Depression

There's a big debate going on in the mental health world. Right now, if someone is grieving following the loss of a loved one, feelings and experiences associated with depression are considered a normal part of the grief process. So, a person can experience sleeplessness, sadness, or crying spells and not be labeled as experiencing depression. Read More

Depression and heart disease frequently travel together. This common observation has generated the myth that depression is "normal" in the heart patient. Buying into this concept, many doctors ignore a heart patient's depression, focusing only on the cardiac problem. This is a mistake.

Two leading health problems 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

The television program, 60 Minutes, recently addressed the volume of research on the lack of efficacy of anti-depressant medications. This research began over a decade ago and has shown that anti-depressant medications are not much more effective than placebo (sugar pill). In fact on 60 Minutes, Dr. Read More

DSM-IV-TR clearly draws a distinction between "normal" and pathological bereavement. As it should. When does a "normal grief reaction" become a debilitating, prolonged and potentially life-threatening mental disorder? Read More

I am in the first few weeks of talking about my new book Rethinking Depression and its publication coincides with the efforts of the mental health labeling task force to re-label grief as "depression." I'll say more about that re-labeling obscenity in a moment. Read More

Whitney Houston was more than a voice, a face, and a lithe body spangled in starlight. If nothing else, she was a deeply emotional woman, with outsized feelings that often seemed to get the better of her. And she was mortal, as her recent death in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton showed all too clearly. Read More

The storm of opposition to DSM 5 is now focused on its silly and unnecessary proposal to medicalize grief. To paraphrase Voltaire, normal grief is not 'Major', is not 'Depressive,' and is not 'Disorder.' Grief is the normal and necessary human reaction to love and loss, not some phony disease. Read More

Last summer I went to a "life extension" conference at Cambridge University in the UK. Scientists from around the world had descended on this small English city to discuss ways of making immortality a reality...it struck me that the scientists at the conference had missed one of the most obvious ways of extending human life—mindfulness meditation. Read More