The Story of a Sign

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NYTimes.com: Op-Ed Contributor - The Power of Negative Thinking

September 24, 2008Op-Ed ContributorThe Power of Negative ThinkingBy BARBARA EHRENREICHGREED — and its crafty sibling, speculation — are the designated culprits for the financial crisis. But another, much admired, habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking.As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits...

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Epilepsy Foundation: Mood Disorders and Victor Newman ...

I'm home today, sick with a cold, and I thought I'd tune in to the soap I watch occasionally.  Imagine my surprise when I realized that, two months later, "Victor" is still incapacitated with grief over the death of his latest wife ... he says he feels "empty" ... he's quitting everything and giving away everything else.  Hey, the dude is depressed and suicidal!  Could it be that the soaps are going to start bringing some intelligent script writing to mental illness?  So I turned to my trusty Google ... it's not much, but it's a start!Viewpoint: Dr. John Barry discusses the impact of mood disorder in the life of "Victor Newman" By John Barry, M.D. Special to EpilepsyUSA Posted: August 29, 2006 JohnBarry, M.D., is an associate...

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Anger in the Age of Entitlement: Emotional Reality

By Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of EntitlementEmotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live. Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choices, processing that which conforms to them and excluding that which deviates from them. The result can keep us pretty much stuck in a rut.When we try to make changes in emotional reality, we tend to think in terms of problems and challenges, as if these were rocks to be removed from a garden. This approach often fails because...

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The Onion: Area Father Remembers When He Thought Killing Family, Self Was Crazy

September 19, 2008 | Issue 44•38SCHAUMBURG, IL— Father of five Don Knutsen, 39, can still recall a time not too long ago when he would have instantly dismissed the thought of lacing his family's lunch with Rohypnol and burning the house down with everyone inside as "crazy." "Just a year ago, that would have seemed pretty out there, all right," Knutsen told reporters as he tried to settle down his overexcited four-year-olds, Beth and Rogan, while his wife, Maude, informed him that the light in the bathroom was still broken. "These days, I usually don't make it to five o'clock before I notice we have five gallons of gas just sitting there in the garage." Although he does not currently have the time or money to seek counseling, Knutsen said he will certainly contact the authorities if he begins...

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Ovidia: What's with the raisins, anyway?

I've blogged a couple of articles now that offer the raisin exercise from "The Mindful Way Through Depression" as an introduction to mindfulness practice. And frankly, I'm a little puzzled. What's the deal with raisins, anyway?OK, I'm not that crazy about them. But even so ... other than their cunning little wrinkles, if they're not singing and dancing, there's just not that much to a raisin to recommend it, especially when you're just beginning to explore mindfulness practice.So let me offer an alternative suggestion: Bliss chocolate. Now THIS is something to be mindful of. For one thing (especially compared to raisins), it's expensive. That in itself is a good reason to pay attention and not just gulp it down. Then they're individually...

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The Irish Times: A mindful distraction for pain and depression

ASHOK JANSARICAN THE WAY you chew a raisin affect the way you experience pain? Trials at St James's and AMNCH (Tallaght) Hospitals in Dublin are beginning to look at how "mindfulness meditation" can be used to help people cope with a diverse range of problems including chronic pain, depression, anxiety, cardiac difficulties and even psoriasis."Mindfulness is a secular form of meditation . . . [and] . . . is useful for anyone going through stress and strain in life, which is probably everybody," explains Dr Noirin Sheahan, who has been practising mindfulness meditation for 20 years."In 2004, I realised that it was being used clinically . . . [and] . . . about a year ago, a consultant in pain medicine, Dr Connail McCrorey, asked me to teach his patients with chronic pain mindfulness," says Sheahan.So...

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The Princeton Packet: WELLNESS: Cultivating mindfulness

By Deborah Metzger Princeton Center for Yoga & HealthDaunted by meditation? You can learn a great deal about it simply by eating a raisin. Read on. If the thought of meditation conjures up sitting in a lotus position for hours or chanting something unintelligible with our knees aching and our legs falling asleep, let’s dispel that myth right now. The fact is that most of us cannot sit still for even a nanosecond without “time traveling” in our minds — those concerns about the future, those lingering thoughts about the past, that itch that comes up within seconds and just won’t quit. Let’s let go of any notion that we “can’t” meditate. One technique that we teach at the Princeton Center for Yoga & Health (PCYH) is Mindfulness Meditation, which trains the mind to focus...

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Health 24: Living with Mental Illness

Ilse Pauw is a holder of the Carter fellowship for mental health journalism from the Carter Center in Atlanta. This is part of her series of articles on mental health and stigma.Living in a quandary"Living with mental illness means living with a set of questions," says 43-year-old Sanette. "Will I get ill again? Am I still ill?"You are in a quandary: you wonder, should I tell them and trust them or not? And how will they react? I don't think that people who haven't had a mental illness can even imagine what it must be like living like this."Sanette is one of the 25% of South Africans with mental illness who worry over questions such as these every day.According to Sanette, the warning signs of mental illness were present in her childhood. She describes herself as having been a "dark and highly-strung...

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globeandmail.com: The shadow of depression

September 16, 2008 at 4:50 AM EDT It is hard to believe that a highly treatable illness could stop the prodigious voice of the U.S. novelist, short-story writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, just 46 when he took his own life last Friday by hanging himself. His suicide is a reminder of the depredations of mental illness, and in particular of how depression can still be, in spite of medical advances, an overpowering and potentially fatal disease. His entire career, it seems, was conducted in the shadow of this illness. For 20 years, according to his father, he took medication for depression. A 1996 profile of him in the New York Times Magazine reported that he had tried to commit suicide at least once. Like any good writer he made his illness into material; depression is omnipresent...

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SFGate: Nonfiction review: 'Acedia & Me' and writing

Paula Priamos, Special to The ChronicleAcedia & MeA Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's LifeBy Kathleen NorrisRiverhead Books; 334 pages; $25.95What prompts a professor on sabbatical to waste precious time by hosing down his house rather than work on his book? Why would a teen girl resolve not to make her bed in the mornings because she knows she'll be sleeping in it later that night?According to Kathleen Norris, these odd rationalizations are described by an old monastic term, acedia, or mental sloth. For Norris, who's written such widely regarded works as "The Cloister Walk" and "Amazing Grace," appraising the importance of faith and the Christian vernacular is familiar ground. In her meditative memoir "Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life," she scrutinizes the intricacies...

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UUWorld.org: Love Can't Fix Everything

I knew the gunman who killed two in a Knoxville church, but I don't need an explanation for his actions. I need stories of heroes and kindness and compassion.By Meg BarnhouseI was sitting with a group of Unitarian Universalists talking about the shooting in Knoxville’s Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church when one person said of the shooter, “He just never had any love.” Never one to err on the side of gracious silence, I snapped, “He most certainly did have love. I know one of the women who loved him, and she loved him fiercely.”I met Jim David Adkisson several times, once at a wedding in his back yard, and then at SUUSI, the UU summer camp in Virginia, in 1996. His then-wife Liza used to attend the Tennessee Valley UU Church. I am a card-carrying liberal, and I think what David...

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McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01.

- - - -Every year, we wonder what might be appropriate on this day, and we can never think of anything more appropriate than this piece, which Mr. Hodgman originally delivered at a literary reading shortly after September 11, 2001.- - - -Good evening.My name is John Hodgman. I am a former professional literary agent, which on a good day is a pretty small thing to be, and these days feels rather microscopic. Before I was a professional literary agent, I thought it would be a good idea to be a teacher of fiction in a college MFA program because it is easy and you are adored all the time and of course it pays a lot of money.I used to have a lot of bright ideas.I even had two lessons planned out, which, by all accounts from MFA programs that I've...

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In Practice: Of Human Frailty

By Peter D. Kramer in In PracticeEarly in my career, when I served as head of ambulatory psychiatry for a group of hospitals here in Providence, Rhode Island, I happened to take a trip to Israel. In Jerusalem, I found myself explaining my job to a skeptical audience. What were outpatient services? a woman wanted to know. Who needed them?Searching for a case that would put me on solid ground, I began to tell the story of a young man injured in an industrial accident. Nerves serving his arm had been avulsed, that is, they had been tugged in way that made the arm useless and painful. The man had become depressed and had not returned to work . . . and here the woman interrupted me. Why had he become depressed?I could see her point. We were in a country where young men and women went to war and...

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UWM Daily Cardinal: Mental health demands more campus attention

By: Ryan Dashek /The Daily Cardinal - September 15, 2008The UW-Madison system needs to focus more time and funds on the mental well-being of their studentsFrom the most experienced fifth-year senior to the newest of freshmen, we all have felt at one time or another the stress and rigors of college life bearing down on us. Whether we are stressing over financial situations, what our goals for the future may be, relationships, or even that term paper due this Friday you haven’t even started yet, college is a tumultuous time that heavily impacts our minds and mental states. That being said, it should be a top priority for our university (any university or college, in fact) to have mental treatment and counseling readily available to all students for free, or at least at very affordable prices....

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The Wilkes University Beacon: Suicide expert offers insights in Issues in Education series

Q & A with Dr. J.J. RasimasLeeAnn SearfossIssue date: 9/14/08 Section: LifestylesAccording to Margarita Tratakovsky, the National Institute of Mental Health reports that "75 percent of all individuals with an anxiety disorder will show symptoms before the age of 22."In a recent presentation to the American Psychological Association, psychologist Dr. David Drum reported on a comprehensive survey he conducted that indicates, "Six percent of undergraduates and 4 percent of graduate students reported seriously considering suicide within the 12 months prior to answering the survey...[Thus] at an average college with 18,000 undergraduate students, some 1,080 undergraduates will seriously contemplate taking their lives at least once within a single year."Last Thursday, renowned suicide and mental...

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Telegraph.co.uk: Max Pemberton on teenagers’ alarming lack of knowledge concerning mental health issues

Finger on the pulseLast Updated: 12:01am BST 15/09/2008'There's no way I'm talking to you," snarls Mark and turns his head away. I swallow hard and try a different approach. "OK," I begin, "it's only a chat. I promise if after five minutes you don't want to talk any more, I'll go away."Silence. He pulls the covers over his head. I stand motionless by his bed, unsure what to do next."Why don't you want to talk to me?" I say. He pulls the covers off his head. "Because I know the sorts of things you lot will do to me." I look at him perplexed. "You'll lock me in a mental hospital," he says. "You'll think I'm mad, but I'm not."Mark is 16 and has just been diagnosed with cancer. I sit down and explain that no one thinks he's mad and that psychiatrists don't just go round locking people up. I explain...

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The Denverchannel.com: Legal Document Gives Voice To Mental Health Patients

Psychiatric Advance Directives Tell Doctors How Patients Want To Be Cared ForPOSTED: 11:54 pm MDT September 13, 2008UPDATED: 12:06 am MDT September 14, 2008]According to the National Institute of Mental Health, mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. More than 26 percent of Americans ages 18 and older suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. That translates into about 58 million adults, including 13 million adults struggling with severe mental illness.Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. In fact, nearly half of those with any mental disorder meet the criteria for two or more disorders.The burden of mental illness on health and productivity is vast. Research collected by the Global Burden of Disease study conducted...

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I Sit By The Window by Joseph Brodsky

I said fate plays a game without a score,and who needs fish if you've got caviar?The triumph of the Gothic style would come to passand turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.I said the forest's only part of a tree.Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.I sit by the window. The dishes are done.I was happy here. But I won't be again.I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-o Euclid thought the vanishing point becamewasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.I sit by the window. And while I sitmy youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.I said that the leaf...

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The Bangkok Post: The Mindfulness Cure

We Thais like to claim that we are peace-loving Buddhists. Yet, we've blown it many times before with violent clashes and crackdowns in previous political crises. Whether or not we fail again this time around, depends very much on how Buddhist we really are. COMMENTARY by Sanitsuda Ekachai Take a deep breath. Watch it leave the nostrils. Watch it come back in. Feel the sensation. See the difference. Watch the constant change. Try do it for at least 10 minutes to let the calm set in. Indeed, we need to instil our inner calm more than ever to prevent ourselves from getting carried away in the emotional rollercoaster of our dangerously unpredictable politics. As the nation sinks deeper into political divisiveness, we also need to build inner strength that will help pull us out of the quagmire...

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People.com: Kirsten Dunst: 'Now I Love Me'

By Maureen HarringtonKirsten Dunst says she's "learned a lot" after checking into rehab earlier this year for depression and is now in a different place in her life."Everyone goes through a hard time in their life," Dunst says in the October issue of Harper's Bazaar. "They just don't have to do it in front of tons of people and with our media the way it is. I did, and I'm lucky that I had the resources and the money to take care of myself."She adds: "Now, I'm great."Though she hesitates to go into details about her stint at Cirque Lodge, a rehabilitation center in Utah, Dunst says prior to going to rehab she was "enormously co-dependent.""I wasn't taking care of myself emotionally. I wasn't expressing my anger," she says. "I was making nice...

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O Magazine: Six Ways to Stop Dwelling on It

By Naomi Barr It's 5 p.m., the deadline for an important work project is at 6, andall you can think about is the fight you had with the next-doorneighbor this morning. You're dwelling, says Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD,a professor of psychology at Yale and author of Women Who Think Too Much."It's natural to look inward," she says, "but while most people pullout when they've done it enough, an overthinker will stay in the loop."Ruminating regularly often leads to depression. So if you're prone toobsessing (and you know who you are), try these tactics to head off thenext full-tilt mental spin cycle…Stop Obsessing 1. Distract Yourself Puton music and dance, scrub the bathtub spotless, whatever engrossesyou—for at least 10 minutes. "That's...

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Beyond Blue: Sticky Thoughts

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Rover 411: Is Your Dog Presidential?

We are looking for the dogs that look most like our candidates for The "My Dog Looks Like Obama or McCain" Photo Contest.Now - September 8, 2008:Date extended to September 15, 2008! Submit photos. Select photos will be displayed on the site. Click here for contest rules or Click here to submit your photo                                    September 22 - October 22, 2008: Rover 411 members vote for their favorite photo.October 25, 2008: Winners will be announced at the Rover 411 Grand Opening Event. Details to foll...

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Life As Art: Sports Grief, Roller Coasters, and Sarah Palin’s Speech

By Shelley H. Carson, Ph.D. in Life as Art It's a dull ache in the throat and stomach, accompanied by a sudden sinking feeling. I started noticing these physical symptoms of melancholy last week but couldn't put my finger on the cause until I reread a Psychology Today blog on Sports Grief by colleague Steven Kotler that first appeared on June 25th. Then I realized that my symptoms coincided with the onset of the NFL season...and that my subclinical case of sports grief (I'm a diehard Patriots fan) had been rekindled by sights and sounds ("Are you ready for some football?") that in previous seasons used to ignite excited anticipation in me. And as if reliving the unimaginable (to Patriots fans and Vegas odds-makers) disaster that occurred in Super Bowl XLII weren't enough, now Patriots fans...

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