a Harvard study [The Harvard Study of Adult Development] and comments from the study’s fourth director Robert Waldinger, M.D. [who is  a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School] who concludes that friendships and relationships in general are highly correlated…

With the rate of suicides in the United States as of 2015 [from the CDC, 2017] at 13.26 suicides per 100,000, there have been programs developed to help identify and get help for people who are suicidal. Many programs are focused on training gatekeepers [people who are likely to recognize a crisis and warning signs…

I read an article by Nancy Kaffer from the Detroit Free Press on January 25, 2020. It is partly a review of a tv show called “The Good Place” and partly her reflecting on what is important in life as portrayed in “The Good Place.” The premise is that we need to build up points…

There was a recent opinion piece in the New York Times regarding the problem of being silent in the face of people being racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. In his TED talk from July, 2014, Clint Smith talks about the danger of silence. He says that we spend so much time on what people are saying…

In the March 10, 2020 edition of the Asheville Citizen Times, An Associated Press aricle quoted Aaron Kandola, a Ph.D. student at University College London’s findings that adolescents who are inactive for a large portion of their days during adolecence are at increased risk for depression by age 18. There was a correlation of the…

Well, we are all having to cope with the changes and uncertainty that this pandemic has presented to us. Many of us have had to make extraordinary sacrifices as we have given up our jobs and businesses as we cooperated with self-quarantining, thus reducing our interactions with each other as we avoid contact and when…

I was reading an opinion piece in the May 31, 2020 Sunday Review by Roxane Gay who reviewed all the bad things happening recently with many in our government continuing to not take responsibility for facing the truth of what is happening and then helping us to safely get through it. Ms. Gay then focused…

A CNN article from November 27, 2014 by John Blake speaks about the problem of racism without racists. This concern has been around for years as people who are not overtly racist unintentionally support racist institutions that promote ongoing exploitation of African Americans. It is only more recently that more Americans have become aware of…