New Intern

Hello all, My name is Emma Swayze, and I am excited to report that this summer I will be interning for Dr. Forster. I am currently a junior at Boston College as a Psychology B.S. pre-med student. I plan to one day go to medical school in the hopes of becoming a psychiatrist. I have a particular interest in mood …

New Intern!

I am very pleased to announce that we have hired Emma Swayze as our intern to work on enhancing the quality of this blog. Emma is an undergraduate at Boston University who is majoring in psychology and planning on applying to medical school in order to become a psychiatrist. She will be working with me (starting in three weeks) to …

Disclosure

I finally got around to posting the interview with Dr. Cannon Thomas about relationship and communication issues. This interview was a response to the discussions on the forum that suggested that a very important topic for readers of this blog was when and how to talk about having a mood disorder with others. Re-reading the interview I found myself feeling …

Mental Health at the Exploratorium

I was intrigued to see that the newly reopened Exploratorium is hosting a temporary exhibit entitled The Changing Face of Normal devoted to exploring how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has changed over time and the various implications of psychiatric diagnosis for what we call “normal.” There is an interesting interview in the Mental Health Matters series that is …

Relationship Problems – Get Solutions

I  am happy to give readers of this blog an opportunity to get answers to problems they may be having with relationships or, more generally, communication with others. This Monday I’m going to be interviewing Cannon Thomas,  a psychologist who is an expert in communication issues, especially as it relates to people with mood disorders. I will of course be …

Forum Technical Problems

For some reason, this week, when I have tried to access the discussion forum, I have been unable to do so, using my Google Chrome web browser. I know that earlier this week, there were a lot of problems with Internet access generally because of an ongoing war between spammers and an anti-spam service, but I am not sure if …

MoodSurfing Forum – Reviews

Thank you to all members of our discussion forum who responded to my request for feedback. It was very helpful. By and large people felt that the new version of Bublaa – which we use to host the forum – was working alright (aside from the awkwardness around setting up a Bublaa account and then requesting membership in the MoodSurfing …

Recruiting Summer Intern

MoodSurfing.com is recruiting for a summer intern to help with – * Creating content for this website * Miscellaneous administrative work * Editing and updating content from this site in order to publish the book version of MoodSurfing by the end of this year, or the beginning of next.  The ideal candidate will have a strong background in psychology, a …

Conversations

I am glad to let you know that I just set up the first of what I hope to be a series of interviews with experts of interest to readers of this blog. I am very much indebted to Dr. Descartes Li for his willingness to be the first participant. Please let me know your thoughts (peter@gatewaypsychiatric.com). I am also …

Website Problems

One of our very alert readers noticed that the links to Amazon that should allow you to buy books are not working. I tried in a short period of time to fix the problem but it looks as though this is a project that is going to take a few hours, and I don’t see it happening until February 18th …

Idea Map Redux

I just wanted to call your attention to a redo of the site map which we have located on a page called “idea map” to indicate that we have tried to organize the keywords into something that will be useful for finding the topic you are interested in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the grand idea that I …

Update for February

Well last night was a lesson in how much time you can spend on the computer without accomplishing very much! Spent the entire night trying to figure out a better way of making a map of the topics in the posts. The result (which doesn’t work yet) is on the page entitled “Map of Ideas”… it is a Mind Map …

Changes

Sometimes you take a very long and arduous journey and end up right back where you started, only with a new appreciation for what you left behind. This is the story of our forum… After spending many hours working with a developer to come up with a new forum for this site, and then, discovering that installing the new forum …

January 2013 Update

It’s probably time for another update about this blog and where it’s heading. Many of you may have noticed that the promised upgrade of our forum never happened.  As I noted previously this is because the project turned out to be much more complicated than I thought and the work that has already been done on it suggests that the …

Forum Update

This is yet another update on our project to improve the discussion forum for the website.  After much more work than any of us anticipated, there is a working model for a new forum that will provide a great deal more functionality than our old Bublaa based forum. However, redoing the forum involves making changes to the rest of the …

Happy Winter Solstice

For those of us in the northern hemisphere this is a day well worth celebrating. Today marks the shortest day of the year. Or, to put it another way, from here until summer every day will be a little bit longer, there will be a little bit more light, and eventually the days will get warmer and we will have …

No News

That is right, today’s post is about the lack of news… how silly is that? No news is an update on the promised changes to our forum, which has slowed down quite a bit since I announced that we were going to be transitioning to a different “platform” (a different WordPress application). Since then I have been busy trying to …

Thank you

We have gotten a couple of thought provoking requests for new content, but the combination of an extremely busy week and the desire to do a good job replying has meant that we haven’t finished the job of writing the posts. Nevertheless, we want to thank those subscribers who sent us requests. And to reiterate our intention to answer every …

Forum Update

Update– Our Forum has been gradually picking up steam, but the current setup, using Bublaa, has been difficult to administer. We are considering making a change to a system hosted by WordPress (the folks who host this site) called BuddyPress. If you have thoughts about this plan please let us know. If we do make the switch the Forum will …

Problems

We have begun to think of 2013. What does the future hold for this blog? Next year we plan to take the content from this site, revise it, add to it, organize it and make it the basis for a book. Then we will start working on a MoodSurfing app. Meanwhile, we really need your input in order to make …