Mind Tapas

Small Plates of Healing and Ideas

by Jeremy Spiegel, MD

Pathology Be Damned!

Yesterday's New York Times featured a personal Op-Ed by Benjamin Nugent, a young man inappropriately diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder. Only years later did it become obvious to him that he was misdiagnosed and that the DSM IV criteria for this high functioning autism spectrum disorder are far too broad and overinclusive to be fair to children like him. Read More

Freud's Last Session

"I had a session with Freud." Read More

The Sexual Complexity Scale

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Dan Savage, the outspoken sexual columnist, originator of the It Gets Better Project, and Grand Marshall with his partner Terry Miller of New York City Pride 2011, calls our attention to the natural complexity of human sexuality. Read More

A Picasso Can Heal You

As Russian artist Alexander Melamid opened the storefront to his Art Healing Ministry in SoHo New York one morning in late May, I handed him a business card for my New York City psychiatry practice, where I have been developing my own version of art healing. Read More

Why We Must Understand Evolution

Let's take a detour from the usual art-related discussion in this blog and concern ourselves with evolution by natural selection, and discuss how a deeper understanding can help to reframe experiences of our emotional lives and lend sorely needed perspective to the understanding of psychiatric disorders.

This week I had the opportunity to interview Ivan Brunetti, a master cartoonist best known for his depressive self-loathing or "self-lacerating" laments, appearing as long existential treatises within gorgeously inked frames. Read More

Art Healing for Medical Students

In the past month I asked medical students to go out and find personally meaningful works of art so that we could discuss them together as a group. Read More

Birds of Transformation

It might be argued that people seek out therapy for one reason and one reason alone. For transformation. For change. Like a chemical change that makes it impossible to return to one's original state. Read More

More Art Healing Q and A

Q. You have come upon an intriguing concept--that people can explore themselves using works of art. Could you explain this idea for our listeners? Read More

Stop Being Such a Jerk!

We're all prone to jerkness, myself included. Read More

Becoming Art at MoMA

Stronger than any pill, art has the power to transmute personal pain into mastery over the past. This idea became intensely clear when I entered a huge cordoned-off square in the second floor atrium at the Museum of Modern Art to join performance artist Marina Abramović. Together, we became a single, living work of art. Read More

Art Healing

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" they screamed, three voices as one. Mildly startled by this collective shriek reverberating up the stairwell, I was not scared by the noise, followed by laughter, from the lower gallery. Only moments earlier I emitted my own eructation, albeit an octave lower and followed by limbic profanity along the lines of "What the f---?!" Read More

Post-Vacation Blues

Have you ever found yourself regretting, at least playfully, a recent vacation not because of such obvious pitfalls as jet lag and Montezuma's Revenge, but because of the inevitable pain you experience with 're-entry' into your usual life? Read More