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 …
Compulsions, Addictions and Secrecy
I got an urgent call yesterday from somebody that I’ve been seeing for several years. His fiancee had just left him. They had been having problems for several months, problems mostly rooted in his ambivalence about commitment. She went on his cell phone and found evidence that he had been having flirtatious conversations with seven different woman over the last …
Small Rewards
A young woman who was scheduled to go on a big trek in the Himalayas was not doing the training she needed to in order to have a good experience. She had been depressed for the last few months and this was probably a manifestation of that mood. She told me that she felt she “should be doing much more.” …
Fish Oil Update
Since so many people with bipolar and depression take fish oil we thought we would pass on some information in a summary form from Consumer Labs. The full information is available if you subscribe. Consumer Labs is the only source of reliable information about supplements (the only place that does any testing) and if you take supplements we strongly encourage …
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 …
Creative Tension
I was inspired to write today’s post after watching a video sent out by a colleague as her “Valentine’s Day gift” to a group of mental health professionals interested in women’s issues. The video was from the TED series (strongly recommended) and had to do with the challenge of having a long-term passionate relationship. The author was a delightful, French …
A Protest
So many of us have to deal with things that are not fair – depression, unsupporting spouses, financial reversals, weight gain, etcetera, it can be tempting to launch a protest of some kind against the unfairness. These protest actions don’t have to be obvious at all, but they can have powerful effects, nonetheless. A few women recently told me, “I …
Hot Button Issues in a Relationship
Dealing with a partner with emotional or psychological issues is tricky. We spent some time today trying to figure out an approach that would work for one woman and her partner. This is what we came up with. It may help you if you are navigating in turbulent waters in your relationship. The link will take you to the video …
Myths of Weight Loss
In a recent article published in the the New England Journal of Medicine, David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, wrote a summary of what is definitely known and what is not known about obesity and its treatment. We thought that we would add a summary of this important and controversial …
Season Specific Interventions
One of the challenging things about bipolar moods is the constant process of shifting priorities and directions that is involved in “moodsurfing”. A young man we’ve been working with for a couple of years has a very seasonal pattern to his moods. Most of the time, the focus of our work is trying to help him emerge from a constant …
Needing to be Perfect
The need to be perfect is one of the “dangerous ideas” that can destroy a life. It often comes from the fear of abandonment that all of us have, and which can be easily activated in childhood by a mismatch in personality with one’s parent. A wonderful, smart, attractive, funny, energetic woman talked with us about her experience of this. …
Drug Companies
This blog has mostly not dealt with questions related to medications for treating mood disorders. When we looked around to see what was out there on the Internet, it seemed to us that there was no dearth of information about medications. The problem was finding reliable information about non-medication approaches to living with moods. This morning I met with an …
Mistrust in Action
I was talking to one of my clients, a very bright and wonderful woman, mother of a delightful young girl, and usually one of my favorite people. This visit, however, I began to experience the cycle of mistrust. When she came in I was in a good mood, I smiled and said hello. She looked serious. The last time we …
WorkSurfing
The New York Times recently published an intriguing article entitled “Relax, You Will Be More Effective.” It arrived at just the right time. Preparing for an upcoming vacation had made me particularly hectic. And then, while I was on vacation and writing this post, I got a blog post from MoodScope which was devoted to the importance of taking regular …
Trickster Brain
If you want to figure out if something is true or not, you’re probably better off not going to a psychiatrist. Therapists really have no greater ability to decipher what the truth is than anyone else. On the other hand, if you go to see a decent, “good enough” therapist, with enough experience working with people, he or she might …
What If It Works?
For a number of years after I first got started in psychiatry I wrestled with the dilemma of what to do when someone with severe, disabling depression came in for an evaluation, seemed to be an excellent candidate for treatment with an anti-depressant, but was completely preoccupied with potential adverse effects and focused almost entirely on all of the negative …
The “Pause” Button
Do you know the feeling of desperate urgency in a conversation with a close friend or romantic partner? The sense that you have to defend yourself from attack, or make a very important point? This feeling is often a signal that it is a good time to use the “pause” button in the conversation. The “pause” button is a previously worked out …
Stigma and Psychiatry
I ran across an article written by a columnist for the New York Times a couple of days ago about what the columnist felt was psychiatry’s “overreaching” (saying that some people who are bereaved may also have a major depression). The article made reference to Michel Foucault’s view that psychiatry is essentially all about making moral judgments on behalf of …
Give Love
We really liked the recent post from Just One Thing on the practice of “giving love.” It resonated with research on how helping others (altruism) improves your mood, and also on the data that shows that one of the most effective antidotes for depression is to systematically try to act more in line with your deepest values. The post is …
Valentine’s Day Gift
I have been thinking a lot about Valentine’s Day, how it can become such a burden if one is single, or bereaved, and trying to figure out a way out of that bind. For years I did not lake the day at all, so I can certainly empathize. I came up with kind of an odd idea, and put together …