PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS This summer has seen the severe disciplining of several major league baseball players for using performance enhancing drugs.  One player, Alex Rodriguez, was loudly booed by the New York Yankee fans when he came out to play after planning to appeal his very lengthy suspension from the game.  It wasn’t very long ago that the news media treated us to the sad, lengthy saga of Lance Armstrong for his using...

LEARNING FROM POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY In recent years the positive psychology movement has been gathering speed and power.  Sometimes it feels like a welcome breath of fresh air into a field long filled with issues of clinical pathology.  Sometimes it feels like a “pie in the sky” approach to life that urges us to just smile more and laugh a lot.  We have all had our fill of “cheer up” advice which doesn’t seem to be very effective...

 John Steinbeck took a line from William Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent” as the title of a novel which deals with what happens when a man tries to get ahead by betraying his own moral values.  Many critics were disappointed with the book, which was published in 1961.  However, after the Watergate scandal, one critic, Reloy Garcia, changed his mind about the book,...