Specifically, about 1 in 5 Americans will receive a diagnosis of major depression in their lifetime. But Shorter believes that the term major depression doesn’t capture the symptoms most of these individuals have. “Nervous illness,” however, does.

“The nervous patients of yesteryear are the depressives of today,” he writes.

And these individuals aren’t particularly sad. Rather, their symptoms fall into these five domains, according to Shorter: nervous exhaustion; mild depression; mild anxiety; somatic symptoms, such as chronic pain or insomnia; and obsessive thinking.

As he writes in this recent blog post:

… The problem is that many people who get the diagnosis of major depression aren’t necessarily sad. They don’t cry all the time. They drag themselves from bed and go to work and plow through family life, but they aren’t sad. They may well have one of the “D-words”  — dysphoria, disenchantment, demoralization – but they aren’t necessarily depressed.

Instead, what do they have in addition? They’re anxious. They’re exhausted and often report crushing fatigue. They have all kinds of somatic pains that come and go. And they tend to obsess about the whole package.

What they have is a whole-body disorder, not a disorder of mood. And that is the problem with the term depression: it shines the spotlight on mood, a spotlight that belongs elsewhere.

Severe depression, which has been lumped in with depression, is a completely different disorder. It’s a serious illness akin to melancholia, a term used around the mid 18th century to the early 20th century. Melancholia speaks more accurately to the gravity of this severe depression and its serious symptoms, which include despair, hopelessness, lack of pleasure in one’s life and suicide.

Shorter also describes melancholia as a “dejection that appears to observers as sadness but that patients themselves often interpret as pain.” It’s recurrent. “Melancholia digs deep into the brain and body, putting patients in touch with their most primeval – and often sinister – impulses. Fantasies of murder and suicide are common themes.”

So how did everyone become depressed?

Shorter names three main culprits: psychoanalysis, which shifted the emphasis away from the body and solely to the mind; the pharmaceutical industry, “the marketing to the public of drugs for depression on the grounds that they rested on an unshakable foundation of neuroscience”; and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Before 1980 (and the DSM-III), psychiatry had two depressions: melancholia, which was also called “endogenous depression;” and nonmelancholia, which was called a variety of names, such as “reactive depression” and “neurotic depression.”

After 1980, with the publication of the DSM-III, we were introduced to one term. The manual did include melancholia as a subtype of “major depressive episode.” But, according to Shorter, this was “a pale shadow of the historic melancholia, with its crushing burden of intolerable pain.” It was there “in letter, not in spirit.”

In the book Shorter harshly criticizes this diagnostic decision. He writes:

Whereas melancholia designated a small population of people with life-threatening illness, the diagnosis called simply “depression” was applied to millions. Before DSM-III in 1980, psychiatry had always had two depressions, and now it had only one, and that depression, which began life in 1980 as “major depression,” was a scientific travesty, a poor limp thing of a diagnosis that did not necessarily mean that the patient was sad at all – which is what a depressive mood diagnosis is supposed to convey – but was unhappy, aggrieved, tried, anxious, uncomfortable, or had nothing at all really wrong; the doctor had put her on antidepressants because he or she could think of nothing else to do.

Throughout the book Shorter features stories, case histories, diary excerpts and experts’ quotes along with research and survey data that bolster the need for separate diagnoses.

For instance, he cites one study where “depressed” patients most frequently picked words such as dispirited, sluggish, empty and listless — not sad — to describe how they felt. In the National Comorbidity Survey of 1990-1992, lack of energy appeared to be a prominent symptom for people with depression and anxiety.

Shorter also cites Bernard Carroll’s work. In 1968 Carroll, a psychiatrist and endocrinologist, discovered a biochemical marker for depression, a “promising lead” that’s largely been forgotten. According to Shorter:

…Carroll discovered that administering a synthetic steroid drug called dexamethasone to melancholic patients uncovered an unsuspected dysfunction of their endocrine system: It keeps their cortisol levels high.  Cortisol is a stress hormone. Unlike normal subjects, if you gave them dexamethasone at midnight, their systems did not experience the normal late-night-early-morning reduction of cortisol; this nonreduction correlated with the severity of the illness, and it disappeared after patients were successfully treated for their depression. Later studies found that the endocrine systems of patients with most other psychiatric diagnoses showed normal suppression in response to dexamethasone. Thus, melancholic patients had a distinctive dysfunction of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis called ‘DST nonsuppression.’

Other illnesses share this suppression. But they’re not mistaken for melancholia, Shorter says. In fact, he compares the accuracy of the DST to the diagnostic test for epilepsy.

The marker of cortisol nonsuppression is not biologically unique to melancholia: it occurs in severe physical illness and in some psychiatric disorders that are unlikely to be confused with melancholia, such as anorexia nervosa and dementia. Yet the dexamethasone suppression test, or “DST,” has about the same ability to diagnose melancholia properly, without too many “false negatives” and “false positives,” that the interictal (between seizures) electroencephalogram has in epilepsy: useful but not perfect. The DST provides evidence that most melancholic patients, whether unipolar or bipolar, have an underlying biochemical homogeneity that is entirely lacking in other psychiatric disorders.

Ultimately, Shorter calls for a de-emphasis of sad mood in depression. “People with the nerve syndrome are not necessarily sad, weepy, or down in the dumps any more than the population as a whole. They feel ill at ease in their bodies, preoccupied with their state of mind, and are unable to get their thoughts off their internal psychic condition.”

He also calls for a division of depression. He believes that lumping melancholia with depression is dangerous. “…[P]oorly diagnosed patients are denied the benefit of proper treatment while being exposed to all the side effects of classes of medication, such as Prozac-style drugs, that are ineffective for serious illness.”

In sum, having one term to describe melancholia and “nervous illness” simply makes no sense. As Shorter writes, these two illnesses are as different as “tuberculosis and mumps.”

My dad was a psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst of the old school. Which is to say he was brilliant, but also a man of his particular age. Which is to further say his fury was directed at the APA for taking homosexuality as a diagnosable mental illness out of the manual. It was 1973.

Hardly aware of what he was so upset about, I did hear him dramatically declare that he was withdrawing his membership in the APA. My dad loved being a psychoanalyst and he loved being a physician but he wasn’t that crazy (you should forgive the word) about being a psychiatrist. His prescription pad gathered dust as he focused on talk therapy. So his threat to quit the APA wasn’t idle. But it wasn’t like he was giving up his beloved couch.

By the time I got to graduate school, the DSM had gone through at least four more mutations. Partly because of my experience with my dad, but also because my mom was addicted to the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Treatment (in which every twinge or sore throat could become a sign of impending doom), I maintained a skeptic’s view of the DSM.

If the DSM really is the behavioral health professional’s “bible,” then I am a doubting Thomas.

I’m comfortable with that. Take the latest edition, the DSM-5, finalized just aweek ago by the APA. I’m not overly excited about it because:

1. The DSM is subject to the times.

For homosexuality to be taken out of the DSM in 1973, it had to have been in there in the first place, probably starting in 1952 when the manual was first compiled. Certain diagnoses, just like some humans, can have their 15 minutes of fame. With problems such as hoarding, which was added to the DSM-5 lexicon, I have to wonder: Why? Do we really need more diagnoses when the condition was fine where it was, as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder?

2. The DSM is subject to politics.

Stakeholders — including drug companies, insurance companies and researchers seeking grants — all have a serious interest in what is deemed a diagnosable mental illness.

3. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

From Homeland (bipolar) to The United States of Tara (dissociative identity disorder), I get the uneasy feeling that having a mental illness can be romanticized. When a character feels flat I imagine screenwriters in Hollywood asking themselves, “What will spice them up? Let’s look up something in the DSM!”

This is no joke when there are plenty of people who seriously suffer from these disorders and stigma is still such an issue. No matter how responsibly the media present mental illness, there is still the danger that the regular person will assume they know everything when they only have one part of the elephant.

Do not get me wrong. I am not saying the DSM should be chucked out the window, baby, bathwater and all. When I need to wade through differential diagnoses to get a clearer picture of what is going on with a patient, so that I can develop an appropriate treatment plan, I have turned to the DSM many times; but I was trained many years to be able to do that. If looking at the DSM doesn’t help, I call on a colleague who is much better at diagnostics than I am or once in a while I will do some strategic psychometric testing. This is how many clinicians on the ground use the DSM. Researchers need an even more fine-tuned instrument upon which to base their methodologies. It is all in the service of helping the patient, not in the questionable pleasure of labeling them.

The DSM has its place. It has gone a long way toward helping mental health professionals speak the same language. It has helped researchers define mental health issues. It provides understanding of psychiatric conditions and helps many to understand themselves better. It is certainly better than nothing. I have great respect for the Herculean effort the committees of knowledgeable professionals had to put into this thing. They are the best in their fields, but they, like my dad, are creatures of their time and culture.

The DSM is a tool, like a hammer, or maybe more like a good Swiss Army knife. You can use it to open a can of beans or you can cut yourself.

It is not the Bible. Otherwise we’d be on Bible No. 1352 by now. God help us.

Want to learn more?
To read more on the specifics of the newly approved DSM-5 click here.

Tracking how psychology has evolved throughout the centuries helps us better understand psychology today. That’s why every month we dig around to find the most interesting articles and videos on the renowned — and sometimes notorious — people and places that have led to where we are right now.

In last month’s roundup, we talked about psychology’s controversial figures and tall tales. This month is no exception. There are links about infamous psychologists John Watson and John Philippe Rushton. There are also links to psychology’s beginnings with early concepts of mental disease and the functionalist school.

“Notes on a Scandal”

American psychologist John B. Watson was the father of behaviorism – and no stranger to controversy. If you’ve ever taken an intro to psychology class, you probably know Watson for two other things: his notorious experiment with “Little Albert” and a white rat, and his affair with his graduate student assistant Rosalie Rayner.

However, if you took an intro course in the 1970s, ’80s or even ’90s, you might’ve learned another fun fact: Watson was conducting sex research with Rayner’s help.

According to this piece in APA’s Monitor on Psychology, the story was published in at least 200 textbooks from 1974-1994. But was this fact or fiction? Monitor editor Jamie Chamberlin sets the record straight amid the racy rumors.

“Whole Body Madness”

Author and professor Richard Noll writes about a mental disease psychiatrists and neurologists believed was the result of a whole-body breakdown in this Psychiatric Times piece. The brain, it was believed, along with other organs, were heavily involved. And, it was also believed that this particular disease could be easily, reliably and objectively diagnosed with a specific physical examination.

(By the way, I talk more about this disease and Noll’s book here.)

John Philippe Rushton

John Philippe Rushton, who died Oct. 2, 2012, was a controversial figure in psychology. It was his work on race and intelligence, crime and penis size that sparked uproar and even protests. One of my favorite blogs, Advances in the History of Psychology, features a brief bio along with a video of a debate between Rushton and geneticist David Suzuki. (They also include links to a few other pieces.

Asylums Turned Apartments

Another favorite blog, Mind Hacks, has an interesting post about a former British psychiatric hospital which has been converted into luxury apartments. (This isn’t the first time former asylums have become pricey homes.) They link to a fascinating website that features the history of Claybury Hospital, along with other “lost hospitals of London.”

“Toward a New School Of Their Own”

Inspired by Charles Darwin, functionalism or functional psychology aimed to study mental and behavioral processes. Psychologists were interested in the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure (like structuralism, another psychology movement).

According to psychologist James R. Angell, structuralists essentially wanted to know “what is consciousness,” while functionalists wanted to know “what is consciousness for?” as C. James Goodwin writes in A History of Modern Psychology.

Christopher D. Green, a professor of psychology at York University, created a great video series all about this school of thought, which started in the 19th century and influenced behaviorism. Check out video one and two.

What interesting pieces have you read lately about the history of psychology?
Let us know in the comments!

This month we’ve got pieces on everything from infamous psychology cases to a radical anti-psychiatry experiment to life in a high-security psychiatric hospital to the passing of one of psychiatry’s greatest critics.

“Psychology’s Tall Tales”

If you’ve ever taken an intro psychology course, you know about Phineas Gage and Kitty Genovese. Both individuals – and their compelling stories – have been used to illustrate some of psychology’s most recognized theories.

After an iron rod tore through his skill, Phineas Gage supposedly became a different man – an uninhibited, surly alcoholic who couldn’t hold down a job. His case provided convincing evidence that our frontal lobes play a pivotal role in personality and judgment.

Kitty Genovese’s murder was used to substantiate the bystander effect. This phenomenon occurs when the presence of other people prevents them from stepping in and helping in an emergency situation.

But were these cases truly solid evidence? In this piece in APA’s gradPSYCH magazine, writer Beryl Lieff Benderly takes a look at what really happened in these infamous stories. I bet this wasn’t covered in your psychology textbook.

“William James and the Sixth Sense”

You might know that psychologist and philosopher William James wasn’t a fan of lab work. But you might not know that he actually conducted extensive laboratory research into dizziness. Katharine S. Milar, Ph.D, explores James’s work on the inner ear’s role in dizziness in this piece in APA’s Monitor on Psychology.

An Experiment in Anti-Psychiatry

In 1965 psychiatrist R.D. Laing conducted an experiment where both patients with psychosis and schizophrenia and psychiatrists lived together at Kingsley Hall, a former community center in London. The radical experiment lasted five years. Instead of prescribing medication, Laing wanted patients to heal their early traumas and live out their symptoms.

As the blog Mind Hacks notes, “…the place was more chaos than freedom, and the residence became a stop-in for hippies, lost souls and acid dealers.” The Observer has an interesting article about the experiment. Writer Sean O’ Hagan also interviewed photographer Dominic Harris, who tracked down 13 individuals who lived at Kingsley Hall. The article includes some of their stories.

Growing Up in a High-Security Hospital

Novelist Patrick McGrath grew up in one of Britain’s high-security psychiatric hospitals: Broadmoor. His dad was the last medical superintendent of Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum. In this article in Intelligent Life, McGrath recounts his childhood and how his father handled his position along with some of the infamous patients of Broadmoor.

“Despite our proximity to a great many very disturbed men and women, I found Broadmoor an idyllic place to grow up,” he writes. On Mind Hacks, psychologist and blogger Vaughan Bell very briefly shares his thoughts on Broadmoor’s reputation and his own work at a similar psychiatric hospital.

Thomas Szasz

In this piece on Psych Central, our founder and editor-in-chief, John Grohol, PsyD, talks about the important contributions of Thomas Szasz, M.D.. Szasz died in September 2012 at the age of 92. Here’s a snippet: “While many associate Szasz with the anti-psychiatry movement, that’s a label he never was comfortable with. It also over-simplifies his complex and nuanced views about mental illness as one of the most vocal critics of psychiatry.”

This month I’m sharing everything from resources on shell shock and how it was perceived during World War I, to the legitimate diagnosis of Don Juan syndrome, to American psychologist Joseph Jastrow.

Let’s dig in…

The Making of War Neuroses

In this post, Mind Hacks, one of my favorite websites, links to a piece in the Journal of the History of Medicine about a 1917 film featuring soldiers affected by “shell shock.” (The entire footage is on YouTube.) Maj. Arthur Hurst, who’s described as a curious figure, filmed these soldiers for one year as they were treated at a UK hospital. Interestingly, some of the before shots were reenacted, and according to the article, Hurst also “openly used deception as a therapeutic measure.”

Shell Shocked

Professor Edgar Jones, Ph.D, also discusses shell shock in June’s issue of APA’s Monitor on Psychology. Specifically, he shares the story of psychologist Charles S. Myers and how he persuaded the British army to take shell shock seriously. Myers’s principles are still followed today.

Hypersexual Disorder: An Encounter with Don Juan in the Archives

Greg Eghigian, Ph.D, talks about Don Juan syndrome, a diagnosis given to various types of male hypersexuality, in this Psychiatric Times post. He also includes an excerpt from a 19th century physician and discusses the different causal theories over time. Here’s a peek at the excerpt:

He is seized with a violent and continued satyriasis, and with such salacity, that he pursued beyond measure his wife, his daughters, and all those females who came in his way. This man, formerly so pious, so modest, fell into the most erotic delirium, and abandoned himself without measure to proposals and acts the most indecent. This state increased for about three months, during which time his mind and strength became weakened; when, following a violent passion, which was occasioned by the refusal of his wife, lassato viro et satiate, he fell into a convulsion . . .4

Today in the History of Psychology

This interesting website from Central Washington University lets you enter any date of the year to see what happened on that day in the history of psychology. (I could do this for hours!)

For instance, here’s what happened on July 4th:

1841 — Wilhelm T. Preyer was born. Preyer’s contributions were in the areas of color vision and child development. Preyer wrote the first book that specifically addressed child psychology, The Mind of the Child (1881).

1911 — The first mental hospital in the province of Alberta, located in Ponoka, was opened for the admission of patients. Alberta was part of the Northwest Territories until 1905 and its residents with mental illness were previously treated in Manitoba provincial institutions at the rate of one dollar per day.

1936 — The journal Nature published a short report by Hans Selye titled “A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents.” This was the first published description of Selye’s “general adaptation syndrome” and described stressor-induced stages of alarm, adaptation, and exhaustion. The article, submitted on May 18, 1936, aroused considerable controversy and research.

1971 — The first Symposium of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development was held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

The Intrepid Joseph Jastrow

The Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison features an excerpt about Joseph Jastrow (1863 –1944), an American experimental psychologist who received his doctorate degree from the first psychology lab in the U.S. (G. Stanley Hall’s at Johns Hopkins).

In it you’ll learn about Jastrow’s background along with his contributions to psychology (and his later diatribes against behaviorism and the followers of Freud).

What interesting pieces have you read lately about the history of psychology?
Please share in the comments section.

This is a description from Richard Noll’s fascinating book, American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, of the man who’d become the most influential psychiatrist in the U.S. in the first few decades of the 20th century — and the one who’d bring dementia praecox to America.

Swiss-born Adolf Meyer didn’t just have little formal training in psychiatry; he essentially knew nothing about it. Fortunately, in 1896, 29-year-old Meyer got the crash course he needed when he set off on a tour of European psychiatric facilities.

At the time he was working as a pathologist at Worcester Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts; the goal of the trip was to get ideas for potential improvements he could make at his hospital.

His most important stop would be in Heidelberg, the location of a small university psychiatric clinic. There, Meyer met psychiatrist and chief Emil Kraepelin – the man behind dementia praecox. During his visit, Meyer read Kraepelin’s textbook, Psychiatrie, talked with Kraepelin and watched his staff at work.

It was in this book that Kraepelin described dementia praecox, an incurable psychotic disorder. Dementia praecox began after puberty, progressively worsening until it led to irreversible “mental weakness” or “defect.” Individuals with dementia praecox could look very different depending on their combination of symptoms.

In the sixth edition of his textbook, Kraepelin categorized dementia praecox into three subtypes “connected to each other by fluid transitions:” catatonia (abnormal movement; usually started with depression and “nervousness,” and led to hallucinations and delusions); paranoid (fixed delusions of persecution and grandiosity are common with auditory hallucinations) and hebephrenic (disorganized thinking and problems with attention, language and memory).

In the introduction, Noll refers to dementia praecox “as a diagnosis of hopelessness from its creation.” The public along with alienists and other medical authorities viewed dementia praecox as “the terminal cancer of mental diseases.”

In the same edition, Kraepelin also introduced “manic-depressive insanity,” which, according to Noll, “encompassed all the insanities whose primary symptoms were based in mood or affect, characterized by periodic manic states, depressed states, mixed states, or varying combinations thereof, which would wax and wane over the course of a person’s life but leave no or little cognitive defect between episodes.” It had a much better prognosis than dementia praecox.

(This later edition had a major impact. Noll says that “Since the 1970s it has been asserted that neo-Kraepelin clinicians created the structure and diagnostic content of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition” (DSM-III) of 1980, and this bias has continued in successive editions until this day, including both clinical practice and research.”)

Back in America diagnosis was a tricky, murky process. And classification simply didn’t exist. There was no such thing as specificity or discrete diseases.

As Noll writes, most American “alienists” – as they called themselves – believed that there was one form of insanity: “unitary psychosis.” Different presentations were simply different stages of the same underlying disease process. These stages were: melancholia, mania and dementia.

After Meyer returned from his European trip, Worcester became the first hospital in America to use Kraepelin’s theory of insanity. And it was at Worcester that the first person was diagnosed with dementia praecox.

As Noll told the Harvard University Press Blog in this interview, dementia praecox would become the most prevalent diagnosis:

Beginning in 1896, as one American asylum after another slowly introduced dementia praecox as a diagnostic box, it became the most frequently diagnosed condition, labeling a quarter to a half of all patients in each institution. How American psychiatrists were making this diagnosis is anyone’s guess—they were probably just snap decisions based on whether someone was suffering from a “good prognosis madness” (such as manic depression) or a “bad prognosis madness” (dementia praecox). What we do know is that being young and male made it more likely someone would receive this diagnosis.

The public was introduced to dementia praecox by a 1907 piece in the New York Times that recounted the testimony in the murder trial of architect Stanford White. The superintendent of an asylum in Binghamton, N.Y. testified that the murderer, Harry Kendall Thaw, might’ve been suffering with dementia praecox.

In the late 1920s to the 1930s, dementia praecox started making its exit, replaced by Eugen Bleuler’s “schizophrenia.” At first, Noll says, these terms were used interchangeably in both clinical practice and research (which, naturally, made things very confusing). But these disorders had distinct differences.

For instance, the prognosis for “schizophrenia” was more positive. Bleuler, Carl Jung and other staff members at Burgholzli psychiatric hospital – where Bleuler was director – showed that many of the 647 “schizophrenics” were able to get back to work.

Bleuler also viewed some symptoms of schizophrenia as being directly caused by the disease process, while others as “…reactions of the ailing psyche to environmental influences and its own strivings.”

Unlike Kraepelin, Bleuler viewed dementia as “a secondary result of other, more primary symptoms.” Other secondary symptoms included hallucinations, delusions and flat affect.

The symptoms that were directly caused by the disease process were, writes Noll:

The simple functions of thought, feeling and volition that were disturbed were associations (how thoughts are bound together), affectivity (feelings as well as subtle feeling tones), and ambivalence (“the tendency of the schizophrenic psyche to endow the most diverse psychisms with both a positive and a negative indicator at one and the same time”).

Unfortunately, Americans put their own spin on schizophrenia. According to Noll in his interview:

By 1927 schizophrenia became the preferred term for inexplicable madness, but the Americans reframed Bleuler’s disease concept as a primarily functional or psychogenic condition that was caused by mothers or maladjustments to social reality. When Bleuler visited the United States in 1929 he was horrified to see what the Americans were calling schizophrenia. He insisted it was a physical disease with a chronic course characterized by exacerbations and remissions of hallucinations, delusions and bizarre behaviors.

Dementia praecox officially vanished from psychiatry in 1952 when the first edition of the DSM was published – and the disorder was nowhere to be found.

But, while it wasn’t around for long, dementia praecox had a significant impact on the field of psychiatry. According to Noll in American Madness: 

Dementia praecox was the vehicle through which American psychiatry reentered general medicine. It descended into American asylums from the Valhalla of superior German medicine and presented American alienists with a divine gift: its first truly specifiable disease concept.

…

There could have been no modern medical science of American psychiatry in the twentieth century without dementia praecox. There can be no biological psychiatry in the twenty-first century without schizophrenia.

Further Reading

Be sure to check out the excellent book American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox by Richard Noll, Ph.D, associate professor of psychology at DeSales University.

Last month you learned about everything from America’s first sport psychologist to Freud’s infamous patient, the Wolf Man, to what led to the rise and demise of mental asylums.

This month I share everything from recent findings on Phineas Gage to the use of film in studying worker safety and satisfaction to the real relationship between Carl Jung and his patient Sabina Spielrein.

“How I Became a Historian of Psychiatry”

I’m always curious how people enter their respective professions. (Plus, part of me has always wanted to be an historian. This is why I love writing these posts — and I’m addicted to the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars…”) The informative blog History of Psychiatryhas started a super-interesting series that delves into how individuals became historians of psychiatry. So far they’ve featured these three historians.

“Neuroscience Still Haunted By Phineas Gage”

Ever taken an intro psychology course? Then I’m sure you’re very familiar with Phineas Gage, the mild-mannered turned foul-mouthed and aggressive foreman after an explosion forced a three-and-a-half-foot iron rod through his head.  Since the 1980s scientists have tried to recreate Gage’s injury to better understand what actually happened. In this piece at the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog, Christian Jarrett summarizes the findings along with what we know today. The Guardian also explores the newest findings in this article.

“Donald Broadbent and the Cocktail Party”

In this BBC podcast Claudia Hammond revisits the work of British cognitive psychologist Donald Broadbent, who radically revised our understanding of how we process information. He’s famous for devising an experiment that explored dichotic thinking. Here, Hammond interviews various psychologists who’ve either studied or worked with Broadbent. Plus, if you have headphones, you can participate in a few of his experiments!

“Psychology’s First Forays into Film”

Industrial psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth, PhD, and her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth were among the first psychologists to employ film in their experiments. In this Monitor on Psychology article, doctoral student Arlie R. Belliveau reveals how the Gilbreths used film to boost worker safety and satisfaction.

“The Real Spielrein Between Jung and Freud”

The film A Dangerous Method depicts the intimate – and sexual – relationship between Jung and his patient Sabina Spielrein. In this piece in The Psychiatric Times clinical professor Zvi Lothane, MD, who’s researched the life and work of Spielrein, reveals the truth behind their relationship along with other inaccuracies.

You’re brought into a small room, a “game room,” with a table, chair and three sugary snacks. You’re asked to pick one treat. You choose the marshmallow. Then you’re told that you can either have the marshmallow right away by ringing a bell, or wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Then you’re left alone for 15 minutes.

This seemingly simple experiment conducted by Austrian-born clinical psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University became known as “The Marshmallow Study.” But don’t let the silly name fool you. This study tested over 600 kids at the Bing Nursery School and has become one of the longest-running studies in psychology.

What Mischel actually wanted to explore had zero to do with kids’ desire for sweets, of course. The lead investigator wanted to test the concept of delayed gratification.

He found that a few kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the researcher left the room. Most waited an average of less than three minutes to consume the marshmallow. But a third used various ways to distract themselves and waited the full 15 minutes. Kids did everything from covering their eyes with their hands and turning around to singing songs from “Sesame Street” and playing hide and seek under the desk to tugging at their pigtails.

While this was fascinating on its own, Mischel would make an even more powerful discovery. Mischel’s daughters also attended the Bing Nursery School. From time to time, he’d ask how their classmates — his subjects — were doing.

He began noticing an interesting pattern, which prompted him to conduct followup research, revealing just how this seemingly simple study was anything but.

According to this piece in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, Mischel mailed out questionnaires to the parents, teachers and academic advisers of the study subjects. The questionnaires requested information on the kids’ abilities to plan, think ahead, cope effectively and get along with others, among many other behaviors and traits. He also wanted to know their SAT scores. Lehrer summarizes Mischel’s findings, which basically revealed that the kids who rang the bell right away weren’t doing so great.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

The inspiration for studying self-control in American kids actually came from an unlikely source: another country. In 1955, Mischel, who was initially interested in psychoanalysis and the Rorschach test, traveled to Trinidad to study one culture’s spirit possession ceremonies. But he changed his mind after noticing the dynamics between two groups of people — those of East Indian descent and those of African descent — and started studying something else entirely. According to Lehrer:

Although his research was supposed to involve the use of Rorschach tests to explore the connections between the unconscious and the behavior of people when possessed, Mischel soon grew interested in a different project. He lived in a part of the island that was evenly split between people of East Indian and of African descent; he noticed that each group defined the other in broad stereotypes. “The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the future,” he says. “The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians didn’t know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never enjoy themselves.”

Mischel took young children from both ethnic groups and offered them a simple choice: they could have a miniature chocolate bar right away or, if they waited a few days, they could get a much bigger chocolate bar.

His research didn’t end up substantiating the stereotypes. But it did bring up important questions about delayed gratification, such as why some kids waited to eat the chocolate bar, while others didn’t.

Mischel also realized that he could actually measure self-control. This was important because at the time most psychology tests, including personality measures, weren’t exactly valid or reliable. After reviewing the literature and using the personality measures in his own work, Mischel realized that the underlying theories were the problem. The measures were created with the assumption that personality was stable across situations. But Mischel found that context was key.

His goal was to conduct rigorous scientific research with measurable variables — and his earlier straightforward setup of sugary snacks in Trinidad provided a great place to start.

Be sure to read the rest of Lehrer’s article, which discusses the advanced methods that Mischel and other researchers are using to study self-control today. For instance, they’re using fMRI machines to explore the brains of the original subjects.

Also, check out this excellent podcast on BBC where Claudia Hammond interviews Mischel and his colleagues. Here, Mischel cautions against using his research to predict the fate of individual kids. He notes that these are group differences, and shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a fortune cookie that dooms one child but blesses another.

(By the way, I know it’s tempting to want to apply these findings to dieting and restricting certain foods like desserts. Unfortunately, nowadays, self-control typically gets associated with such things. However, many studies show that restricting yourself actually leads to overeating. As author of Weightless, a blog that helps people improve their body image and ditch dieting, you know where I stand.)

Last month we talked about Alan Turing, Carl Jung and the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

This month we’ve got quite the array of topics and in various mediums, including a podcast and a few videos. You’ll learn about the first sport psychologist, the infamous Wolf Man, the history of treating depression, mental asylums and a recent film featuring psychology’s masterminds.

America’s First Sport Psychologist

In this piece in Monitor on Psychology, York University professor Christopher D. Green, PhD, reveals how experimental psychologist Coleman Griffith became the first sport psychologist. Green focuses on Griffith’s work with the Chicago Cubs in the late 1930s.

(I’ve also written about the history of sport psychology.)

The Wolf Man

Writer Richard Appignanesi and artist Slawa Harasymowicz discuss their graphic novel The Wolf Man in this fascinating six-minute video. The Wolf Man was a famous patient of Freud’s. In fact, he played a pivotal role in Freud’s theory of psychosexual development. The Wolf Man was a Russian aristocrat named Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff. Freud called Pankejeff the Wolf Man to protect his identity. You’ll find more interesting info about the Wolf Man here and here.

Treating Depression

In this New York Times piece, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the science and history of treating depression. Specifically, he discusses the birth of Prozac and other psychiatric drugs and the theory that serotonin contributes to depression. He also shares a slew of studies and explores other theories of depression.

Mental Asylums

This 30-minute podcast features various historians discussing the factors that led to the rise and demise of mental asylums along with how people became patients at these asylums and how they were treated. They also dispel a few common misconceptions. Check out other podcasts here.

Reviews of “A Dangerous Method”

“A Dangerous Method” is a 2011 film that chronicles the relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. Spielrein became a patient of Jung’s after she was brought to a psychiatric hospital in Zurich suffering with hysteria. Eventually, she becomes Jung’s colleague and even his lover. (It’s unclear whether they had a sexual relationship in real life.)

You can watch the movie trailer here. Geoffrey Cocks, who teaches at Albion College, recently reviewed the film at the excellent blog H-Madness, which explores the history of psychiatry.

We also reviewed the film on Psych Central (here and here.)

This month you’ll find everything from information about Alan Turing to Phineas Gage to Carl Jung to the infamous Robbers Cave Experiment.

Alan Turing

This year marks a century since Alan Turing’s birth. A mathematician and code-breaker, Turing also was the founder of computer science and artificial intelligence. Nature has a variety of articles and a podcast on everything from Turing’s famous 1936 paper to his other interests. Also, here’s another podcast that explores Turing’s tragic life and his incredible contributions.

“The Beast Within”

This 15-minute podcast explores the human brain, including the infamous case of Phineas Gage, phrenology and Sigmund Freud. (I’ve written before about Gage and other men with brain injuries here and phrenology here.)

“Sigmund Freud, MD: Forgotten Contributions to Neurology, Neuropathology, and Anesthesia”

Many people may not know that Freud started out as a neurologist and strived to become a pioneer in neuroscience. In this 2004 article David Galbis-Reig, MD, discusses Freud’s significant contributions to the fields of neurology, neuropathology and anesthesia.

As Galbis-Reig writes, “In fact, many students and clinicians in the neurosciences are not even aware that Freud’s initial scientific work was instrumental in allowing for the major discoveries of his time.”

Also, this is another 15-minute podcast from the same series as above about “the part Freud almost played in the history of the brain.”

“A Week with the Boys”

In the 1950s social psychologists and spouses Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Sherif conducted a well-known series of experiments to study group dynamics. Named the Robbers Cave Experiment, it studied the behavior of 22 11-year-old boys under the ruse of attending a summer camp.

In this article writer Gene Perry discusses the interesting ins and outs of this work along with compelling tidbits of the Sherifs’s personal and professional lives. For instance, Muzafer Sherif composed an outline for his social psychology book while in a Turkish prison for writing anti-Nazi books. Muzafer and Carolyn collaborated for 17 years on the same research, but Carolyn never received the same recognition: She was never given a faculty position.

“Psychology’s Magician”

Writer Algis Valiunas refers to Carl Jung as psychology’s magician and compares his work to Freud’s in this piece in The New Atlantis. According to Valiunas:

The method of [Jung’s] analytical psychology — as he called it, to distinguish it from Freudian psychoanalysis — was nothing short of fantastic. To penetrate the psyche of a woman destined for schizophrenic disintegration, he would study dreams, reveries, her “borderland phenomena” — the apparitions that came to her as she was half-asleep — and explicate them in the light of Mithraic religious symbols, Old Testament wisdom, the words of Jesus, passages from Shakespeare, poems by Nietzsche, Teutonic and Persian and Chinese and Indian legend. His path-breaking 1912 book Symbols of Transformation tracks the course of this woman’s treatment and introduces what would be Jung’s characteristic methods of interpretation. Although Jung focuses intently on a particular patient with a particular disorder, his study has a far more extensive cultural reach. He was out to dethrone arid modern scientism and restore the symbolic imagination — which is to say, religious feeling — to its rightful place in the life of men.

As Valiunas writes elsewhere in the piece:

Freud’s ideas were once taboo, then conventional wisdom, and now largely in disrepute. But since Freud’s approach still largely comports with our rationalist shibboleths, we have found a comfortable niche for him as a father of modern psychology. Jung remains a more inscrutable, potentially subversive figure: the self-avowed scientist who seemed to embrace all that science defined itself in opposition to — religion, mysticism, even parts of pseudoscience, but most significantly the depths of the human soul. In embracing the strangeness of the human psyche from within itself, he remains that father of psychology who still threatens to upend our view of ourselves.

The terrible conditions of public asylums that prompted physicians to open their homes to wealthy psychiatric patients. Rich patients could expect tranquil, scenic environments and — for that time ­– state-of-the-art treatments. Boris Sidis was one of the physicians who established a private hospital.

As psychologist Ellen Holtzman, PsyD, writes in the piece:

In 1910, Sidis opened a private asylum, the Sidis Psychotherapeutic Institute, on the Portsmouth, N.H., estate of a wealthy New Englander. Hoping for referrals from psychologically minded colleagues, he announced the opening of his hospital in the Psychological Bulletin and advertised it in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, which he had founded. The ad noted that he would treat patients by “applying his special psychopathological and clinical methods of examination, observation and treatment.”

Sidis touted the luxury of the asylum’s accommodations and setting, even more than the availability of psychotherapy. “Beautiful grounds, private parks, rare trees, greenhouses, sun parlors, palatial rooms, luxuriously furnished private baths, private farm products,” wrote Sidis in his brochure describing the institute. Moreover, he offered his patients the somatic treatments of hydrotherapy and electrical stimulation, as did his less psychologically minded colleagues. The emphasis on luxury combined with the availability of the popular somatic treatments, even in an institution created by an “advanced” thinker like Sidis, suggests that wealthy patients expected a traditional, medical approach to treatment.

Staying in these small and serene asylums didn’t come cheap. Sidis charged $50 to $100 per week (and more), which he expected to be paid prior to admission. To put that into perspective, $50 then translates into about $1,000 today.

Over time, the number of private asylums grew, and some doctors even expanded their facilities to accommodate more patients. According to Holtzman:

The small private asylums were quite successful for a number of years. There were only two in Massachusetts in 1879 and more than 20 by 1916. In addition, the asylums frequently started small and grew. The Newton Nervine asylum was a case in point. In 1892, N. Emmons Paine, a Boston University Medical School instructor, opened the Newton Nervine in his own home with four patients.

Over the next 10 years, he added three buildings to accommodate a total of 21 patients. A reported increase in the number of mentally ill individuals over the course of the 19th century may have contributed to the success of the private asylums. “A good many people are beginning to realize that nervous diseases are alarmingly on the increase …. Nerves are the most ‘prominent’ complaint of the 19th century,” wrote one reporter in an 1887 issue of the Boston Globe.

Check out the article to learn more and read what happened to these exclusive asylums.

You can learn more about Boris Sidis’ sonWilliam James Sidis here, who was a child prodigy.

This month, you’ll find everything from the birthplace of psychoanalysis in America — hint: it’s not New York City — to the founder of cognitive psychology to an entire series on mental illness and last rites.

Let’s get started…

“Shrinking City”

Did you know that psychoanalysis was born in Baltimore? According to writer and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman in this fascinating article, a group of physicians established an American branch of the Psychoanalytic Association in Baltimore after seeing Freud’s famous 1909 lecture.

Brottman introduces readers to several of the key players of psychoanalysis in Baltimore. She discusses psychiatrist Trigant Burrow, who founded group therapy and played an influential role in psychoanalysis at the time; and author and social critic Robert Lindner, who wrote the book Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath.

Ulric Neisser

German-born Ulric Neisser was an American psychologist and the founder of cognitive psychology. The New York Times recently published his obituary, which goes into some detail about his work and personal life.

Also, one of my favorite blogs, Mind Hacks, includes an interesting insight about Neisser’s 1976 book Cognition and Reality, which criticized the very field he founded.

History of Psychology podcasts

Another one of my favorite blogs, Advances in the History of Psychology, recently announced a new series of podcasts about various topics in the history of psychology. In the first episode, historians explore the history of lunatic asylums in the 19th century.

“A-mazing Research”

C. James Goodwin, Ph.D, a professor at Western Carolina University, explores the use of mazes in psychological research in this Monitor on Psychology piece. Some researchers viewed mazes as the key to psychological knowledge.

Goodwin cites an interesting quote from neobehaviorist Edward Chace Tolman, Ph.D, in his 1937 APA presidential address: “Everything important in psychology… can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze.”

“Lunacy’s Last Rites: Dying Insane in Britain, c. 1629 to 1939”

The History of Psychiatry journal just published a special issue with the above title, which looks at everything from cultural perceptions of funerals to death by suicide to perspectives on passing away in the asylums. Unfortunately, there’s no free access. (If you can get your hands on it, I’m jealous.)

But the blog H-Madness does include all the abstracts in this post. And it’s very fascinating stuff.

The most famous example involved a rat. When a rat was first placed alongside Little Albert, he appeared interested and unafraid. When the researchers paired the rat with a loud noise, over time, Albert got scared.

In fact, Albert would start crying at the mere sight of the rat, even though the noise was gone. It turned out that Albert’s newfound fear also extended beyond the rat. He started fearing other furry objects.

Watson used this experiment to substantiate his theory that babies were blank states, and the environment was powerful in influencing them. This experiment was always considered controversial, and many psychologists were curious if Albert’s learned fears continued into adulthood. (That’s because Watson and Rayner never deconditioned him.)

But no one knew Little Albert’s identify or his fate… until a few years ago.

According to a 2010 article in Monitor on Psychology, for seven years, Hall P. Beck, Ph.D, a psychologist from Appalachian State University, along with his colleagues and students, scoured historical documents and consulted facial recognition specialists. They even met with the family of the boy they believed was really Little Albert. Finally, they confirmed that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, the son of Arvilla Merritte, a wetnurse at a campus hospital.

Eventually, the pieces of the puzzle came together. The attributes of Douglas and his mother matched virtually everything that was known about Albert and his mother. Like Albert’s mother, Douglas’s mother worked at a pediatric hospital on campus called the Harriet Lane Home. Like Albert, Douglas was a white male who left the home in the early 1920s and was born at the same time of year as Albert. What’s more, a comparison of a picture of Albert with Douglas’ portrait revealed facial similarities.

Sadly, Douglas passed away at six years old from hydrocephalus. Known as “water in the brain,” hydrocephalus is an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain’s cavities.

But that’s not the only information researchers dug up — and this new info questions the very findings of Watson’s experiment (not to mention his integrity). Watson always claimed that Little Albert was a healthy and normal baby. However, when researchers discovered how Douglas died, questions arose about his supposed good health.

According to a paper published in January 2012, in the journal History of Psychology, when watching Watson’s experiment footage, researchers noticed that Douglas seemed to have behavioral and neurological deficits.  After getting hold of his medical records, they learned that Douglas suffered from a variety of medical conditions: congenital obstructive hydrocephalus, iatrogenic streptococcal meningitis/ventriculitis and retinal and optic nerve atrophy. At the time of the experiment, Douglas was relatively stable.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article on the new findings written by science writer Tom Bartlett. Little Albert’s condition has important implications for Watson’s experiment. As Bartlett points out: “If the baby indeed had a severe cognitive deficit, then his reactions to the white rat or the dog or the monkey may not have been typical — certainly reaching universal conclusions about human nature based on his reactions wouldn’t make sense.”

Watson also likely knew about Douglas’s condition, but of course went through with the experiment anyway.

Check out the articles in Monitor on Psychology and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

During this time, the idea that marriage could be saved — and a divorce prevented — with enough work gained ground, according to Kristin Celello, assistant professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York, in her fascinating book Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. A slew of experts stepped in to help American couples strengthen their unions — and with some interesting suggestions.

These experts, however, weren’t necessarily trained therapists or even anyone who had anything to do with psychology. Take marriage expert Paul Popenoe, for example. He was incredibly well-known and established one of America’s first marriage counseling centers in the 1930s, made regular media appearances and contributed to Ladies Home Journal — and he was a horticulturalist.

The marriage prescriptions of the 1950s could be summed up in one sentence: It was mainly a woman’s job to foster a happy marriage and steer it away from divorce.

Marriage as a Career

For starters, marriage counselors encouraged women to think of marriage as a fulfilling career. As Celello writes:

Emily Mudd, for instance, outlined the many roles that women had to assume when they became wives. She approvingly quoted a “modern and prominent wife” who explained “To be a successful wife is a career in itself, requiring among other things, the qualities of a diplomat, a businesswoman, a good cook, a trained nurse, a schoolteacher, a politician and a glamour girl.”

Experts also believed that wives were responsible for their husbands’ professional success. Dorothy Carnegie, whose husband was self-help guru Dale Carnegie, published How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead in 1953. She laid out a variety of suggestions and cited personal examples. For instance, because her husband had a tough time remembering names, she’d learn the names of party guests before events and incorporate their names into the conversation.

Corporate culture actually dictated that a wife could make or break her husband’s career. When hiring or promoting an employee, companies supposedly considered his wife. Celello cites self-made millionaire R.E. Dumas Milner in an article in Good Housekeeping:

We employers realize how often the wrong wife can break the right man. This doesn’t mean that the wife is necessarily wrong for the man but that she is wrong for the job. On the other hand, more often than is realized the wife is the chief factor in the husband’s success in his career.

Coping with Alcohol, Affairs & Abuse

Even when alcohol, affairs or abuse was the issue in a failing marriage, wives were still responsible for making the marriage work — and for likely causing their husbands to stray, drink or be violent in the first place.

For instance, experts suggested that wives consider whatever they were doing or not doing to cause their husbands to cheat. Fixing their behavior could bring their husbands back home. If a husband did come home, it was also his wife’s duty to make sure that he didn’t cheat in the future.

This is what a counselor at the American Institute of Family Relations told a woman whose husband had an affair after 27 years of marriage:

We have found in our experience, that when a husband leaves his home, he may be seeking refuge from an unpleasant environment. Could it be that your husband feels that he is not understood or appreciated in his own home? What might there be in your relations to him that could make him feel that way? Could you have stressed your contribution to your marriage in such a manner as to have belittled the part he has played and thus made him uncomfortable in his presence?

Experts also had ideas on how to deal with physical abuse in a marriage. As Celello writes in Making Marriage Work:

Clifford Adams thus assured wives whose husbands were prone to violence that following a program of avoiding arguments, indulging their husbands’ whims, helping them relax, and sharing their burdens would “foster harmony” in the home and make them “happy wives.”

Divorcees Anonymous

Divorcees Anonymous (DA) was an organization that helped women avoid divorce, Celello writes. Interestingly enough, it was started by an attorney named Samuel M. Starr. Again, it was all about what the woman could do to save the marriage.

One woman sought help from the DA when she found out her husband was cheating. Apparently, according to Starr, the problem was that the woman looked decades older, wore dowdy clothes and had stringy hair. The women in the organization took her to the beauty salon and sewed her new clothes. They also worked with her daily on “her mind and her heart as well as her appearance.” When she was deemed improved, the DA set up a date with her and her husband. After that, the story goes that the husband stopped seeing his mistress and came home.

Couples Therapy

When most couples attended marriage counseling, they actually saw the counselor separately. The American Association of Marriage Counselors believed that “joint conferences with both partners can be helpful but are difficult and potentially dangerous.”

Finding a Husband

A woman’s career as a wife didn’t just start with her walk down the aisle, Celello points out. It began when she started searching for her mate. Women had to persuade potential partners into marriage since it was understood that women benefited more from matrimony. In essence, women had to work for their proposal, as the author of How to Make Him Propose described it. Specifically, the author writes:

It is up to you to earn the proposal — by waging a dignified, common-sense campaign designed to help him see for himself that matrimony rather than bachelorhood is the keystone of a full and happy life.

In addition to conducting a dignified campaign, women also needed to work on themselves, as a four-part series in 1954 in Ladies’ Home Journal suggested. In it, a single 29-year-old woman wrote about her counseling sessions in a “Marriage Readiness Course” at the American Institute of Family Relations. She learned that she needed to lower her expectations, improve her appearance and work on her intimacy issues — which she did and eventually landed a groom.

(Not that much has changed. Books on how to get a guy to marry you still exist today.)

In reality, according to Celello, many husbands did value their relationships and were willing to work on them. But the advice of the 1950s overwhelmingly put the responsibility of a relationship’s success on the wife.

I especially enjoy his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. His work is very challenging, however, so to get my Jung fix, I also read a bunch of interviews that he gave that were printed in the collection C.G. Jung Speaking. They are a fascinating read.

In 1960, journalist Gordon Young asked Jung, “What do you consider to be more or less basic factors making for happiness in the human mind?”

Jung answered with the five following elements…

1. Good physical and mental health.

2. Good personal and intimate relationships, such as those of marriage, the family, and friendships.

3. The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature.

4. Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.

5. A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.

Jung, always mindful of paradox, added,

“All factors which are generally assumed to make for happiness can, under certain circumstances, produce the contrary. No matter how ideal your situation may be, it does not necessarily guarantee happiness.”

I did disagree strongly with Jung on one point. He said, “The more you deliberately seek happiness the more sure you are not to find it.”

I know, Carl Jung vs. Gretchen Rubin, who is the authority? But though many great minds, such as John Stuart Mill, make the same point as Jung, I don’t agree.

For me, at least, the more mindful I am about happiness, the happier I become. Take Jung’s five factors. By deliberately seeking to strengthen those elements of my life, I make myself happier.

What do you think of Jung’s list? Would you add anything else, or characterize any element differently? And do you think it’s helpful to think about happiness directly, or not?

Several months ago, I posted an interview with the writer and humorist Andy Borowitz, and I also linked the podcast of a story he told, The time I almost died (a true story). Because people responded so warmly to the story, I suggested to Andy that he might consider publishing it in written form—and he has! An Unexpected Twist is the #1 Kindle Single. It’s hilarious and also deeply moving. I love any gold star, so I have to admit I got a huge kick when, in an interview on the New Yorker site, Andy mentioned that I’d given him a nudge to write it.

Count down to March 1! If The Happiness Project can hang onto the New York Times list for eight more days, it will have been there for a solid year. Yes! One year. Amazing. So, if you’re thinking about buying the book, go right ahead…. Order your copy.