I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes arent what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. Its a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once youve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. Against Interpretation. No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the books allure the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat but the charisma of the title shouldnt be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldnt say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever interpretation turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way Ive made my living as an adult. Its not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 Against Interpretation, a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartres Saint Genet, Jean-Luc Godards Vivre Sa Vie, Jack Smiths Flaming Creatures), modestly presents itself as case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of Sontags own sensibility. Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontags signature is ambivalence. Against Interpretation (the essay), which declares that to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world in order to set up a shadow world of meanings, is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 Its hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact Against Interpretation had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadnt hadnt yet! read and movies I hadnt heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the 60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading Against Interpretation following it with Styles of Radical Will, On Photography and Under the Sign of Saturn, books Sontag would later deprecate as juvenilia for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called On Style). For the voice, I guess, but thats a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked Against Interpretation from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontags called Pilgrimage. One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. I felt I was slumming in my own life, Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The pilgrimage in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Manns house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susans shame and dread at the prospect of paying the call. Oh, Merrill, how could you? she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks like a book review. The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. Why would I want to meet him? she wondered. I had his books.

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazines editors. Tell him Susan Sontag called. Hell know why. (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading or maybe just walking through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish Regarding the Pain of Others, a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book On Photography. The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didnt want to fail to impress her; I didnt want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close. I didnt want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mothers illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontags partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. Sempre Susan, a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the I knew Susan minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontags own Pilgrimage. Its about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontags longtime publisher, issued Reborn, the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries arent intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind, documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (I.; H; C.). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser Sontag: Her Life and Work, published last month shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized, he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment has at last been decisively captured by what she called the image-world, the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of On Photography), but its hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe its inevitable that after Sontags death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing that rigorous, serious, impersonal self has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable surely fits the bill.

10 Interpretation, according to Sontag, is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into the life, a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I cant deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I dont want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say thats why she matters to me. In Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhards comic possessive thinker, who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose art selfishness makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

Im the opposite of that. I dont like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasnt a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, shes often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didnt talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay certainly among the most controversial is Notes on Camp, which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by the spirit of extravagance with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the Notes like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent a seriousness that fails, then Notes on Camp enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of Against Interpretation called Camus Notebooks originally published in The New York Review of Books Sontag divides great writers into husbands and lovers, a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the ideal husband of contemporary letters. It isnt really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. Hes the guy the reader will settle for, who wont ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Cline or Gide. Hes also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontags serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in Against Interpretation and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in Under the Sign of Saturn, Sontags major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into The Pornographic Imagination with the warning that No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornographies there are at least three and before pledging to take them on one at a time.

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontags masterful prose. Shes the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game dont simply dictate silence or obedience on the readers part. What sustains the bond the bondage, if youll allow it is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. Against Interpretation was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. On Photography was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years Ive purchased at least three copies of Under the Sign of Saturn if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, Id pick that one and in each the essay on Canetti, Mind as Passion, is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Ive never met such a person. Mind as Passion is the best thing Ive ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer teaches us how to breathe, about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn. Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader who is also, of course, a writer is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontags reader, the love story becomes an implicit mnage trois. Each essay enacts the effort the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. Its almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why arent the kids reading Canetti? Why dont trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic to most people.

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The new sensibility she heralded in the 60s, dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia, survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and let people enjoy things looks like an emoji-friendly update of Against Interpretation, with enjoy things a safer formulation than Sontags erotics of art.

That isnt what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced Notes on Camp had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this years Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of On Photography, which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the 60s and 70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter? The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that the white race is the cancer of human history. In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism fascism with a human face. After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. Lets by all means grieve together, but lets not be stupid together.

That doesnt sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontags writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didnt soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didnt read or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

20 Consciousness is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. Its sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs in ways that escape scientific analysis to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single persons private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontags great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud but Sontag doesnt quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 Under the Sign of Saturn opens in a tiny room in Paris where she has been living for the previous year small bare quarters that answer some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on. Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If shes alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

Its only reading. By which I mean: Its everything.

Read more:
How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think - The New York Times

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Resist the Urge to Access: the Impact of the Stored Communications Act on Employer Self-Help Tactics - JD Supra

Most Americans will either have to or want to retire one day. With the massive population of baby boomers out there, millions of them already have started their retirement and millions more will be retiring every year for the next decade or more. To have a good retirement generally requires a lifetime of planning, but for millions of Americans there just is not going to be enough in Social Security and basic retirement funds to make those golden years all that golden.

24/7 Wall St. frequently has looked at long-term planning issues around investing and retirement. The good news is that if you are set to retire in the immediate years ahead, there is effectively zero risk that your Social Security benefits will not be there for another decade or two. The bad news for the majority of the population is that most people will not be able to live very well only on Social Security alone. Even adding in retirement funds may not make those golden years all that pleasant without some additional self-help. You need to take action and make an effort to help boost your income and cash available immediately and in the years ahead.

While Social Security is safe for the boomers and elderly, younger generations have very low expectations. Their expectation is that Social Security will not be there for them at all, or if it is there the benefits might be greatly reduced. All this makes it imperative for people of all ages to begin thinking about how to supplement their retirement as early as possible.

Investment advisers commonly tell clients to have saved $1 million, $2 million or more to be able to enjoy retirement. Even if you arent working any longer, those pesky costs from food, insurance, medicine, transportation, clothing, shelter, utilities, bills, vacations and entertainment all will keep adding up every month. We previously provided a basic plan for most ages on how to save that $1 million for retirement, and that is very attainable, but the reality is that most people just arent anywhere close to having saved that much money.

There are some basic issues that need to be considered about funding a proper retirement and taking a reality check about just how golden your future golden years will be. It is assumed that you are going to have some Social Security, if you are already near retirement, but the statistics from government and independent researchers show that an additional retirement account or other savings have to be in place. Here are some basic stats on Social Security, retirement income and so on:

Add all this up and here is what it means ahead for Joe Retiree. Even the maximum monthly Social Security benefit is unlikely to go very far in your retirement, and the average 401(K) and IRA accounts are likely to add only a few thousand dollars per year in income.

Here are 10 simple efforts that can boost your income and give you extra cash to make your retirement really feel like they are the golden years.

Knowing how to time your Social Security payments is a critical part of retirement for most Americans. Your mandated retirement age of 65 to 67 depends on what year you were born, and the SSA website shows a table of scheduled benefits. Some people choose to start taking their Social Security benefits at 62 years of age, while others choose to delay their benefits until age 70.

That SSA table shows a breakdown of how much more you get per month for delaying or how much less you receive for starting early. For anyone born 1960 or later, the full retirement age is 67 years old. Taking Social Security for those born 1960 or later at age 62 reduces monthly payments by 30% (to $700 for each $1,000 eligible at full age), and delaying Social Security until age 70 turns a $1,000 benefit into roughly $1,280. Taking money sooner or later depends on needs, lifestyle, how long each person reasonably expects to live and many other factors.

Dont forget: if you start taking Social Security before the mandatory age of 70, you can always choose to interrupt the benefits and let those monthly benefits grow.

Originally posted here:
10 Easy Steps to Boost Your Income and Cash in Retirement - 24/7 Wall St.

After a 20 percent increase in use last year, the Rollins Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) has adjusted its treatment methods to accommodate more students.

The new emphasis on group therapy and a switch from weekly to bi-weekly individual appointments, leaves some students feeling concerned.

In the past, students began individual talk therapy at their first appointment. In this new model of care delivery, students will first attend a 30-minute consultation. They will work one-on-one with a counselor to design an individualized care plan and identify their needs and goals for therapy. In this way, resources can be delegated more efficiently.

Additionally, one-on-one therapy is offered on a biweekly rather than weekly basis, and group therapy and workshops are emphasized and integrated into individual plans.

Dr. Connie Briscoe, director of the Wellness Center, said that the changes are part of an initiative to move to a stepped care model of mental health service provision.

This approach is considered one of the most appropriate and cost-effective models for college campuses. A patients care plan is adjusted based on the severity of their mental health issues.

Briscoe said, We spent time at other college counseling centers talking to other people who are using a variety of different models and felt that because we are a highly individualized campus and were all about relationships, the stepped care model really fits our campus and our culture best.

The individualized care plans include self-help resources, group therapy, therapeutic workshops, biweekly individual talk therapy appointments, campus and community resources such as Student & Family Care. It can also include referrals to off-campus therapy, as well as any necessary specialized treatment options.

Were matching the needs of the students to the services much more intentionally, and so were seeing that students are receiving a much broader range of services, said Briscoe.

One of the consequences of this need-matching plan is that many students will have less one-on-one appointments, unless a student is receiving specialized treatment or experiencing a crisis.

Anecia Inbornone (22), a client of the CAPS program, said,I know that for me, if Im in a group setting, Im not as vulnerable as I would be in like a one-on-one session, and I know thats probably very true for many people; so, although its an alternative, I dont think that fixes the problem.

Students are not upheld to the same code of ethics that requires counselors to maintain students confidentiality. Therefore, in group therapy and workshops, students must place their trust not only in their counselors but also in their fellow students to keep their personal information protected.

A survey conducted at the end of last year indicated that Rollins students would prefer to see a larger number and variety of workshops in addition to an increase in the availability of individual CAPS appointments.

Briscoe said that the CAPS program is not meant to be used as a long-term individual therapy service.

If students really want and need long-term intensive individual therapy, something we dont have here, we can always work with that student to provide them with resources in the community where they can go out and get that type of care, said Briscoe.

However, many students at Rollins rely on the schools mental health services because appointments are free and on-campus. Some students feel that there are not enough individual appointments available.

Kendall Clarke (21) has been using the CAPS program since the fall of her sophomore year. She said she benefited most from the relationship she built with her counselor in individual therapy.

A lot of people use CAPS as a replacement for a therapist, and I get that its counseling and not official therapy but we are college students and our money and our mobility are really limited, Clarke said.

I wanted to go to a professional therapist, but I dont have a car, and I dont have the money to be paying a Lyft or Uber every week to pay for a therapist, so CAPS kind of is the only thing I can get to help with some of my mental health issues, she said.

From 2017 to 2018, faculty and staff referred students to CAPS at an increased rate of 300 percent. Last spring, roughly 350 Rollins students were utilizing CAPS.

From 2018 to 2019, the number of students using CAPS increased by 20 percent, raising the average wait time for a CAPS appointment from 6.5 days in 2018 to two weeks in the spring of 2019.

In August 2018, the Wellness Center was awarded the Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention Grant, a federal government grant matched by Rollins and totaling over $300,000 distributed over a three-year period.

Besides that, the Wellness Center has not requested any additional funding from Rollins, but Briscoe said she is always hoping for more resources.

However, there would be challenges along the way. Briscoe said, If we were to get a lot more staff, where would we put them? We only have this one building.

As this new model is implemented, Briscoe remains hopeful that the changes will be beneficial to a majority of students on campus.

I think it cant be anything but really positive for our students to have more options and opportunities and better ways to tailor our resources to their needs, said Briscoe. I wouldnt have put the model together if I didnt think that it was a more effective model than the one we had in the past.

Students in need of mental health assistance are encouraged to contact the Wellness Center. No matter the time of day or availability at the Wellness Center, students in need of someone to talk to are encouraged to call the 24/7 crisis phone line at (833) 848-1761.

Additionally, students may utilize the WellTrack self-therapy app for free by registering with their student email address.

Visit link:
Wellness Center alters therapy options - Sandspur

Twenty years ago, McKinsey predicted that the success of organizations would primarily depend on their ability to identify, develop, and retain top talent. Those employees are responsible for most of their employers productivity, revenues, profits, etc., and are therefore also the key to outperforming their competitors.

Today, few companies would disagree. There is also ample scientific evidencethat in any workgroup or team, a small but vital number of people have a disproportionately high impact on that units performance and success.

The last two decades of academic researchreveals that these indispensable individuals are far more similar across jobs, cultures, and industries than most people think. They havethree major traits that set them apart.They tend to be smart and curious, which means they learn faster and better than others. They tend to have better people skills, so they are more effective in their interpersonal relations. They are more driven and hard-working than their peers, which explains their higher productivity rates.

But one critical dimension of talent appears to have been mostly forgotten and is surprisingly absent from companies competency frameworksand high-potentialmodels. Its importance is such that it can amplify or extinguish any other aspect of talent, including the benefits of learning ability, people skills, and work ethic.

That trait is self-control, and it explains why some people are much better able to resist temptations and make short-term sacrifices to pursue more meaningful long-term goals, not just at work, but in any area of life. Without self-control, every other virtue, skill, or ability is rendered futile, as any significant accomplishment starts with the ability to manage yourself. As Plato said: The first and best victory is to conquer self.

Scientific research suggests there are five key reasons for the critical importance of self-control in the workplace.

We live in an age of information overload and ubiquitous digital distractions. And as Herbert Simon noted, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Academic research shows that individuals with higher levels of self-control are better able to ignore distractions, which enables them to concentrate more and achieve higher levels of performance.

Curiosity is a sought-after trait by many top organizations, including Google and Amazon. But the type of curiosity they seek aligns with what psychologists call the bright sideof curiosity. That means those people can be so deeply immersed in a subject that they are able to develop superior levels of expertise and skill that provide a competitive advantage to both the employee and the employer. Unleashing this positive aspect of curiosity and key knowledge driver requires shutting down its dark side. That is the short-term glut that pushes individuals to consume trivial content, as a short-term cure to boredom, and a lazy alternative to focus and concentration. The more self-control you have, the less time you will waste binging on random YouTube clips or looking at the Facebook photos of your neighbors cat having breakfast.

As Daniel Markovits highlights in his excellent new book, The Meritocracy Trap, we live in an age of unprecedented competition for jobs and career success, where even the most highly skilled and employable individuals are pushed into longer and more intense working hours. In this ever more complex and unpredictable world, nobody can succeed unless they are able to marshal the necessary levels of resilience and stress tolerance. People with higher levels of self-control are more likely to be in this category.

As a recent meta-analysis shows, employees personality is as important a predictor of their level of engagement and job satisfaction as the actual job they are in. This means that one of the best ways to ensure that your workforce is engaged is to hire people with a predisposition to enjoy work and be enthusiastic about their careers. Self-control is one of the key traits that distinguish employees who are more engaged at work.

Self-control is a strong predictor of ethical and prosocial behavior. When employees who lack self-control are promoted into management or leadership roles, they misbehave. Sadly, this happens all too often, which explains harassment and the prevalence of leaders who engage in other reckless, entitled, and antisocial behaviors at work. Incidentally, if we selected leaders on the basis of their self-control, the majority of them would be female.

When you look for talented people, focus not just on what they know or their likability. Pay attention to their ability to control their urges and keep their impulses in check. This evidence-based recommendation is in stark contrast with much of the popular self-help advice you will find online on just being yourself and bringing your authentic self to work.

Self-control is as underrated as authenticity is overrated. Theres no need to go against ones values and principles, but the most productive and rewarding version of you will require a healthy degree of restraint and self-censorship, and that can only be achieved if you exercise self-control.

View post:
the most under-rated aspect of talent - Fast Company

The world around is being cluttered with too many screens and India hasnt been slouching on that front either. An overload of screens, which was once considered an assault on our senses, has now become a part of our everyday lives. Moving beyond TV and computers or laptops, we are always connected through smartphones, often carrying more than one to segregate professional from personal. But thats not all! When running out of cash, the ATM screen is our go-to resource. At airports, we would rather get the boarding pass from a self-help kiosk and drop the baggage at the counter instead of bearing a long queue.

I sometimes pause and wonder How many screens per second are we living." With every passing day, the world around us is being increasingly populated with screens. No matter where we go, the black mirror follows usat workplaces, home, indoors and outdoors, buses, trains, airports, there is simply no escaping now. However, one may halt and wonder, what does this explosion of the screen mean for the evolution of laptops? From clamshell designs to athletic architectures, laptops have certainly come a long way. Yet, the future may hold true integration of multiple screens, with a pursuit to de-clutter and help multi-taskers prioritize better.

It was 1982 when Grid Systems, under the leadership of John Ellenby, popularly known as the godfather" of laptops, launched the first-ever laptop as we recognize todayclamshell and portable. Named the Compass, the laptop was, however, noting like a modern-day notebook. Despite the clamshell design, the laptop was heavy (weighing 5 kilos) and expensive (a present-day equivalent of over $20,000).

However, the Compass led to Apple, which released its first portable laptop in 1989, which may have been priced lesser but was still questionably portable, weighing 7.2 kg. It was the 90s when some other popular product ranges greeted us, for instance, the 1992 ThinkPad, which is still an active product line. It folded the screen at the top and keyboard at the bottom neatly in half, also offering TrackPoint allowing users to operate the mouse on the screen. In 1996, Toshiba Libretto may have been the first entrant to the subnotebook category, owing to its sleek design. With the dimensions of a novel, the laptop weighed only 840 g, garnering immense popularity within the market for its industry-leading easily portable attribute.

While tracing the evolution of laptops, a standout aspect has been the consistency in the design of laptops architecture. While the machines have surely shrunk, the year 2018 saw the growth of the thin and light" category priced at an affordable range. But not much has shifted in the age-old clamshell design.

We made a leap towards the weird and wonderful design of laptops when Windows 8 debuted over half a decade ago. It led to the rise of interesting designs, noteworthy to mention the Yoga laptop range and other athletic designs from the leading OEMs. However, the quirky designs have come and gone, without defining the generation. The industry, thus, in the need of a serious makeover and to de-clutter the proliferation of multiple screens, is perhaps headed what may be a significant epoch in the laptop space the advent of dual-screen laptops. Brands are tinkering with the idea of adding another secondary screen to the traditional design.

A dual-screen laptop allows the user to perhaps check the work emails on a secondary screen while focusing on the major task at hand on the primary one.

Professionals can develop the PowerPoint presentation on the main screen, while constantly brainstorming on the messenger app opened on the secondary screen. Gamers can utilize the dual offering to focus on the high-adrenaline action-packed formats and leverage the secondary screen to take stock of their arsenal, zoom in on the map, or simply stream music online. In a nutshell, dual-screen laptops are here to make life easier for the multi-tasking clan and take some pressure off from having to utilize multiple screens. They would also solve the conundrum for users to select between gaming devices and work laptops.

With their razor-sharp focus on delivering high horsepower to enable productivity and multi-tasking, the dual-screen offerings are the torch-bearers of an integrated and de-cluttered future.

In days to come, laptops will continue to get more powerful and play a significant role in the lives of users. The high-powered machines would empower users to venture into critical tasks such as 3D modelling, animation programs, and more. With the machines getting ready to take charge of critical roles, the market for consumer notebooks and laptops will only get enriched with superior and disruptive offerings.

Arnold Su is BDM, consumer notebooks & ROG, Asus India

Excerpt from:
Opinion: The evolution of laptops from bulky machines to compact, dual-screens - Livemint

La Jolla, CA, Oct. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MadCap Software, Inc., the leader in multi-channel content authoring, today announced that the MadCap Flare and MadCap Central October 2019 Releases are now available. Together, the latest versions introduce several industry firsts, including the drag-and-drop import of Microsoft Word and other files, responsive content personalization, and built-in business intelligence and data analytics on customer content and user activity, among others. With MadCap Flare and MadCap Central, users have more comprehensive functionality than ever for creating, reviewing, analyzing and delivering modern self-support websites, training content, technical documentation, and knowledge management centers.

MadCap Flare and MadCap Central are part of the MadCap Authoring and Management System (AMS). Combining the power of desktop authoring with the convenience of the cloud, MadCap AMSprovides a complete solution to support the entire content development lifecycle. MadCap Flare offers cutting-edge technical authoring and publishing capabilities with advanced features to maximize authoring efficiency, content reuse, and multi-channel publishing. MadCap Central is the first cloud-based platform for content and project management designed specifically for the documentation industry. As a result, content developers can leverage one integrated system to streamline their content deliveryfrom authoring, publishing and translation to cloud-based project, content and workflow management, to now gathering valuable business intelligence and user statistics on how end users interact with the content.

Today, more than 20,000 organizations worldwide and growing rely on our solutions to deliver an increasingly broad range of content to support their training, customer service, employee education, and documentation demands, said Anthony Olivier, MadCap founder and CEO. With the newest releases of MadCap Central and MadCap Flare, we are extending our commitment to innovating solutions that facilitate the development and delivery of these diverse content requirements. Now, customers have unprecedented power and simplicity in leveraging existing content by importing various file types, personalizing their output to users different needs, managing their content publication, and using analytics to consistently improve their content and create a superior user experience.

Unprecedented Ease with Microsoft Word ImportsMadCap Flare is used by thousands of companies worldwide to create and publish their technical documentation, user guides, instruction manuals, online Help, and support websites to any number of print, web, desktop and mobile formats in users languages of choice.

The October 2019 Release introduces two innovations that make it easier than ever to import Microsoft Word files and convert these into Flare topics for maximum content reuse. In a first for the industry, MadCap Flare enables users to simply drag and drop any number of Word files directly into Flare for a simplified content import workflow. Additionally, a completely redesigned import wizard simplifies the process of customizing the import of Word files and adds new options for streamlining the conversion process.

The MadCap Flare October 2019 Release also adds the ability to drag and drop any other file typesuch as image files, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets among othersdirectly into Flare.

Business Intelligence and AnalyticsTogether, the XML-based MadCap Central and MadCap Flare provide a comprehensive, agile, highly extensible, and cost-effective alternative to enterprise content management (ECM) and component content management system (CCMS) solutions. In another industry first, the October 2019 Releases of these solutions extend their functionality with new business intelligence (BI) and data analytics.

Providing a Google Analytics-like experience, the new capabilities enable technical communications and documentation professionals to use analytics on Flare-generated content to analyze and continuously improve their content, thereby increasing self-help, ticket deflection, and overall user satisfaction. Technical authors can easily set up the analytics in minutes with no hardware or additional IT requirements and track usage on any hosted website or desktop outputcontent can be hosted anywhere, not just with MadCap Centralto start gathering data analytics immediately. Analytic data includes:

Responsive Content PersonalizationMadCap Flare is the only professional authoring and publishing solution that lets authors create and publish responsive HTML5 output out of the box with top and side navigationwhich more closely resembles a modern, search engine-optimized, and fully customizable informational websitealong with high-end print documentation from the same source of content.

The October 2019 Release of MadCap Flare extends responsive output to now include responsive text. This intelligent, responsive content functionality introduces another industry first by adding the ability to personalize and create content with the intelligence to change based on not just the device but also the format or user type. Now text, images and video can be automatically modified based on the screen to provide the most appropriate and personalized content to end users, regardless of device, format or user type.

Atlassian Confluence ImportAtlassian Confluence is the content collaboration tool widely used by software development teams to collaborate and share knowledge efficiently. Increasingly, organizations are seeking to repurpose content from Confluence within their MadCap Flare-based documentation, Help websites, training content, and knowledge management systems. In this way, customers can capitalize on Confluence as a source of gathered subject matter expert information and then use the power and flexibility of MadCap Flare to extend the delivery of this content throughout the enterprise and across multiple channels. MadCap Flare is also being used by these businesses to better stylize the content to align it with their corporate brandingas reflected by the new Cloudistics case study published earlier this week.

With the October 2019 Release, users now have the ability to import Atlassian Confluence content directly into MadCap Flare, including HTM and Resource files for Confluence cloud and desktop, while respecting the Confluence structure.

Availability and PricingThe MadCap Flare and MadCap Central October 2019 Releases are available today as part of the MadCap Authoring and Management System. Per-user subscription pricing for MadCap AMS is $2,988 per year or $249 per month. The subscription includes 30 GB of storage per company account (with additional storage available), free product upgrades and updates, Platinum-level maintenance and support with unlimited email and telephone support, a knowledge base, and forum access. Standalone perpetual licenses for MadCap Flare and subscriptions for MadCap Central are also available. Visit MadCap Software at https://www.madcapsoftware.com/ or contact MadCap Software at sales@madcapsoftware.com or +1 (858) 320-0387 to learn more.

About MadCap Software MadCap Software, Inc. is a trusted resource for the thousands of companies around the globe that rely on its solutions for single-source multi-channel authoring and publishing, multimedia, and translation management. Whether delivering technical, policy, medical, marketing, business, or human resources content, MadCaps products are used to create corporate intranets, Help systems, policy and procedure manuals, video tutorials, knowledge bases, eBooks, user guides, and more to any format, including high-end print, online, desktop or mobile. MadCap services include product training, consulting services, translation and localization, and an advanced developer certification program. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, MadCap Software is home to some of the most experienced software architects and product experts in the content development industry. Learn more about MadCap Software at http://www.madcapsoftware.com.

MadCap Software, the MadCap Software logo, MadCap Authoring and Management System, MadCap Central, and MadCap Flare, are trademarks or registered trademarks of MadCap Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other marks are the properties of their respective owners.

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MadCap Software Introduces Industry Firsts with Plug-and-Play Imports and Data Analytics in the Newest Releases of MadCap Flare and MadCap Central -...

If parents were giving their children virtue names today, as the Puritans used to do, nobody would choose Charity or Grace or Patience. Instead, half of all baby girls born in America would be named Empowerment or Assertiveness.

For women in this cultural moment, assertiveness is perhaps the ultimate in aspirational personal qualities. At the nexus of feminism and self-help lies the promise that if we can only learn to state our needs more forcefully to lean in and stop apologizing and demand a raise and power pose in the bathroom before meetings and generally act like a ladyboss (though not a regular boss of course; that would be unladylike) everything from the pay gap to mansplaining to the glass ceiling would all but disappear. Women! Be more like men. Men, as you were.

There are several problems with this fist-pumping restyling of feminism, most obviously that it slides all too easily into victim blaming. The caricature of the shrinking violet, too fearful to ask for a raise, is a handy straw-woman for corporations that would rather blame their female employees for a lack of assertiveness than pay them fairly.

Theres also the awkward issue that it turns out to be untrue. Research shows that despite countless attempts to rebrand the wage gap as a confidence gap, women ask for raises as often as men do. They just dont get them.

But even if we leave these narrative glitches aside and accept the argument that female unassertiveness is a major cause of gender inequality and that complex, systemic problems can be fixed with individual self-improvement, we are still left with a deeply sexist premise.

The assumption that assertiveness is a more valuable trait than say, deference is itself the product of a ubiquitous and corrosive gender hierarchy.

As a rule, anything associated with girls or women from the color pink to domestic labor is by definition assigned a lower cultural value than things associated with boys or men. Fashion, for instance, is vain and shallow, while baseball is basically a branch of philosophy. Tax dollars are poured into encouraging girls to take up STEM subjects, but no one seems to care much whether boys become nurses. Girls are routinely given pep talks to be anything a boy can be, a glorious promotion from their current state, whereas to encourage a boy to behave more like a girl is to inflict an emasculating demotion. Female hobbies, careers, possessions and behaviors are generally dismissed as frivolous, trivial, niche or low status certainly nothing to which any self-respecting boy or man might ever aspire.

Women: Improve yourselves! has always been a baseline instruction of both the world at large and the self-help movement. Take the whole Women Who subgenre, a surprisingly large range of books whose titles start with the words Women Who and end with a character flaw that then blames us for our own failure to be happy or successful. Women Who Love Too Much, Women Who Think Too Much, Women Who Worry Too Much, Women Who Do Too Much.

Rarely do we stop to consider that many of lifes problems might be better explained by the alternative titles Men Who Love Too Little, Think Too Little, Worry Too Little or Do Too Little. But instead we assume without question that whatever men are doing or thinking is what we all should be aiming for.

Now the assertiveness movement is taking this same depressingly stacked ranking system and selling it back to us as feminism. We in turn barely question whether the male standard really is the more socially desirable or morally sound set of behaviors or consider whether women might actually have had it right all along.

After all, one mans assertive is often another womans abrasive, entitled or rude. Surely many of our current most pressing social and political problems from #MeToo to campus rape, school shootings to President Trumps Twitter posturing are caused not by a lack of assertiveness in women but by an overassertiveness among men. In the workplace, probably unsurprisingly to many women who are routinely talked over, patronized or ignored by male colleagues, research shows that rather than women being underconfident, men tend to be overconfident in relation to their actual abilities. Women generally arent failing to speak up; the problem is that men are refusing to pipe down.

Take apologizing, the patient zero of the assertiveness movement. Women do too much of it, according to countless op-ed essays, books, apps and shampoo ads. Theres even a Gmail plug-in that is supposed to help us quit this apparently self-destructive habit by policing our emails for signs of excessive contrition, underlining anything of an overly apologetic nature in angry red wiggles.

The various anti-apologizing tracts often quote a 2010 study showing that the reason women say they are sorry more often than men is that we have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior. This is almost exclusively framed as an example of female deficiency. But really, isnt a person with a high threshold of what constitutes offensive behavior just a fancy name for a jerk?

Rarely in the course of this anti-apologizing crusade do we ever stop to consider the social and moral value of apologies and the cost of obliterating them from our interactions. Apologizing is a highly symbolic and socially efficient way to take responsibility for our actions, to right a wrong and clear space for another persons feelings. Its a routine means of injecting self-examination and moral reflection into daily life.

Indeed many of our problems with male entitlement and toxic behavior both in the workplace and elsewhere could well be traced back to a fundamental unwillingness among men to apologize, or even perceive that they have anything to apologize for. Certainly many emails I have received from men over the years might have benefited from a Gmail plug-in pointing out the apology-shaped hole. The energy we expend in getting women to stop apologizing might be better spent encouraging men to start.

So perhaps instead of nagging women to scramble to meet the male standard, we should instead be training men and boys to aspire to womens cultural norms, and selling those norms to men as both default and desirable. To be more deferential. To reflect and listen and apologize where an apology is due (and if unsure, to err on the side of a superfluous sorry than an absent one). To aim for modesty and humility and cooperation rather than blowhard arrogance.

It would be a challenge, for sure. Pity the human resources manager trying to sell a deference training course to male employees. She would need to paint all the PowerPoint slides black and hand out Nerf guns just to get started. As long as the threat of emasculation is a baseline terror for men, encouraging them to act more like women still instinctively feels like a form of humiliation.

Which is exactly why we need to try, because until female norms and standards are seen as every bit as valuable and aspirational as those of men, we will never achieve equality. Promoting qualities such as deference, humility, cooperation and listening skills will benefit not only women but also businesses, politics and even men themselves, freeing them from the constant and exhausting expectation to perform a grandstanding masculinity, even when they feel insecure or unsure.

So H.R. managers and self-help authors, slogan writers and TED Talk talkers: Use your platforms and your cultural capital to ask that men be the ones to do the self-improvement for once. Stand up for deference. Write the book that tells men to sit back and listen and yield to others judgment. Code the app that shows them where to put the apologies in their emails. Teach them how to assess their own abilities realistically and modestly. Tell them to lean out, reflect and consider the needs of others rather than assertively restating their own. Sell the female standard as the norm.

Perhaps some capitulation poses in the bathroom before a big meeting might help.

Ruth Whippman, the author of America the Anxious, is working on a book about raising boys.

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Private therapy helps so many people stay mentally healthy, but it also can come with long wait times, high costs and sometimes awkward moments. So its no wonder that many people turn to mental health apps for help with their own mental health concerns. Popular apps can include mood tracking, meditation, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and other tools to use to stay mentally healthy.

People find that they can increase insight, improve habit forming behaviors and build mindful awareness [using apps], Lauren Cook, MMFT and Doctoral Candidate of Clinical Psychology at Pepperdine University, tells SheKnows. Furthermore, they can be discreet. It might look like youre texting when in actuality you may be utilizing a mental health app.

But with all the advantages, mental health apps arent exactly perfect. There can be some drawback to using them especially if youre using them incorrectly. Here are five things mental health experts want you to know before you hit download.

Mental health apps are best used in conjunction with in-person therapy. Jessica A. Rose, LMHC, a Manhattan-based psychotherapist, says mental health apps are most useful for individuals who are currently working with a mental health professional and are looking for an organized way to their track symptoms or experiences, or to practice the interventions theyve learned in therapy in their daily life interventions such as meditation and breathing techniques.

The best thing about mental health apps is that they extend the learning from the therapy session, says Cook. They bring the skills into a day-to-day practice and build greater awareness. They also help you form healthier habits. For example, you may begin a more consistent mindfulness practice when you get a daily reminder from your phone app.

Rose has only criticism for any mental health apps that promise to make you your own expert.

Imagine the same statement was put forward regarding legal advice, dental health, acupuncturist? Mental Health Professionals (LMHC, LCSW, Ph.D., PsyD, MD) have, at minimum, six years of college education, plus externships/residencies, supervised clinical hours, and must pass a state licensure exam, says Rose. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an app that is able to encapsulate all the education acquired both in and out of the classroom to assert that one who downloads this app may become their own expert.

Mental health apps should not be diagnosing anyone and it is concerning that someone would use an app after they have self-diagnosed themselves, says Cook. Ideally, she says, use of an app is monitored by your clinician so that any questions or significant changes in behavior can be monitored. Mental health apps also dont assess for safety in the same way that an in-person therapist can. For example, if someone is feeling suicidal, an app can only do so much to get you to the appropriate care whereas a therapist can guide you through the process of getting support.

In the same vein, of course you want to select apps that will do you good, and your doctor or mental health provider can likely give you a personalized recommendation. But if thats not possible, read reviews about the apps and Google what apps may be the most helpful for treating the symptoms that you believe you are experiencing, recommends Cook.

If youre experiencing mental distress, Cook suggests connecting with your personal support network first before you go to an app. Having conversations with family and friends about your distress can be a meaningful way to process your experience, she says. That face-to-face opportunity for support can make a tremendous difference even if its through FaceTime. Human connection makes a big difference.

If its a small amount of stress, that in-person support may be all you need to help you cope. But if youre having difficulty completing your daily obligations and/or are overwhelmingly upset, Cook recommends that you seek professional care before turning to an app.

Ultimately, when it comes to treating your mental health effectively, the experts we talked to believe that seeking treatment from an in-person therapist should always take priority over seeking help from a mental health app.

Mental health apps are great for those who are looking for self-improvement and increased awareness, Cook says. But for people who have difficulty controlling their emotional responses and/or are emotionally in distress or for those who lack motivation, a mental health app is likely insufficient treatment.

Instead, Rose urges people to think of mental health the same way you think of physical health: Ifyou have a worrisome symptom, its best to first get checked out by a professional.

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5 Things You Need to Know Before Trying a Mental Health App - SheKnows