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.”

Unlike compulsive gambling, which also is proposed for addition to the new DSM (to be called DSM-5), the proposed diagnosis — hypersexual disorder — stops short of categorizing the problem as an addiction, and for a reason.

“If we are looking at a disorder, it’s not clear what that disorder is,” said Michael Miner, a professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota who advised the DSM-5 committee on sexual disorders. “There is not an agreed-upon name. The research is in its infancy.”

Patterns of extreme sexual acting out are described variously by therapists as an addiction, as a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder or as a symptom of another psychiatric illness, such as depression.

The lines specialists draw between what is sexually normal or abnormal have long been in flux. Some behaviors, such as pedophilia, are almost universally considered abnormal and have been described in the DSM for decades. Homosexuality was once considered deviant, but that reference was dropped from the DSM decades ago.

Therapists who see patients — mostly men — with problems caused by repetitive sexual behaviors, whether sex with consenting adults, pornography or cyber-sex, said the addition of a hypersexual behavior category was long overdue.

“There is no doubt in my mind that this condition exists and that it’s serious,” said Dr. Martin P. Kafka, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard University who was a member of the DSM-5 work group on sexual disorders.

“There are definitely men who are consumed by porn or consumed by sex with consenting adults — who have multiple affairs or multiple prostitutes. The consequences associated with this behavior are very significant, including divorce, pregnancy” and sexually transmitted disease, he said.

Some studies suggest that hypersexual behavior is indeed similar to an addiction, akin to the loss of control that seizes compulsive gamblers or shoppers.

At any given time, hundreds of online psychology experiments are going on. They are a great, cost-efficient method to gather experimental data from the multitudes of people online. These experiments can be fun to try, but also provide researchers with valuable data that future research may be based upon. Here are all-new experiments as well as a couple of classics.

10. Sexual Infidelity. Can you guess who cheats, from listening to their voices? New research, with voices speaking vowels, and some facial images too. Unfortunately, no results shared…

The rest of the list is here.

What is TMS and how does someone know if they’ve got it?

Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) is a term coined by Dr. John Sarno of the NYU Medical Center. Put simply, it means physical pain that’s the result of psychological causes rather than structural causes.

Anyone who’s ever had a headache or stomachache as the result of stress has experienced TMS. For most, the pain goes away within a day or two, but for some it becomes a chronic condition. Chronic back pain, neck pain, fibromyagia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and many other conditions that are commonly thought of as having structural causes are often TMS.

Many of my clients bounced around from doctor to doctor for years, unable to find relief for their chronic pain. Usually they come upon the TMS diagnosis as a last resort, having exhausted every treatment from physical therapy to magnets to South American shamanism…

[W]e have the myth of depression as a “clarifying force,” or as an “adaptive response to affliction” — notions being advanced by a number of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists. Thus, Lehrer quotes psychiatrist Andy Thomson as saying, “…even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships… Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

Now, with all due respect to Dr. Thomson, I am inclined to ask, “Worth it to whom?” Perhaps the patients Dr. Thomson has treated emerge from their three-month bouts of depression saying, “Ya know what, Doc? It’s been a bad three months—lost my job, almost killed myself, and couldn’t get a damn thing done—but overall, it was worth it!” The depressed patients I evaluated over the past nearly 30 years almost never reported that their major depressive episodes had a “net mental benefit,” to quote Lehrer’s article. Most felt that their lives and souls had been stolen from them for the duration of their depressive episode. Many would have understood and endorsed Willam Styron’s description of his own depression, in his book Darkness Visible:

“Death was now a daily presence, blowing over me in cold gusts. Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain… [the] despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room.”