Showing results by author "Alexander Kriss" in All Categories

Mental illness is heavily stigmatized within our society, and folks with BPD are portrayed as especially hopeless by doctors and popular culture alike. When, as a graduate student, Alexander Kriss first began working as a therapist in the field, his supervisors warned him that borderline patients were manipulative and had a tendency to drop out of treatment. Yet, years later, when Kriss was establishing his private practice and a patient named Ana came to his office, he felt compelled to try to help her, despite all of the warnings he'd heard.

Are videogames bad for us? It's the question on everyone's mind, given teenagers' captive attention to videogames and the media's tendency to scapegoat them. It's also - if you ask clinical psychologist Alexander Kriss - the wrong question. In his therapy office, Kriss looks at videogames as a window into the mind. Is his patient Liz really "addicted" to Candy Crush - or is she evading a deeper problem? And when Jack immerses himself in Mass Effect, is he eroding his social skills - or honing them via relationship - building gameplay?

Even as the popularity of videogames has skyrocketed, a dark cloud continues to hang over them. Many people who play games feel embarrassed to admit as much, and many who don't worry about the long-term effects of a medium often portrayed as dangerous and corruptive. Drawing on years of experience working directly with people who play games, clinical psychologist Alexander Kriss steers the discourse away from extreme and factually inaccurate claims around the role of games in addiction, violence and mental illness....