Allison Van Dusen has a nice writeup of Seasonal Affective Disorder over at Forbes.com:
For sufferers, January and February tend to be the months when this form of depression, clinically known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), hits hardest. Those battling a severe case can have trouble getting any work done. They completely withdraw from social and […]

It was hard to miss a story titled “Straighter teeth won’t guarantee happiness” if only because the premise sounded pretty strange. Sure enough, scientists in England have spent 20-years studying a variety of aspects of the lives of people who have gotten braces. Unfortunately, having braces and straight teeth does not mean that life will […]

My oldest brother has been living with ulcerative colitis for years now. It’s one of those chronic medical conditions that can usually be well managed with a healthy lifestyle, eating right, and medications. But during a routine exam, inoperable polyps were discovered. Surgery was conducted last week to remove all or part of his colon, […]

The California Literary Review has an in-depth, interesting interview with the latest Sigmund Freud biographer, Peter D. Kramer. You may remember Kramer as the author of the well-known, Listening to Prozac. The new Freud book is entitled, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. The two reviews of this biography on Amazon.com are mixed, but […]

Some online self-help communities seem to have been having a hard time of things lately.
Last summer, the long-running BrainTalk Communities went offline for nearly 3 months before limping back into existence once we posted about its offline time here and started a new, more reliable support community to replace BrainTalk (our community is called […]

A recent article posted on Science Daily.com titled “Social Workers may indirectly experience post-traumatic stress“, discusses the impact that post traumatic stress disorder affected clients can have on their social worker. Research conducted at the University of Georgia; found that “repeatedly hearing the stories of trauma victims doubles the risk of social workers themselves […]

It seems logical that if a mother is under significant stress during pregnancy that the child may be at increased risk for some problems. Research is beginning to accumulate that confirms this belief, and a report at the BBC discusses new research in the area. Specifically, a recent study found that women experiencing relationship stress […]

There is ongoing debate across the country about the type of insurance coverage that people with psychological disorders receive. For many people, insurance comes up short in paying for complete treatment. Those struggling with eating disorders often have serious difficulty with this since the cost of in-patient or on-going out-patient treatment can be significantly high. […]

ACOR, the Association of Cancer Online Resources which serves tens of thousands cancer survivors and people seeking information and emotional support for cancer exchanging over 6,000,000 messages/month, urgently needs your help!
A technical catastrophe has caused a financial crisis. See further details below. In the meantime….
Make a Donation to the Association of Cancer Online Resources […]

A report on a study about antidepressants putting the elderly at risk for bone fractures hit the wires earlier this week. Researchers essentially found that older people being treated for depression with SSRIs were at double the risk to break bones compared to elderly individuals not on the medication.
“What we found was that there […]

People who take medication to treat a mental illness often face opinions and advice from friends (and strangers) whose ignorant ideas about medication come from stigma-reinforcing sources that lack an understanding of the science, evidence-based treatment, and/or real experience of mental illness.

Next time an uninformed person tells you to throw away your pills, consider […]

There are millions of Americans who are not covered for health insurance because they can’t afford or their employer doesn’t provide it (or some combination of the two). I count myself lucky because I can afford it, even while working for myself (although it is far from affordable).
I’ve been in and out of health […]