Excuse us while we do some spring cleaning around here and publish a few entries that have been sitting in our “draft” pile longer than I care to admit…
In a bit of research done in 2000, Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues researched taxi drivers’ brains using structural magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRIs). They discovered that […]

While I’m down in Texas enjoying some sunshine and the ranch life, I’m happy to present to you some of the golden oldies from Psych Central’s archives. Have a great weekend!
10 Years Ago on Psych Central

The Birth of a New Society:
The International Society for Mental Health Online
Ten years ago this March marks the 10th anniversary […]

All of us have our insecurities, and some of us have our secrets. Sometimes we share these with the ones we love, and sometimes we feel trapped, ashamed or simply unable to do so. Sometimes our insecurities are just the random issues of self-esteem or feeling like we’re not good enough in anything we do, […]

We’d like to give a hat tip to the New York Times health blog, written by the intrepid Tara Parker-Pope, for her entry on our article published earlier this week by our resident expert, Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. — The Family Bathroom Waltz. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out, it’s well worth […]

Look, you might be 22 or 42, but there are some things you should think about even if you think it’s premature or “I’ll get to that later.” While it’s a morbid topic for some, it’s one that’s important enough that I have to write about at least once. That topic is your own death, […]

There’s no easy way to do this, but when a state wants to cut costs (and ostensibly “improve” treatment, although that remains to be seen) and close a sprawling old mental hospital, and move its remaining patients to group homes, it’s going to run into opposition and problems.
The Boston Globe has the sad story about […]

Margaret Trudeau, Canada’s lively and lovely former first lady turned bipolar advocate, talks about her recovery (récupération in French) process to stay balanced.
“You need to develop a sense of forgiveness,” she says. “Forgiving myself and forgiving others for abandoning me, for hurting me, for their lack of understanding. I have to ask for forgiveness, and […]

Meta-analyses are great research tools, because they allow researchers to look at data across large sets of data published by multiple studies, and see if there are more powerful (or less powerful) effects that no single study has found on its own.
So it’s always interesting to read something that a meta-analysis finds in the data […]

People and professionals often divide up depression into different types, such as “clinical” depression versus “non-clinical” depression, “biological” depression versus “situational” depression. The diagnostic manual professionals refer to, however, doesn’t make any distinctions about theorizing where or how your depression is caused, and neither does most research in this area. And yet, I believe such […]

As I’ve banged the drum previously here and here about the lack of a significant relationship between violence and mental illness, I was happy to read an editorial published in today’s Boston Globe, Mentally ill unfairly portrayed as violent by Dr. Ronald Pies. He makes the point far more succinctly and strongly that I […]

Eating disorders are usually thought of a teen issue, but increasingly men, adult women and girls as young as seven also suffer. They don’t fit into the usual treatment programs designed for adolescent girls. In my community, there’s a recovery program for girls aged 12 – 19, and another mental health service runs a body […]

I’ve been reading a lot of articles in the past couple of years supporting mental exercises to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s. However, today I came across a study which states that physical exercise is also beneficial to delay onset of dementia, which is a main component of the Alzheimer’s disease.
In this […]