Psychology Today

Better care for vets with PTSD, suicide prevention, getting the mentally ill out of jails: What enlightened person could possibly oppose any of these ideas?

What is surprising is that the Republican rightwingers see a “crisis” in the vast new interest in porn, now that sexual images can be streamed on smartphones.

Today, the chatter on personal devices is about depression, sometimes about suicidal thoughts. Young girls in particular are batting this stuff about on Facebook, and acting on it.

Our hearts go out to this sad, young man who is experiencing the symptoms of severe depression. He has somehow fallen between the cracks in the system of psychiatric care.

By almost every measure of mental health, the countryside is now more dangerous than the city.

Ever since the French poet of dissolution, Charles Baudelaire, described “the chaos of the living city” in 1857, the city has been associated with mental fragmentation and madness.

Estimating Spitzer’s place in history is largely a matter of assessing the impact of the DSM-3, and the revised version, DSM-3-R.

A psychiatric patient who throws a tray table has committed a criminal offense and may be the object of “lethal force.” Any concept that the symptoms of psychiatric patients may involve aggression and agitation – and should be the object of medical not police attention -- has been lost here.

At NIMH, Insel brought in a big new program, Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), to investigate the biological underpinnings of psychiatric illness. This was very progressive: moving the field off the dead center of psychotherapy (where the Freudian hand still lay heavy when Insel took over in 2002), and shifting laterally towards science and away from psychopharmacology...

The tragedy here is that, among that many symptoms of autism that are unresponsive to treatment, catatonic symptoms are highly responsive. Instead, many clinicians are still administering neuroleptics, which may make the patients worse rather than better. Medicine has the power to relieve illness, but switch a train onto the wrong track and it may just ignore the red flag

This is one of the big questions in psychology: When we experience sexual desires that are new to us, is it because our brains have just become activated for that particular desire, which slumbered latently all along?

Erotomania may mean the fixed false idea that someone is in love with you, and that she is prevented from declaring her love. This could be dismissed as a relatively harmless though annoying belief, except for the fact that erotomaniacs can turn vengefully upon the love object after perceiving themselves as rejected.

Nash was certainly delusional and evidently hallucinated as well. He filled the blackboards of Fine Hall at Princeton with indecipherable scribblings, and wandered about the campus in an apparent daze. He became known as “The Phantom of Fine Hall.”

To be clear, we have known since the early 19th century that there is a form of manic excitement, or “manic delirium,” that may end fatally.