Category: Reading

  • Behavioral Optometry vs. ADHD

    Another massive mental-health related piece in the New York Times magazine–Concocting a Cure for Kids with Issues. [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. […] That’s why some of…

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  • Insomnia Battled

    “All Nighters” is a New York Times blog series about insomnia–how it’s lived, what to do about it.  Cartoonist Roz Chast recommends playing some individual Scattegories, “The A to Z Cure“: 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…

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  • Manufacturing Depression

    A long review/think piece in the New Yorker about therapy and psychiatry, including the view from Gary Greenberg’s book, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease: 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…

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  • Depression Good for You?…Maybe Not

    A vigorous response to the NYT’s Depression’s Upside article by Dr. Ronald Pies at PsychCentral: [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…

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  • Depression is Good For You…Maybe

    A massive NYT Magazine piece explores “Depression’s Upside,” as hypothesized by evolutionary and social psychologists. [T]heir speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a…

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