Mike Langlois's Blog

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader! I wanted to let you know about a new startup project that launches this month that you may find of interest called Grokcraft. Grokcraft is a Minecraft server, learning lab, & community where parents, kids & professionals engage in playful collaborative social-emotional learning (SEL.) All our members are vetted & for […]

  This post is more personal than some, but then at some time in many of our lives cancer gets personal.  As many of you know, I have a companion and co-therapist named Boo.  For the past 12 years Miss Boo has worked with me to help in therapy.  We have worked with hundreds of […]

Last month I had the opportunity to talk at SXSW 2015 about how the video game Minecraft has a lot to teach us about mindfulness.  Video games often get a bad rap with mental health folks, but I try to change that thinking by pointing out that playing video games can actually be a form […]

Today I was slicing some lemons for shish kabobs and so not surprisingly I began to think about social media, attachment and what constitutes an authentic relationship. Authenticity was a key term when I was becoming a therapist in the mid nineties, and society in general.  Today, most people I have spoken to in the […]

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”  –The Imitation Game Shortly before I fell into the lava I began a conversation with an eleven year old girl, we’ll call her Sal.  This was a while back, on a Minecraft server I play on […]

What does “gamification” mean, and what is its relevance to mental health practice?  In this video of a conversation I had at University at Buffalo with Charles Syms, I take a stab at answering those questions.  This is just a start, and hopefully by the end of the video you can begin to see how […]

The importance of play is universal, and in many ways the nature of play is timeless.  That said, there is a lot to learn about video games as 21st-century play, especially if you are a play therapist.  Adding 21st-century forms of play to your repertoire can be daunting.  With so many naysayers in the mental […]

If you have ever wondered how to begin attending to, listening for, and asking questions about a patient’s use of technology, this video might give you some ideas.  In it my colleague Lesa Fichte, LMSW, University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and I, discuss the role of technology, people’s relationship with technology, and how […]

Often when I present, people are surprised that I teach on both emerging technologies such as social media and video games, and classic psychodynamic theories.  Although it may initially seem counterintuitive, especially to classically trained psychotherapists and social workers, I see a strong connection between the two.  Here is the first in a series of […]

I have written before about how technology often makes life easier for a large number of the population while simultaneously disenfranchising others.  The good news is that this does not have to be the case. The example I used in the past was the Starbucks App which allows customers to use, gain rewards for, and […]