According to a growing body of evidence collected over the last three or more decades, people’s Jekyll and Hyde behaviour while drinking can be understood by a simple idea which has some intriguing ramifications.

The alcohol myopia model says that drink makes our attentional system short-sighted and the more we drink, the more short-sighted it becomes. With more alcohol our brains become less and less able to process peripheral cues and more focused on what is right in front of us. It’s this balance between what is right in front of us and what we don’t notice around the edges that determines how alcohol affects us in different situations.

More here.

My family illness has been a shape shifter. Diagnoses, when they’ve been done, have included one or more psychiatric disorders–depression, anxiety, addictions, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia–often in the same person. In some cases, the original diagnosis one of us received was wrong or incomplete.

My youngest son Sammy’s underlying issue turned out to be social anxiety, not his original diagnosis of depression; his depressed state most likely a reaction to the sizeable toll his severe anxiety took on him. Alex’s diagnosis was probably schizoaffective, because he was depressed, sometimes paranoid and at times his thinking process went into near total disarray.

These floating diagnoses for one person are not unusual. More current scientific thinking sees several mental illnesses (there is some debate about how many) as points along the same spectrum. This means that two or more disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, currently defined as separate conditions, are acknowledged to share the same possible genetic cause(s) and overlapping environmental triggers. Not surprisingly, medications and other treatments for these illnesses also overlap.

One prominent researcher and clinician who shares this view is psychiatrist Terrence Ketter at Stanford who treats a population who are at a common age of onset for these diseases. Ketter sees schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder on the same disease spectrum.

It’s a much more fluid model of mental illness than researchers have used before…

[Some] parents often don’t trust the mental-health professionals who usually treat children with “issues,” as we euphemistically tend to refer to problems like learning disabilities, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or other developmental difficulties. They find offensive the prospect of having a child “labeled” when his or her development doesn’t correspond to what seem like random, overly restrictive norms. They find the notion of putting children on psychotropic medication frightening and unacceptable. They want to find concrete causes for their children’s diffuse, often difficult-to-understand problems and, ideally, to find cures. They want their children to achieve, and they’re dissatisfied with what they feel are the palliative half-measures offered by pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists and learning specialists.

That’s why some of these parents end up seeking the services of people like Stanley A. Appelbaum.

Appelbaum is a behavioral optometrist, part of a growing subspecialty of optometry that takes the traditional practice beyond its usual focus on eye health and eyesight. Through a practice referred to as vision therapy — a combination of in-office and at-home eye exercises — many of these optometrists claim they can offer significant help for problems that go far beyond the headaches, neck aches, eyestrain and poor posture typically associated with vision problems. According to Visionandlearning.org, a behavioral-optometry Web site, vision therapy can be used to treat reading problems, learning problems, spelling problems, attention problems, hyperactivity, coordination problems; it can also treat a child who experiences “trouble in sports,” who “frustrates easily,” displays “poor motivation,” and “does not work well on his own” — virtually anything that presents as an “impaired potential for achievement,” to borrow a phrase from the prominent late optometrist Martin H. Birnbaum. They can do this because for behavioral optometrists, vision isn’t just about eyes or eyesight but is also something more holistic — “how eyes work together and move together and process information and store information and do something with the information,” as Appelbaum puts it. Vision therapists caution that they cannot cure “real” cases of A.D.H.D., dyslexia or other learning disabilities. But since they say that such disorders in children are frequently misdiagnosed, the distinction often is moot.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

The Gift of Therapy, by Irvin Yalom

Both worth the time.

One thing I do when I can’t sleep is play alphabet games. I try to list various things from A to Z: countries, rock groups, prescription drugs, movies, books, celebrities whose first and last names begin with the same letter… you get the idea. I don’t mind repeating categories from one night to another. Diseases might seem to be an unlikely insomnia game category, but for some reason, it’s one of my favorites. I like to combine ailments that terrified me in childhood (lockjaw) with ones that I didn’t know about until I was an adult (Ebola). And there are certain ailments that are never, ever on the list. Ever.

Illustrated on the site.

Too tired for sex? You are not alone.

About one in every four Americans married or living with someone say they are so sleep-deprived that they are often too tired to have sex, according to a new study by the National Sleep Foundation. Lack of sleep also keeps many people from work and family functions, the report said.

The study, based on a random sampling of 1,007 adults ages 25 to 60, focused on differences in sleep habits among ethnic groups — but the responses on tiredness and sex were about the same across the board…

Back in the 60s and 70s, before the sexual revolution had really taken hold, the standard dating advice for women was play hard to get. In some quarters it still is.

Like the Roman poet Ovid 2,000 years earlier, social scientists in the 1960s accepted the cultural lore that women could increase their desirability by being coy. When interviewed, men seemed to agree: they said that hard to get women were probably more popular, beautiful and had better personalities.

Unfortunately every time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense. At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).

Here’s what they did…

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.”

In fact, Greenberg seems to believe that contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms except existential-humanistic talk therapy, which is an actual school of psychotherapy, and which appears to be what he practices, is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements. And it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.

More here.

There’s no texting on skis. No distractions. Just fresh air and the challenge of learning a new sport. So-called “bad kids” can leave their reputation behind at school and forge a better one in the outdoors.

That’s the theory behind the Adventure Therapy program, which an Airdrie high school counsellor has developed to help small groups of students with behaviour problems become more confident and socially adapted.

That’s also the reality of the progressive program that has seen 16 students go through it in its first two years, according to founder Mike Reece of George McDougall High School. The former physical education teacher and ski instructor with a master’s degree in psychology has seen troubled teenagers in the program develop healthy social habits and a quiet confidence they never knew before mastering an outdoors skill such as skiing.

“Getting away from the friends, and the distractions and the worries — it’s a regaining of perspective in their lives,” Reece says. “It helps them change their ability to cope with others and to think.”