As I write this, our thoughts are with those in Boston who were affected by the bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

In my 20 years living in the Boston area, I cheered on the runners on many occasions and now, even from far way, these events feel close to home.

Experiencing trauma can have a dramatic effect on our bodies and our minds.  And although it’s a different experience to witness a trauma on television, it still can affect us.

When you perceive a threat, the body activates the stress response. The stress response occurs in both your body and brain.

The body’s response to acute stress is a preparation for emergency.  Adrenaline and other hormones are released.  The body shuts down processes associated with long-term care.  When under immediate threat, digestion, reproduction, cell repair and other body tasks related to long-term functioning are unimportant.

A recent article published in the Journal of Positive Psychology surveyed the life satisfaction of 99 garbage pickers in León, Nicaragua. Researcher Jose Juan Vazquez interviewed these difficult-to-access individuals and found that not only are they happy, there is no correlation whatsoever to their financial well-being.

This is one of those studies that take a moment to get your mind around.

Imagine you are an itinerant individual living in absolute penury in a third-world country. You survive by going through other people’s garbage and extracting your food for the day as well as other essentials like clothing and footwear. You live your life hand to mouth and what your hand finds are the things others have discarded. You recycle what you can for money, and this considerable effort earns you about $3 a day.

By downward social comparison, almost anyone seeing a person living in these conditions would assume the individuals engaged in this activity would resent their life circumstance and view their life as anything but happy.

But this study shows this is a false assumption.

While I believe mindfulness meditation has been the keystone to my recovery, I still think of it as an adjunct therapy. I couldn’t manage mental illness as well as I do now if I did not meditate. But I acknowledge that the medication my doctor prescribes and the therapy visits I have with him are crucial as well. Only through the consistent application of all three therapies am I well.

Mindfulness meditation is currently all the rage, and it works. But I am wary of its proponents who claim it can treat (or even cure) mental illness by itself.

Meditation is a powerful tool when used to decrease stress and increase well-being. But if we are to maintain that mental illnesses are biochemical malfunctions of the brain and nervous system, then we must allow room in treatment for medicine. Therapy also has a long history of positive impact on the lives of those challenged by psychiatric disease. Meditation, when added to more traditional and well-tested methods of treatment, can help a patient successfully manage a challenging life. I, and so many others like me, am proof of that.

I’m sitting down for my yearly physical with the blood pressure machine in view. From the displeased expression on the nurse’s face, I gather it wasn’t a perfect reading. Instead of jotting the numbers down in her notes, realizing that I’m probably just nervous (because I do have “white coat syndrome”), she sighs and expresses the urgency to take my blood pressure again and again, until she’s satisfied with the result.

Then, I walk into the lab next door for a blood test and the line I hear is: “Oh, your blood pressure was high, let me see if I can draw your blood now.”

Wait, what? Do they actually think that these comments will make me feel more relaxed?

When we are growing up, we learn from everybody around us. We learn how to interact with others; how to share, how to eat, how to think. We believe most of what we are told growing up, and if we don’t believe it, we might be shouted at, or told we are wrong; and we soon learn not to speak up, to ‘swallow’ others’ opinions we don’t necessarily agree with at the time.

It could be argued that, if we grow up healthily, we are encouraged to question the world.

Ideally, we would be taught to form our own opinions and respect other people’s opinions, but not necessarily subscribe to them. However, if we aren’t encouraged to question things, if we are told lies by adults we look up to and trust, we’ll probably learn to follow what we are told. We will learn to think as we have been told and act on this information without questioning its validity.

In the information age, personalization and customization are remarkable themes in technology, goods, and services. There is no one brand of toothpaste, or one kind of refrigerator — there are hundreds of each. There is no one kind of phone — there are hundreds of them, each able to be tailored with cases, covers, backgrounds, and apps.

And now, there are even designer babies: Parents are able to choose their children’s hair and eye color (though according to Wired, the Los Angeles clinic offering these services was recently shut down amid public outcry).

The potential for humans to modulate their emotions via technology is just as radical.

Have you ever fallen in love? Then you know what the poets, songwriters, gurus, playwrights, …

What Happens Now is a shiny new blog hosted by the American Association of Suicidology, written by and for suicide attempt survivors. Journalist Cara Anna is the editor, inviting other attempt survivors to contribute guest posts, or take part in interviews with her, as well as writing extremely insightful posts herself.

Even the word “survivor” uncovers stigma in the world of suicide prevention. Traditionally it’s been used by those bereaved by the suicide death of someone else, and does not refer to those who have survived suicide attempts.

A few savvy agencies, including the AAS and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, are careful to distinguish between “loss survivors” and “attempt survivors,” but more often organizations will simply refer to “survivors,” and they always mean the bereaved when they do.

This might seem like a quibble with language, but in fact illustrates structural stigma among suicide prevention agencies. Attempt survivors simply don’t exist in their language, or in their activities.

Sir Winston Churchill, who battled plenty of demons, once said, “When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”

Unfortunately that advice wouldn’t have been able to stop me from praying rosary after rosary when I was in fourth grade to avert going to hell, nor does it quiet the annoying noise and chatter inside my brain today in any given hour. But the fact that a great leader battled the worry war does provide me some consolation.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a chronic worrier without an official diagnosis or battling severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a neurobehavioral disorder that involves repetitive unwanted thoughts and rituals. The steps to overcome faulty beliefs and develop healthy patterns of thinking are the same.

I was just catching up with the latest Lakers news and was interested to see the new drama surrounding Kobe Bryant and Dahntay Jones of the Atlanta Hawks. It turns out that Kobe hurt his ankle after Jones walked into him on a fade-away jumper, and Kobe landed awkwardly, twisting his ankle.

What does this have to do with mental health?

Well, it’s interesting listening to sports analysts talking about this as a ‘dirty play’ and debating whether Jones is a ‘dirty player.’ Similarly, people often begin to depress themselves by rating their whole self negatively for making mistakes in their lives.

This self-rating doesn’t make any sense, and is totally illogical. What these TV reports do, though, is reinforce the idea that if we do something wrong, our whole being is now judged as wrong. And because this type of reporting is on so many TV channels, repeated over and over again, it is easy to understand why we, as people, have bought into this illogical nonsense of self-rating.

I wrote in a post titled Using Meditation to Diagnose Your Mood that one of the benefits of meditation to a person with a mental illness is the ability to detect episodes early. Well, I’m in one.

It’s been hard to sit at all, let alone for the 30 minutes I meditate each day. I find myself agitated and fidgety. My thoughts are all over the place.

This is not unusual during meditation, but in taking note of the subjects of my thoughts, I can see hypomania creeping in. I’m thinking of buying stuff. I’m thinking of trading stocks. I’m thinking of another career change, discarding good ideas for more exciting, if undoable, ones.

All of my thoughts are about getting and doing. Anything. Right now I feel smarter, more creative, and more energetic than I usually do. That might be dangerous, but that’s what I’m feeling, and that’s what I encounter during meditation.

And here’s where mindfulness meditation really helps.

“You have to decide… Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?”

That’s one of the questions Randy Pausch, famous deceased Carnegie Mellon professor, asked in his presentation “The Last Lecture.” It went viral, landing him on Oprah and a host of other afternoon and late-night shows.

I loved every other part of his lecture but that.

Because I think the world needs its share of Eeyores: solemn, stoic, realistic, pensive creatures. And I don’t think I’m saying that because I unapologetically claim to be an Eeyore.

I mean, imagine a world of hyperactive, happy Tiggers. How long can you stay with that image before you want to throw something at the striped orange guy?