Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Psychiatry and Psychology

  • Rage against the machine

    Kaitlin KanVillanova, Pennsylvania, United States It was almost as if the neuromodulation clinic was the machine itself. The entire ward was U-shaped, with each arm housing preparation and recovery and the treatment suite nestled in the middle. Each patient was scheduled to the moment; nurses were on a constant cycle of ushering in and wheeling…

  • Enlightenment from Sherlock Holmes on COVID-19 associated perilous boredom

    Daniel GelfmanIndianapolis, Indiana, United States Boredom can useful. It can motivate people to do great things. It can also be dangerous by increasing the risk of depression and the risk of participation in unhealthy activities.1 It is an emotional state of weariness through lack of interest that can result in the “pursuit of novel (even negative)…

  • Snapped by Snapchat: Social media and adolescents

    Ganga PrasanthAustin, Texas, United States When was the last time you checked in with social media? An hour ago? Thirty minutes? Maybe ten? Social media plays a large role in modern society. Humans have an innate drive to belong to groups and take part in social interactions; and a sense of belonging can be almost…

  • The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes

    JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…

  • Trauma stewardship

    Laura LipskyConnie BurkSeattle, Washington, United States This article was excerpted and adapted from Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others © 2009 Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. For more information about the book and this work, please visit the Trauma Stewardship website. “Are you sure all this trauma work hasn’t…

  • Géricault’s art of insanity

    Caitlin MeyerScotland “Now I am disoriented and confused. I try in vain to find support; nothing seems solid, everything escapes me, deceives me. Our earthly hopes and desires are only vain fancies, our successes mere mirages that we try to grasp,” scrawled Théodore Géricault in a letter to his friend Dedreux-Dorcy in 1810.1 A master…

  • Screenwriting: psychiatry in reverse

    Stephen PottsEdinburgh, United Kingdom Introduction The subject matter of medicine is inherently dramatic. Decisions taken by professionals who are highly skilled, but still human and therefore flawed, are applied to suffering patients in situations of pressure and can have radically diverse outcomes: life or death; disability or cure: a healthy baby born to a healthy…

  • The psychiatrist in literature

    Solomon Posen Good girls didn’t go to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists were people who testified in court on behalf of murderers or who nannied film stars. They were themselves charlatans, ratbags, sex-obsessed, evil and/or mad (Coombs 1990: 26). Within three years of graduation some 5% of doctors emerging from British medical schools elect to become psychiatrists and…

  • Sectioned

    Shaili JainMenlo Park, California, United States Liverpool, Great Britain, 1999 In 1999, during my residency in Liverpool, England, I had the experience of observing a supervising psychiatrist make a home visit to a severely mentally ill patient and arrange for her involuntary hospitalization, a process referred to in England as sectioning.1 I was greatly impressed…

  • Uncle and nephew: Alcohol-related dementia

    Sergei JarginMoscow, Russia This essay is a composite of several stories published by different authors on the subject of alcohol induced dementia. It concerns two men, an uncle and his nephew. The uncle was more muscular than the nephew. The nephew had started binge drinking at the age of twelve and had obviously damaged his…