What I do for a living often involves asking dumb questions. For example, we all know our moods are usually affected by events. In fact, if we happen to notice we’re in a bad mood, the first thing we start to do, often unconsciously, is try to figure out what caused that bad mood. It’s not that it’s a bad …
Mood Disorders and Summer Nutrition – Arnrow
We recently wrote about healthy eating for people with mood disorders (original post can be viewed here). Today, we bring you some delicious and easy ideas to enjoy in this summer weather—well rather, July in San Francisco that so happens to be co-occurring with the hot and sunny climate in other places. Infused water Drinking infused water is a great and …
Be Mindful of Keeping Your Mind Full of Good – Arnrow
Experience-dependent neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to learn, adapt, and evolve to not only our experiences, but also, and perhaps more significantly, our reactions to those experiences. It is almost as if our brains can form habits, and the types of behaviors and patterns that it develops are dependent on how we choose to be. This suggests that the …
Wholeness: Overcoming the War Within – Arnrow
I feel like there is a war within us– an internal battle between the different parts of us, tugging and pulling for control and dominance. On one side is the brain— a soldier of logic and reason, commanded to evaluate all it comes in contact with, and to calculate corresponding plans of actions. It is enemy to, well, the other …
Hello!
Hello! My name is Arnrow and I am very much excited to be the new summer intern at Gateway Psychiatric Services. I am an incoming junior pursuing psychology at the undergraduate level at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. My first encounter with psychology was almost completely accidental, having just taken a psychology class in high school to simply …
Summer Intern 2014: Arnrow
Long time readers of this blog will recall that last year we had a wonderful contributor, Emma, who helped enliven our forum as well as creating a number of posts on the blog itself. She also set up the topics pages. This summer we have another college intern, Arnrow, who will be helping in the same way that Emma did …
A Healthy Diet
We are glad to have recently added a page to our “Topics” section that discusses a healthy diet and also reviews some information about nutritional supplements. This is a huge topic, and none of us are dietitians, but it is an important issue and so, with the caveat that we approach the topic from the standpoint of what helps people …
Skill Building for Psychosis
One of the very hard things about many psychiatric disorders, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, is that they often begin at a time that is critical to the development of many skills and abilities needed for successful adult life. Many years ago we visited a wonderful program in Atlanta developed for young people with schizophrenia called STARS. The program was …
Summer Vacation: Taking a Break from Therapy
Maybe because it’s summer, and everybody’s thinking about vacations, or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but we’ve been spending a lot of time talking with people these past two weeks about taking a break from treatment or drastically cutting back on treatment, etc. All of it has us wondering about how to think sensibly about these types of decisions. After …
Does Psychiatric Treatment Work?
How well do psychiatric treatments work? Aren’t psychiatric medications just placebos? Does psychotherapy really do anything? These are the kind of questions that mental health clinicians run into all the time. Dr. Maximilian Huhn and colleagues from the Munich Technical Institute (Huhn – reference 1) have conducted a major review of the data. They evaluated results from 852 clinical trials involving …
Hypomania and Sensory Experience
More than a decade ago, Dr. Suzanne Black, who occasionally writes posts on this blog, got me interested in the sensory experiences associated with hypomania.In our Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the only reference to these is under the heading of “distractibility.” And, indeed, sometimes people who are experiencing intense and profound sensory experiences everywhere they look and listen, may have trouble …
Seeing the Other – Kelsey
“I see you.” That is one of the many profound concepts in one of my favorite movies, Avatar. “I see you.” For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, “I see you,” is the greeting of the Na’Vi, which expresses a sense of being aware of being seen by another.* Whoa. To be seen by another person. To feel …
App that Predicts Mania
There are smartphone apps for monitoring your diet, your drugs, even your heart. And now a Michigan psychiatrist, Melvin McInnis, is developing an app he hopes doctors will someday use to predict when a manic episode is imminent in patients with bipolar disorder. Manic episodes can come with a dangerous mix of increased energy and impaired judgment. “We want to be able to …
Spring into Summer: Light and Sleep Changes
Many people have been noticing the very long days of late Spring and early Summer. There is more energy to get things done, although that energy can end up being challenged into anxiety and irritability if you aren’t careful and don’t get at least a few hours of sleep every night… I often think about my trips to Alaska a …
New Home – Redux
This past week, we spent another couple of days trying to figure out why the site was suddenly inaccessible for several long periods of time. Some of you may recall that we only recently moved to a new web hosting service and it was my expectation that this new service, with its dedicated server, would provide us with better responsiveness for the …
Soul Training – Lyndsey
One difficult aspect of living with bipolar disorder, especially when it is new, is that our ever changing moods make it difficult to keep up a regular and normal social life. After all, If you can’t get out of bed for 3 weeks on account of acute depression, it’s pretty hard to make new or keep existing commitments. In my …
Longevity and Having a Purpose in Life
Studies in older adults have suggested that having a sense of purpose in life can add years to longevity. Now researchers have taken a look at the question of whether these beneficial effects occur in younger people. The study looked at a group of 6163 people aged 20 to 75 and followed them for 14 years. They found that having …
Stress and Trauma as Risk Factors for Bipolar
I have long been interested in the relationship between traumatic experiences and bipolar disorder. A couple of years ago I gave a presentation at the University of California, San Francisco, Bipolar Disorder Clinic on the topic. I got interested in the issue because I noticed how many of the women in my clinic with bipolar disorder also had childhood PTSD. …
Children of Bipolar Parents – Risk of Having a Mood Disorder
One of the most common questions I am asked is, what are the odds, if I am bipolar, of my children having bipolar. Recently we ran across a research study that tries to answer this question. The Pittsburgh Bipolar Offspring study, directed by Boris Birmaher of the University of Pittsburgh, looked at the odds of developing psychiatric disorders in children of parents …
Specialized Treatment for Bipolar is More Effective
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. A recent article from the excellent Bipolar News Network, summarizes a study that showed that specialized treatment for bipolar was more effective than usual care and actually saved money (the cost savings from avoiding hospitalization more than paid for greater outpatient treatment costs). Patients who had been hospitalized for a first episode of mania were …