Tag: Psychotherapist

Events

• 1990 – The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

People (Births)

• 1875 – Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (d. 1961).
• 1952 – Glynis Breakwell, English psychologist and academic.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA (42 U.S.C. § 12101) is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations.

In 1986, the National Council on Disability had recommended the enactment of an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and drafted the first version of the bill which was introduced in the House and Senate in 1988. The final version of the bill was signed into law on 26 July 1990, by President George H.W. Bush. It was later amended in 2008 and signed by President George W. Bush with changes effective as of 01 January 2009.

Disabilities Included

ADA disabilities include both mental and physical medical conditions. A condition does not need to be severe or permanent to be a disability. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations provide a list of conditions that should easily be concluded to be disabilities:

• Deafness.
• Blindness.
• An intellectual disability (formerly termed mental retardation).
• Partially or completely missing limbs or mobility impairments requiring the use of a wheelchair.
• Autism.
• Cancer.
• Cerebral palsy.
• Diabetes.
• Epilepsy.
• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD).
• Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection.
• Multiple sclerosis (MS).
• Muscular dystrophy.
• Major depressive disorder (MDD).
• Bipolar disorder.
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
• Schizophrenia.

Other mental or physical health conditions also may be disabilities, depending on what the individual’s symptoms would be in the absence of “mitigating measures” (medication, therapy, assistive devices, or other means of restoring function), during an “active episode” of the condition (if the condition is episodic).

Certain specific conditions that are widely considered anti-social, or tend to result in illegal activity, such as kleptomania, paedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, etc. are excluded under the definition of “disability” in order to prevent abuse of the statute’s purpose. Additionally, gender identity or orientation is no longer considered a disorder and is also excluded under the definition of “disability”.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.

Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as president of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Glynis Breakwell

Dame Glynis Marie Breakwell DBE DL FRSA FAcSS (born West Bromwich, 26 July 1952) is a social psychologist and an active public policy adviser and researcher specialising in leadership, identity process and risk management. In January 2014 she was listed in the Science Council’s list of ‘100 leading UK practising scientists’. Her achievements as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath in Bath were marred by controversy culminating in her dismissal in a dispute regarding her remuneration.

Breakwell has been a Fellow of the British Psychological Society since 1987 and an Honorary Fellow since 2006. She is a chartered health psychologist and in 2002 was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Breakwell was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to higher education. She is also a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Somerset.