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 …
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 …
Mood and Food
Today’s post was inspired by Disorderly Chickadee’s blog. She has been in an unstable (irritable) mood but her post is about how proud she is of the fact that she has been losing weight. For some reason, several people we have been working with have also been feeling irritable and agitated, and using some of that energy to lose weight…It …
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 …
Tripolar Disorder
For a long time I have been trying to figure out how to convey to the people I work with the view of mental health professionals that a certain type of depression is really a kind of mania, called “mixed mania.” From an “objective” standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. A mixed state generates lots of energy and agitation. …
Be Helpful
We love today’s post from Just One Thing! (And yes, we have had several references to this site in the last few days… but he is starting the year by reviewing the best ideas on his site). And we felt compelled to put this post up today when we checked our email and found that today’s blog post from the …
Mary Poppins: Overcoming the Winter Months
What I most want to have available to me in the long winter months, to help me with my patients with bipolar and depression, is access to someone a lot like Mary Poppins. You may remember that Mary, played by Julie Andrews, was the incredibly cheerful nanny who transformed the unhappy and dysfunctional lives of the family she joined. What …
10% of Americans Suffered Childhood Sexual Abuse
Approximately 10 percent of American adults were sexually abused as children, according to a study reported in Comprehensive Psychiatry. They are more at risk of psychopathology and suicide attempts than are adults who were not sexually abused as children. This study fits with other evidence. The global prevalence of child sexual abuse has been estimated at 19.7% for females and 7.9% for males, based …
Silver Linings
We have heard interesting rumors about the new movie “Silver Linings Playbook” that is supposed to address some of the issues involved in living with moods in a way that avoids stigma. Last week we got this from the American Psychiatric Association News – “It has been a long time since a Hollywood movie actually seemed like it could help people suffering …
Feeling Already Full
A wonderful friend sent us a note that this post had been very helpful to him. It is, once again, from the Just One Thing site. The practice is called “Feel already full” and it is a perfectly timed reminder that so much of what we see in life (TV especially) is specifically designed to make us feel unhappy with …