Happy Independence Day 2008
Ah, Independence Day — July 4th. A good day to celebrate, enjoy some family time, and have an outdoor barbeque. Or try to, if only the darned kids would get off their Nintendos and cell phones! It’s a day for family and friends, for celebrating our independence from another country who tried to dominate our lives [...]
Harvard Researchers for Sale: Take 2
Apparently after you’ve made it as a tenured professor at Harvard University, your first job is to secure some more funding for your research (despite Harvard being the richest school in the world). And what better way to do this than to ask for a little industry support? Critics have typically focused on the potential for [...]
Groovy, Man! Follow-Up Study Supports Therapeutic Use of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms
Johns Hopkins University researchers have released two follow-up papers to their fascinating 2006 study in Psychopharmacology, in which 36 healthy volunteers were given psilocybin (also known as “magic” or “sacred” mushrooms) under controlled laboratory conditions. Subjects in the original study were screened to rule out any predisposition toward psychosis or other serious mental illnesses, which can [...]
Computerized Therapy: The New Therapists?
With the question of how to pay for good psychotherapy (nevermind how to find or get “good” psychotherapy in the first place) not far from many people’s minds, researchers are spending more time looking at alternatives to traditional but expensive face-to-face psychotherapy. While some therapists are exploring alternative realities, researchers are still focused on far [...]
Pets Can Help — For Most
It’s common wisdom that pets help confer certain physical and emotional health benefits to their owners. An advice column from The Times last month, in fact, suggested that the health benefits of pet ownership are global and generalized — that owning a pet has a positive correlation with wellbeing in most people. The research tells [...]
Less Plastic Surgery Might Make You Look Happier, New Study Shows
In a study published in the medical journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery recently (and profiled in this May 28 New York Times article), Yale University researchers examined how features of the eye and eyebrow affect our facial expressions and, in turn, how other people use this information to guess our mood at the time. Study [...]
Kings County Hospital Lets Woman with Mental Illness Die
The below hospital surveillance video shows a dying woman while people around her, including a hospital security guard, did nothing to help. Apparently hospitals aren’t good places for people with mental illness to be (click here to read the full entry and view the video): After a full hour, [...]
Guns Are a Lethal Choice
I don’t mean to be insensitive to the potential for destructive nature of a gun in the home, but there was a spate of news articles yesterday regurgitating a statistic which is neither new nor news — that more than half of firearm deaths in the U.S. are suicides. From the Associated Press: Public-health researchers have [...]
W.H.O. Global Drug Survey Finds High Rates of Cocaine, Marijuana Use in U.S.
In a newly published report on “Global Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use” from the World Health Organization’s series of Mental Health Surveys, Americans’ levels of cocaine and marijuana use were highest among the 17 countries on six different continents surveyed. Researchers found that 16.2% of U.S. survey respondents had at least tried cocaine in [...]
Running in Place to Conquer Your Anxiety?
In this blog post a few days ago, John mentioned an April 2008 literature review by researchers at Boston University who wanted to explore the efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in treating anxiety. The authors of the review concluded that CBT, a short-term treatment technique, is generally effective for anxiety orders. In a related article from [...]
Help! I’m Anxious about My Anxiety Management Class!
Pages: 1 2 Next » Single Page I took a seat at a large conference table in the university’s counseling center. I looked around nervously. I kept my hands in my lap, fingers (figuratively) crossed, hoping that I wouldn’t recognize a single face that walked through the door and into [...]
Creative Funding Solutions for Mental Health Care
As we read our way through the detailed, insightful articles of The American Prospect’s special issue on the politics of mental health, we’ll share interesting tidbits from them. Taxpayers historically hate having to pay for public services through increased taxes of any kind. Many of us believe we are taxed enough as it is, and [...]
Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.
-- John Wayne
-- John Wayne
