Brent Robbins

Brent Dean Robbins is Associate Professor of psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His areas of research include grief, humor, self-consciousness, spirituality/religion, death anxiety, and the medicalization of the body. He is Editor-in-Chief and founder of Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, and is a Board member for a number of journals, including International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, the International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, PsyCRITIQUES, and Terrorism Research. Robbins is a co-editor of The Legacy of R.D. Laing, published by Trivium Press. Robbins is a recipient of the Harmi Carari Early Career Award, from the Society for Humanistic Psychology. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Duquesne University.^[1][2]

In 2011, Robbins co-authored an open letter from the Society for Humanistic Psychology regarding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders's fifth edition, the DSM-5. The letter has been endorsed by thirteen other American Psychological Association divisions,^[3] and has been signed as a petition by over 15,000 people. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about the debate over the DSM-5, Robbins noted that, under the new guidelines, certain responses to grief could be labeled as pathological disorders, instead of being recognized as being normal human experiences.^[4]

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