In the past week, I’ve seen some incredibly sensationalistic articles published about the upcoming DSM-5 and a letter recently released by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the letter by Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, wrote in part, “That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

Some writers read a lot more into that statement than was actually there. Science 2.0 — a website that claims it houses “The world’s best scientists, the Internet’s smartest readers” — had this headline, “NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5.” Psychology Today made the claim, “The NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5.” (The DSM-5 is the new edition of the reference manual used to treatment mental disorders in the U.S.)

So is any of this true? In a word, no. This is “science” journalism at its worse.

Sometimes, I overhear people casually using the term “OCD” (obsessive-compulsive disorder). They’re ‘OCD with being clean’ or ‘OCD with organizational skills.’

In fact, however, a real struggle with OCD is a manifestation of anxiety that creates an actual disturbance in one’s life.

Lena Dunham, creator/ writer/ producer/ star of the HBO award-winning series “Girls,” showcased the leading character, Hannah, (played by Dunham herself) in very raw and honest encounters with the illness toward the end of this past season. Hannah had dealt with OCD in high school. It resurfaced when she was faced with two significant stressors: trying to write an e-book in a short time frame, and dealing with the rocky aftermath of a breakup.

Whether the scenes illustrated episodes of relentless tics, counting, or a compulsive habit that brought her to the emergency room, “Girls” took on authentic territory that invited other OCD sufferers to feel less alone.

Hyundai, the world’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the world, apparently believes showing a man trying to kill himself in one of their vehicles is good marketing. The ad, called “Pipe Job” and created by the ad agency Innocean Europe, depicts a man taping a hose from a Hyundai ix35‘s exhaust pipe into the cabin, trying to commit suicide.

It then shows the man sitting in the cabin, waiting to die.

A few frames later, the garage lights come back on, and the man opens the garage door. The tag line is, “The New ix35 with 100% water emissions.”

Yes, very tasteful. Maybe if you were brain and dead and haven’t been alive for the past three decades. Nothing like making fun of people with mental illness, clinical depression, or a disability, is there Hyundai (and Innocean)??

Warning, we’ve included a copy of the video below. Do not continue on if you don’t wish to watch it.

“For most teens, the Internet is a fundamental part of life,” according to Dana Udall-Weiner, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in media literacy. It’s how they communicate and interact. Teens use social media sites like Facebook for everything from casual talks to breakups, she said.

With social media a major part of teens’ lives, it’s important they have a healthy relationship with the Internet. What does this look like?

According to Udall-Weiner, it resembles any healthy relationship: It has boundaries.

It also shouldn’t have to meet all their needs, including emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual, she said. For instance, sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest should never replace face-to-face interactions, she said. Instead, they should supplement them. That’s because online interactions lack the emotional depth and support of real-time relationships. “…[I]t’s hard to know whether someone is trustworthy, loyal, and invested in your well-being.”

While the police are still sifting through the clues for information about who was behind the Boston Marathon 2013 bombings on Boylston St., it’s time for the rest of us to take a deep breath and start healing from this tragedy. With over 100 people injured — some quite seriously — and three people dead, that healing is going to take some time.

Other countries have long had to deal with seemingly random bombings in urban areas; the U.S. is relatively late to this particular brand of horror. I’m not sure how one ever gets used to the idea that by just going shopping or watching a parade or sporting event, something really bad could happen.

But life carries on — we cannot stop living out of fear.

Could the bystander effect be partially to blame for the lack of anyone intervening in the rape and sexual assault of Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott while it occurred?

The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon whereas the more people that are present when a person is in distress, the less likely anyone intervenes to help that person. Both cases involved a young girl being sexually assaulted and raped while at a house party with other teenagers.

Add alcohol to the mix — and the emotionally-based (often poor) judgment associated with the teenage years — and yes, it appears to be the perfect recipe for disaster.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I am sort of a sucker for consumer-friendly psychology magazines. Publications like Psychology Today are full of articles I either enjoy reading or using as fire kindling. Or, when I am really irritated by the content, writing articles on the topic. Like this one.

The article, published in Psychology Today, is titled “Ahead of the Curves” and the brilliant tagline? “Men know something vital about women’s body shapes that women don’t. Plus: How big hips make wise women.”

It is six pages long and features illustrations of women who look more like playmates than the women who have the aforementioned “big hips” and are “wise” because of it. One of the illustrations boasts a sexy blonde wearing a pastel-pretty bra and tight briefs. She is pursing her red lips — ready to kiss! She is rather revolting and her hips, well, they certainly are not wise.

That alone is irritating but this is the part that really makes me question my taste in literature: This lengthy article is written by two men.

Malcolm Gladwell capitalized on research conducted by Roger Barnsley (et al., 1985) by suggesting in his 2008 book, Outliers, that there is an “Iron Law of Canadian Hockey.” This theory is also known as the relative age effect in psychological research and it suggests that the older a player is when they begin training for a sport, the more likely they are to achieve success in that sport.

In fact, in a talk posted on YouTube, Gladwell goes even further, saying, “In absolutely every system in which hockey is played, a hugely disproportionate number of hockey players are born in the first half of the year.” He says this in the context of a talk about society not taking advantage of opportunities to improve human potential.

“Logic tells us there should be as many great hockey players born in the second half of the year,” suggests Gladwell, “as born in the first half. But what we can see here, there’s almost no one born it the end of the year, everyone’s from the beginning.”

But is this actually true — are more elite hockey players born in the first half versus the second half of the year?

You may have missed the Oscars on Sunday night, but you surely haven’t missed all the talk about them since their aired.

One of the things you may have also missed, though, was Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence speaking about mental illness and the stigma and prejudice that still surround people with a mental health concern.

In the movie she won the Best Actress Oscar for, Lawrence plays a character who befriends Bradley Cooper’s character, who has bipolar disorder. Her performance is simply wondrous, and given her age at the time of the filming — just 21 — also quite extraordinary.

“I think that there’s such a huge stigma over it [mental illness], that I hope we can get rid of, or help… I mean, people have diabetes or asthma and they have to take medication for it. But as soon as you have to take medication for your mind, there’s this instant stigma. Hopefully we’ve given those people hope, and made people realize that it’s not–”

Click through to watch the interview…

Everyday, when we open our electronic mailbox, we get our fair share of unsolicited email. Of course, the unsolicited offers have gotten a lot more subtle and duplicitous. A few years ago, dozens of marketeers tried to get us to post badly sourced and designed infographics.

Now they’ve moved on to something that, in my opinion, looks a lot like deception.

In today’s email box, we found an email from “Jeffrey Redd, Project Outreach Director” with an email address of jeff@va.gov.samhsa.net sharing with us “a guide about finding treatment, free of cost.” Wow, really? A new fantastic resource from the folks over at SAMHSA?

But wait, hold on a minute. That email address doesn’t look quite right…

Let me preface this by stating that I was born in 1985 and that makes me 27 years old. Arguably because of this, my life has been defined by the rapidly changing technology of the 20th century.

I recall the first time I encountered a computer — it really was an encounter as the machine looked rather frightening to my 10-year-old eyes. It was grey and weighed at least 25 pounds. It took what felt like forever (minutes — in its later years, hours) to load.

And it made a strange ticking noise, a repetitive sound not unlike the clock that hung in our living room, or the motion of my foot hitting the side of the metal desk as I waited for the noise the machine made once the screen finally appeared. I loved that noise. If the computer could talk I was certain it was telling me, whispering among the ticking, Welcome Home, Natalie! Enjoy your stay!

It was 1995. My two siblings and I fought over that large machine, forcing my parents to give us each an allotted amount of time. We cried and we kicked once 30 minutes had passed, 45 minutes if the gods were smiling down on us or my mother was taking a nap.

USA Today on Thursday published an editorial hopeful entitled, Editorial: Fix broken mental health system. Which would be fine as a stand-alone piece advocating more money, focus and resources for our nation’s patchwork system of mental health and recovery care.

Instead, they — like many well-meaning but apparently brain-dead newspapers — tie the need to fix our mental health care system — something others have been advocating for for decades — to recent headline-news grabbing acts of atrocious violence.

Only buried in this hypocritical, two-faced gutter-piece editorial do you find the truth — “Only the tiniest fraction of the mentally ill ever become violent, and then, usually when they fail to get treatment.” It’s even worse than that — statistically speaking, mental illness is a horrible predictor of violence, and nobody who’s read the research would ever suggest otherwise.

I have no problem with you advocating to help people with mental health concerns. I have a big problem if you’re doing so because of violence in America. The two have little to no connection with one another.