Brent Dean Robbins is associate professor ofpsychology atPoint Park University inPittsburgh, 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 ofJanus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, and is a board member for a number of journals, includingInternational Journal of Transpersonal Studies, theInternational Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy,PsyCRITIQUES, andTerrorism Research. Robbins is a co-editor ofThe Legacy ofR.D. Laing, published by Trivium Press. Robbins is a recipient of the Harmi Carari Early Career Award, from theSociety for Humanistic Psychology. He holds a doctorate inclinical psychology fromDuquesne University.[1][2]
In 2011, Robbins co-authored an open letter from the Society for Humanistic Psychology regarding theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders's fifth edition, theDSM-5. The letter has been endorsed by thirteen otherAmerican Psychological Association divisions,[3] and has been signed as a petition by over 15,000 people. In a recentSan 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]
Brent was born into a nominallyCatholic family, became an atheist when in college, and then he reverted to the Catholic faith after experienced something in a retreat.[5]