Suffer the Children

The director of my children’s nursery school was a warm and nurturing woman named Andy. I had no problem at all leaving my daughter and twin sons in her care while I was at work. Read More

In the United States, 5% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France? Read More

What does the latest research on the placebo effect mean for the one million children in the United States, some as young as six, who are diagnosed with "childhood depression" and taking antidepressant medications? Read More

Family systems therapists are a rare breed, for we see the world from a different angle. Simply put, our particular slant is that we look for the interconnections and relationships between people instead of seeing people as separate independent individuals. And for teaching us this unique way of seeing the world, we are indebted to Gregory Bateson. Read More

      The Latin word "placebo" means "I shall please." The word occurs in the Latin translation of Psalm 116: "I shall please the dead in the land of the living." In the Middle Ages, hired mourners chanted this line in the Vespers for the Dead. Read More

Director David Cronenberg's new movie A Dangerous Method is, primarily, a portrait of the brilliant Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. We first meet Jung in 1904, in the early years of his career as attending psychoanalyst at Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich. A severely troubled young woman is dragged in screaming. Read More

Agoraphobia is derived from the Greek words phobia, which means "fear," and agora, which means "marketplace." Agoraphobia generally means a fear of public places, perhaps due to social anxiety. But from a family systems point of view, a child's agoraphobia can have a different meaning entirely. Read More

Parents these days have a lot to deal with--violent video games like Whack your Soul Mate, Mafia Wars and Boneless Girl, internet sites which sell virtual "pets" to children and threaten the kids with unhappiness for their pets if they don't visit the site often enough and buy them enough virtual treats. Read More

Most of us are familiar with the famous experiment by Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan which was originally published in the journal Science in 1973. Read More

     Some years ago, there was a bestselling book called Women Who Love Too Much by California therapist Robin Norwood. As I read an article in this month's Atlantic Magazine with the intriguing title "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy," I was reminded of Norwood's book. Read More

For some of us, however, a looming vacation or even a business trip is not a happy prospect. It means an airplane flight, and these people inwardly quake at the very thought of getting on an airplane. They may fear losing control and panicking during the flight, or suffocating, or dying when the plane unexpectedly takes a nose dive. Read More

 I just finished reading a heartbreaking article in the May 30 issue of The New Yorker  (Annals of Mental Health, God Knows Where I Am: What Should Happen when Patients Reject their Diagnosis? by Rachel Aviv) which provides much food for thought both about the care provided for deeply troubled people and their civil rights in America today. Read More

Seven-year-old Jarrod was a classic bully. He hit and kicked other children at school when he didn't get what he wanted. He even bit one of his classmates for not giving him a toy. The principal and teacher at his school had been very patient because they knew that Jarrod's parents had recently divorced. Read More

The recent capture and killing of America's number one enemy is on everybody's lips. Children are undoubtedly hearing about it from their classmates and they cannot help noticing their parents watching the story on television. Read More