“That’s not mental illness. That’s evil.”Roger’s boss said it over lunch, about Jeffrey Dahmer, and it ended the discussion. He has been thinking about it for thirty years since.When someone shoots up a school, or walks into a mall with a knife, we reach for the same handful of words. Lunatic. Madman. Crazy. He was nuts. Every one of them…

Loneliness is more deadly than smoking, and the man whose research proved it died of lung cancer. Touch starvation is not a figure of speech: oxytocin, the chemical that bonds a mother to a newborn, is released by skin on skin contact, and a society that has stopped touching each other is running short of it.This is Part 2 of…

Low energy. Weight gain. Lethargy. Low mood. That is the symptom list for depression. It is also the symptom list for an underactive thyroid, and a blood test tells you which one you are looking at.This episode is about the rule Rich Russell taught him: check the biology before you go to the psychology. Roger is a business psychologist, not…

“He was a nice man and a good boss.” That is what a German housemaid said about Hitler, and it is the sentence that made Dr. Roger Hall stop treating nice as a virtue. This episode takes apart unconditional positive regard, the idea Carl Rogers built modern therapy on. Rogers wanted to say love, but in the 1950s love sounded…

We’re taught that healing starts with understanding, that if we can just uncover why we are the way we are, everything will click into place. Dr. Roger Hall says that’s only half true, and chasing insight alone can actually keep people stuck.In this episode of Second Thoughts, Dr. Hall unpacks why insight is neither necessary nor sufficient for change, why…

What’s the real difference between being angry and being hostile? According to Dr. Roger Hall, the answer matters more than you think — and getting it wrong can quietly damage relationships, therapy outcomes, and how people see themselves.In this episode, Dr. Hall unpacks the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to explain our own mistakes as situational (“I dropped the ball…

Have you ever left a single therapy session with a label that changed how you see yourself, permanently? On this episode of Second Thoughts, Dr. Roger Hall explains why one offhand diagnosis can take root and spread through your identity like a dandelion in a lawn, nearly impossible to remove once it’s there.Dr. Hall pulls back the curtain on the…