Another massive mental-health related piece in the New York Times magazine–Concocting a Cure for Kids with Issues. [Some] parents often don’t trust the mental-health professionals who usually treat children with “issues,” as we euphemistically tend to refer to problems like learning disabilities, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or other developmental difficulties. […] That’s why some of […]
Behavioral Optometry vs. ADHD Read More »
“All Nighters” is a New York Times blog series about insomnia–how it’s lived, what to do about it. Cartoonist Roz Chast recommends playing some individual Scattegories, “The A to Z Cure“: One thing I do when I can’t sleep is play alphabet games. I try to list various things from A to Z: countries, rock
A long review/think piece in the New Yorker about therapy and psychiatry, including the view from Gary Greenberg’s book, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease: Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to
Manufacturing Depression Read More »
A vigorous response to the NYT’s Depression’s Upside article by Dr. Ronald Pies at PsychCentral: [W]e have the myth of depression as a “clarifying force,” or as an “adaptive response to affliction” — notions being advanced by a number of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists. Thus, Lehrer quotes psychiatrist Andy Thomson as saying, “…even if you
Depression Good for You?…Maybe Not Read More »
A massive NYT Magazine piece explores “Depression’s Upside,” as hypothesized by evolutionary and social psychologists. [T]heir speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a
Depression is Good For You…Maybe Read More »
Unless 2012 turns out like the movie (“2012,” that is), the year that follows should see the release of the latest version of the DSM, the big book of psychiatric diagnoses that mental health pros use as a guide to thinking about what’s going on with clients. You’re not your diagnosis, and you’re really not
Back at Where the Client Is, a new interview with psychoanalyst Frances Sommer Anderson, PhD about treating pain the Dr. John Sarno way: By getting at underlying, unfelt emotion. Not mainstream at the moment, but look out. (The interview is intended for therapists, but is still readable.) Key: For people who have great difficulty being
Treating Chronic Pain Read More »
Another in case you missed it, this one from the New Yorker: “Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved?” looks at how we cope with death and loss. One autumn day in 1964, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, was working in her garden and fretting about a lecture she had to give.
On “On Death and Dying” (and Others) Read More »
In case you missed it, last weekend’s NYT Magazine asks, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing