Maureen Murdock's Blog

Justice Alito has determined that women do not have the right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term but what about their male partners? Why aren’t more men protesting this decision that will impact them emotionally and financially? Since 5 old men and 1 woman have determined that women must bear unwanted pregnancies, under current law, their male partners must bear responsibility to raise the child, pay for their housing, food, clothing, education, and medical care.

But why isn’t...

Fat Albert first appeared in l967 during one of Bill Cosby’s stand-up comedy routines. The character of Fat Albert was based on Cosby’s tales about the neighborhood where he grew up in North Phillie.  He had a distinctive voice; you knew Fat Albert was around because of his distinctive baritone, “Hey Hey Hey.” All the high school kids I taught in West Phillie in the late Sixties greeted each other in the hallways with “Hey, Hey Hey”. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing his voice.

In 1970, I...

If you’re feeling blah as we come out of the pandemic, the name of this feeling, according to Adam Grant of the New York Times, is “languishing.” “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness” he writes. “It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” One of my psychotherapy clients put it this way: “I don’t think I’ll ever be somebody’s muse again. I don’t have that kind of creative energy, that life force. I feel flat.”

During months o...

Speaking about the incredible failure by law enforcement in D. C. to prepare for and contain the mob rampage through the Capitol on January 6th, R. P. Eddy, a former American counterterrorism official and diplomat said, “There was a failure among law enforcement to imagine that people who ‘look like me’ would do this.”

Not only was there a failure of imagination by law enforcement that hordes of white men would smash, break and splinter windows and doors to get into the Capitol because they too ...

I wrote The Heroine’s Journey 30 years ago when women of my generation sought validation from patriarchal systems and found them not only lacking but terribly destructive to the feminine psyche. We were the children of the post-Sputnik era who were encouraged to excel in this competitive race in order to recover Western supremacy.

Unfortunately, the historical cycle is repeating itself. My granddaughters, children of the post-911 generation, are implored to “Make American Great Again” in a 1950s...

In the midst of front page news about the coronavirus, the Weinstein convictions, the ups and downs of competitors to capture the Democratic presidential nomination, I bet you missed the shocking news that children as young as 6 years old are being taught how to administer Narcan to save their mother or father from an overdose.

Carter County Tennessee, next to North Carolina, is dealing with the ravages of opioid addiction. Nearly 60 people have died from opioid overdoses since 2014. That year 8...

Teenagers are drinking less alcohol, smoking fewer cigarettes and trying fewer hard drugs according to a new federal survey of 8th, 10th and 12th graders. This is due to an effort in the US to discourage drug use including stricter school penalties, smoking bans, and general public awareness campaigns including lawsuits against opioid manufacturers. “There has been a whole lot of effort at the community level,” said Dr. Sion Kim Harris, a pediatrician and a director for the Center for Adolescent...

Last Sunday, TV critic James Poniewozik wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times reminding us that Donald Trump is not a real person but confirming that he is a TV character. I found the article enlightening. As a psychotherapist by profession, I had been faux diagnosing Trump from the early days of his presidency with a slew of DSM-V labels: bipolar disorder for his erratic mood swings and rages; narcissistic personality disorder for his grandiose sense of self-importance and exaggeration of his ...

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently pointed out that mass shootings are almost exclusively perpetrated by men, adding that a discussion of this “is missing from the national conversation.” He got me wondering if this was true and if it was time to begin a conversation.

I started reading research about the fact that many of the gunmen in mass shootings share a history of hating women, assaulting wives, girlfriends and female family members, and posting misogynistic views online. Connor Bett...

For some time the focus of the opioid crisis has been on the doctors who run pill mills, the pharmacies who dispense opioid pills by the thousands, and the Sacklers, the family that controls and profits from Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. Now the attorneys general in New York, Vermont, and Washington State are going after the distributors of the drug—companies that act as middlemen, trucking medication from huge warehouses to hospitals, clinics, and drugstores.

The attorneys general all...