Storied Mind: Why Depressed Men Leave - 2

Written by john on February 21st, 2009Some Rights Reserved by nyki_m at FlickrSome of the comments on the last post in this series hit hard on two issues. First is the question of personal choice: is a man supposed to escape responsibility for destructive behavior by attributing everything to depression? The answer is no! Depression is never an excuse for inflicting pain and loss, breaking up families, violent rages or destructive behavior of any kind. The other compelling question that is asked over and over again, often in desperation, is: What can I do?I’ll try here to deal with both of these issues here rather than put them off to the end of the series, as I had originally planned.1. ResponsibilityWhatever might roil me internally in the...

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Storied Mind: Why Depressed Men Leave - 1

Written by john on February 9th, 2009Why Depressed Men Leave - 1 Written by john on February 9th, 2009 Some Rights Reserved by lepiaf.geo at Flickr About a year ago, I wrote a series of posts about my experience with the fantasies of a better life that often prompt depressed men to leave their families. You can find the first of those stories here, here and here. Those brief pieces tell only a small part of a long and troubling story. To stay in recovery I have to know more, and so I’m starting a new series of posts specifically about why men want to leave, how we change, where we want to go.Read more ...

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Hara Estroff Marano: Buddhism and the Blues

Buddhist psychology's core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners.By: Hara Estroff MaranoTo most people Buddhism is an ancient Eastern religion, although a very special one. It has no god, it has no central creed or dogma and its primary goal is the expansion of consciousness, or awareness.But to the Dalai Lama, it's a highly refined tradition, perfected over the course of 2,500 years, of analyzing and investigating the inner world of the mind in order to transform mental states and promote happiness. "Whether you are a believer or not in the faith," the Dalai Lama told a conference of Buddhists and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can use its time-honored techniques to...

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Anger in the Age of Entitlement: Uncertainty Is Your Friend, Part III: Emotions Are All of the Above

By Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement All available evidence suggests that the brain has enormous flexibility to do a lot of different things at one time. Mental focus is hard because it forces the brain to concentrate its resources, something it is naturally inclined to do only with the prospect of reward or in the face of threat.Read M...

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Anger in the Age of Entitlement: Uncertainty is Your Friend, Part II: Testing the Illusion of Certainty about Emotions

By Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement There's a famous story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein watching a sunset with a student and marveling about how anyone could have believed that the sun revolved around the earth.Read M...

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Anger in the Age of Entitlement: Uncertainty is Your Friend, Part I

By Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement A number of years ago the dean of a leading medical school opened the commencement ceremonies with a message to the newly graduated physicians, "Fifty percent of what we taught you is wrong.Read M...

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In Practice: Fuhgeddaboudit

By Peter D. Kramer in In Practice If we had a drug that could erase bad memories, should we use it? That was the question the press extracted from an arguably limited set of observations reported in an on-line article in Nature Neuroscience.You've probably heard about the experiment. A trio of Dutch researchers showed normal subjects photos of spiders, accompanying one image with an electric shock. The next day, the scientiest re-presented the images, with or without pre-administering the subjects an anti-adrenalin drug, propranolol. Down the road, those who had taken propranolol were less likely to startle when exposed to a loud noise in the presence of an offending picture. The conclusion was that the drug interfered with the consolidation...

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Urban Mindfulness: Mindfulness and the Financial Crisis

By Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D. in Urban Mindfulness Here in the city (and all over the country), anxiety about the financial crisis is palpable and omnipresent. Thousands of people, especially within the financial services industry, have been losing their jobs. Real estate construction and development have slowed or ceased, while home sales plummet. Retail businesses and restaurants have been doing poorly too as many of us cope with a decrease in income by reducing our spending.How can mindfulness help?Mindfulness can help by reducing our suffering in a very painful situation. The financial crisis has a negative effect on our home finances, savings, and fulfillment of some life dreams (at least temporarily). This is our current reality--and it...

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The Human Experience: Emotional Hunger Vs. Love

By Robert Firestone, Ph.D.  in The Human Experience Emotional hunger is not love. It is a strong emotional need caused by deprivation in childhood. It is a primitive condition of pain and longing which people often act out in a desperate attempt to fill a void or emptiness. This emptiness is related to the pain of aloneness and separateness and can never realistically be fully satisfied in an adult relationship. Yet people refuse to bear their pain and to face the futility of gratifying these primitive needs and dependency. They deny the fact of their own ultimate death and do everything in their power to create an illusion that they are connected to other persons. This fantasy of belonging to another person allays the anxiety about death...

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Telegraph.co.uk: Florence Nightingale 'might never have succeeded with modern stigma against mental illness'

She became world-famous as the saviour of countless lives and the inventor of modern nursing, but a new report suggests that Florence Nightingale might never have been able to transform hospitals if she had to combat today's stigma against mental illness. By Kate Devlin, Medical CorrespondentLast Updated: 3:48PM GMT 10 Feb 2009 The document, co-written by Alastair Campbell, the former Government spin doctor, also questions whether a modern politician could reach the top of their profession suffering from Winston Churchill's "black dog" of depression. And it queries whether the ideas of other leading figures, including Charles Darwin, Marie Curie and Abraham Lincoln, would be ignored in today's society, which the report found was...

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Sustainablog: Is Climate Change Making Us Mental?

Written by Robin Shreeves Published on February 11th, 2009If you were to click on my bio here for Sustainablog, you’d see that I started down this green path because my son who was six at the time had read about global warming and gave us the “what for” over the SUV we owned. We joke now with him that he was the one that got this whole thing started for our family, yet at times he seems, at almost ten years old, the least interested in the environment. In a way, that may be a good thing.The Boston Globe reported that climate change takes a mental toll, and that children and adults alike are starting to have “psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change.” Children especially “are having nightmares about global-warming-related...

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San Jose Mercury News: Lawmakers debate mental health cuts

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ Associated Press WriterPosted: 02/12/2009 04:27:26 PM PSTCARSON CITY, Nev.—Lawmakers challenged major cuts in the state's mental health services on Thursday, saying they won't agree to reductions that would jeopardize the health and safety of Nevada communities.Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed closing 11 of the state's 21 rural mental health clinics, and increasing the number of patients per staff member at mental health facilities in Reno and Las Vegas.While overall human services spending, about a third of the state's general funds, for the coming two fiscal years is up, funding for mental health services would decrease 5 percent, to $473 million."Several of us took vows that we would never support reductions again," said...

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The Buffalo News: Hard times are pushing many into mental illness

By Deidre WilliamsNEWS STAFF REPORTERIt’s all weighing pretty heavily on Barbara Smith, a widowed grandmother who lives in the Black Rock section of Buffalo.She fears layoffs are coming soon at her job a local nonprofit agency. That’s on top of the hours that were cut recently at her part-time job at a local florist.And don’t forget the weather: the very cold, very snowy past weeks, followed by a couple of days of warming, then 60 -mph winds and wet snow that knocked out power to more than 50,000 homes and businesses.“I guess the news is bad for everybody,” Smith said, “and it just seems to get worse.”All this contributes to what experts call the new face of mental illness.Doom and gloom seem to have dominated the news lately.Consider the headlines:•...

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Monkey See: Valentine's Day Un-Romances

by Linda HolmesI have a long history with romantic movies of all kinds. Goopy musicals, kicky-girl rom-coms, masterpieces of banter -- you name it, and I've probably fallen for it at one time or another. Unfortunately, the older one gets, the more some of these fall apart, and the more others don't work at all. I give you five (of many) Un-Romances. Be warned: all descriptions contain spoilers.1. Jerry Maguire This really pains me, because I thought this was a terribly touching story the first time I saw it. As much as "you complete me" and "you had me at hello" are now as dessicated as "Show me the money!" there was a time when they seemed like sort of nifty things for people to say to each other. Of course...I was 25.Why it's an...

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