Jailing the Mentally Ill
Prisons, ironically, are burdened by responsibilities that once belonged to enormous, state-run psychiatric hospitals. Many of those were shut down half a century ago...
Tag: mental illness
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Psychedelics in Psychotherapy
If you’d paid thousands of dollars in order to travel to a foreign country for a last-ditch, Hail Mary-type grab at lasting relief, wouldn’t you really want it to work?
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Excited Delirium? Ketamine on the Street
Excited delirium is a term widely recognized in emergency medicine yet somehow lacks a single accepted definition.
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Mental Health and Gun Violence
I’m all in favor of wider access to good mental health care, and since drug and alcohol problems are included, I thought this might be an opportunity to point out some serious flaws in this approach.
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Opioids and Mental Health Diagnoses
This goes back to a problem in assessing pain. There’s no physical test for what is essentially a subjective experience.
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Are Video Games Addictive?
Isn’t that a bit like the drinker who insists he’s fine except that he just drinks a whole lot more than other people?
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A System That Isn’t One
It makes little sense to criticize our “system” of mental health care, when it’s only a system in some places. In the national sense, it isn’t a system at all, and never has been.
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Mental Illness: The Dilemma of Diagnosis
In spite of the advances, science still struggles to understand the disease process that underlies most disorders.
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DSM5 – The Great Debaters
In a sense we’re just describing disorders that we only partly understand.
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More on Mental Illness: Genetics
As a general rule, the better the causes of a disease are understood, the more effective the treatments will be.
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Retrain Your Brain: Scripting
Language– the words we choose for our self-talk– has a powerful influence on our brain function. Words can help us re-shape the cycle of feelings, impulses, and behaviors.
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Some Observations on Mental Illness
Therapy we might see as fiddling with the ‘software’. Not so different from treating a chronic disease such as diabetes, where education and counseling improve outcomes.
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Some Observations on Mental Health Diagnosis
Another common criticism is that the diagnostic system dehumanizes clinical care, leading us to think about disorders rather than people.
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