Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind with Dr. Ruth Richards

Please join us and our guest, Dr. Ruth Richards, for a show on Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind. Ruth Richards, MD, PhD, one of the leading researchers on creativity in daily life, is a distinguished educational psychologist and Board Certified psychiatrist.

“We all have universal creative potential, essential in evolution, yet it often goes unnamed and underdeveloped,” so writes Dr. Richards. She adds that creativity, our “originality of everyday life,” offers health, joy, and life meaning, plus a fresh new worldview and view of self-in-world. One sees self as process, life as profoundly interconnected, emergent, surprising, and dynamically changing, with health related to qualities including our change potential, conscious awareness, openness, and non-defensiveness, as we “go with” —and add our unique piece to—this flow.

As Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in the College of Social Sciences, she specializes in the areas of Consciousness, Spirituality, Integrative Health, and Creativity Studies. Many years ago, before she went on to earn an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, she was studying to become a high school teacher. While taking a required psychology class, a discussion about diagnostics tests led to a “light bulb” life-changing moment when she realized that it was possible to come up with profoundly creative ways to answer even standardized questions!

She authored Everyday Creativity: Coping and Thriving in the 21 st Century, and is currently coediting Nonlinear Psychology: Keys to Chaos and Creativity in Mind and Life. She was also principal investigator and co-author for The Lifetime Creativity Scales.