Tag: Psychiatry and Psychology
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“Hills Like White Elephants” and the collusion of non-communication
Clayton BakerRochester, New York, United States There is a particular type of dysfunctional communication that can occur between doctor and patient, a sort of a temporary folie-a-deux. This “collusion of non-communication” happens when a doctor-patient interview reaches a topic that one or both parties find particularly distasteful, frightening, or shameful. Seeking to avoid, or spare…
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A twice-told tale: Nabokov and Moore on mental illness and parents’ suffering
Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Mental illness casts a wide net, enmeshing patient, family, and doctors. When the patient is young, the main characters are usually parents, who struggle with love, guilt, fear, and despair. Yet families are often secondary, sometimes shadowy, characters in clinical accounts. Fiction allows parents to be the primary…
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Mood and anxiety disorders or a return to “neurosis”?
Brian SharplessPullman, Washington, United States Since the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)1, explicit recognition of the overlap between anxiety and depression markedly declined. However, a long historical tradition tracing its roots back to the ancient world (i.e. Greeks and Romans) viewed these two phenomena as…
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Heinz Lehmann and the dawn of psychopharmacology
Benjamin Chin-YeeToronto, Ontario, Canada In the spring of 1953 at the Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal, the psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann initiated the first trial of chlorpromazine in North America, treating “psychomotor excitement” in patients with diagnoses ranging from manic depression to schizophrenia.1,2 Within weeks, the drug proved a remarkable success: patients’ delusions, hallucinations and thought…
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Meaning and the cognitive default
Basil BrookeJohannesburg, South Africa Being human invariably involves a strong tendency to search for meaning in life. This search takes many forms; it can be a quest for psychological immortality/conscious afterlife, an intelligent, supernatural design of oneself, a symbolic meaning to life and natural events, a causal link between mortal behavior and the quality of…
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Portrayal of schizophrenia in movies
Akli HadidSouth Korea Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which patients experience irrational paranoid thoughts or simply affective flattening. The onset of the disease is usually around the age of twenty-one. Some 42% of patients tend to have their symptoms progressively disappear, 35% have an intermediate outcome, and 27% do poorly. Those from wealthy families…