Will Baum, LCSW Psychotherapy

Blog

  • Transcendental Meditation for Depression

    PsychCentral has news about two studies showing that Transcendental Meditation (TM) helps reduce depression…at least for African-Americans and Hawaiians over 55. Participants in both studies who practiced the Transcendental Meditation program showed significant reductions in depressive symptoms compared to health education controls. The largest decreases were found in those participants who had indications of clinically…

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  • Sleep Deprivation v. Depression

    From the NYT Opinionator section, In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression–post-partum depression, at least.  (Since when did new moms get a lot of sleep anyway?) Sleep deprivation used as a treatment for depression is efficacious and robust: it works quickly, is relatively easy to administer, inexpensive, relatively safe and it also alleviates other…

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  • Sleepeating

    From the NYT, a portrait of a malady:  Raiding the refrigerator, but still asleep. Shirley Koecheler, 54, has been a sleepwalker for as long as she can remember. But it wasn’t until she got married that she started eating in her sleep, too. She’d wander into the kitchen — eyes open but asleep — and…

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  • Magnet v. Moral Compass

    The Los Angeles Times reports on an MIT study that shows a magnetic pulse interfering with basic moral judgments.  Sounds made up, but evidently it’s science: With their right temporoparietal junctions scrambled, participants seemed unable to recognize an action as wrong unless it led to harm — a moral judgment that virtually all could make easily when…

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  • The Depression Debate

    A while back, I linked to Louis Menand’s big New Yorker article about the history of depression treatment.  Didn’t read it?  Here’s a conversation about the piece–The Depression Debate–in a podcast from the magazine’s website. Meds, placebos, Freud, CBT, and depression itself all come under the microscope.

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