Dr. Payton

Recently, I was listening to a “Great Courses” cd on the history of our understanding of evil. There was a discussion of the repeated experience that people who had participated in doing evil things were often convinced that they were doing their duty and what they should be doing. They were not acting like they…

Chrisitian religions speak about faith and living in faith. That seems like you are supposed to not worry about the future and instead be confident and then see what happens in our lives. So, instead of stressing ourselves by worrying and by predicting the future, we are invited to be open to what happens and…

Almost two years ago I decided to not accept the limitations that insurance companies place on what I charge. Insurance companies reimburse psychiatrists for a brief “medication check.” This often translates into a 10 minute session during which there is discussion of how the person is doing in general, an evaluation of current symptoms and…

I have come to believe that listening to others without our own personal reaction to what we are hearing is kind to those people as we are actually being with them when we don’t react. If we react we are not listening and that is like not being with them. They may react if these…

Competition seems to inevitably lead to winners and losers and this runs the risk of separating people. On the otherhand, competition is often considered to be healthy. So is competition healthy or not?  Or is it sometimes healthy? What might healthy competition be. It has been decribed as being healthy when the goal is not…

Much has been written about the wonders of being connected through the internet to the world and the potential problems of changing how we connect to each other. My daughter forwarded an article from the NY Times by Barbara Fredrickson about this topic. Ms. Fredrickson is a professor of psychology at the University of North…

The above is a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King and the rest of the quote is: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of mutuality.” Margaret Meade once said: if we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut…

In an earlier blog I mentioned research by Ms. Fredrickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that involved one group receiving training in metta meditation while a control group did not. The metta meditation really seemed to help that group feel better and be more positively connected to others.…

When we treat other people as if they are statistics then we are separating ourselves from those people. This is because when we choose to not see other people as individuals we don’t really see them at all, like when we stereotype others by treating them as if they are like everyone else in a…

The most recent AACAP News summarized an article by Copeland, etal., in JAMA Psychiatry 20:1-8 that looked at children and adolescents who were bullied or the bullies 10 years later. This was a follow-up from the Great Smoky Mountain Epidemiological study that was done in wesern North Carolina. They found that both those who were…