Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: psychiatry psychology

  • Geza Csath, in defense of interconnectedness

    Gerda KovacsAalborg, Denmark “I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.”– Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair Geza Csath, a Hungarian psychiatrist and writer, was born in 1887 and died in 1919. During his short life, he worked at the Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital in Budapest, produced…

  • “…One must imagine Sisyphus happy”

    Katerina DimaPreveza, Greece Ancient Greek mythology teems with stories of morality, despair, and the philosophy of the absurd. No story, however, had a greater impact on this young, impressionable medical student than the story of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a popular and prominent figure of Ancient Greece, the successful king of the city of Corinth. As…

  • She changed her mind

    Marlene BermanBoston, Massachusetts, United States Neuroscience is demonstrating that torment can be eliminated by altering one’s memories of the original circumstances responsible for the anguish. The changes occur when the old memories are retrieved, reappraised, and reconsolidated differently.1,2 Retrieving, Reappraising,and Reconsolidating Memories Our brain allows us to learn and then to recall events, feelings, perceptions,…

  • Emptiness Melancholia: depression sweet depression

    Camila MachadoMinas Gerais, Brazil The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.1—Andrew Solomon Vitality had seemed to seep away from me through the years, stopping me from feeling joy, sadness, affection, and love. I felt empty but somehow managed to continue living, insisting on existence. Everything seemed too much work. Instead of being thrilled…

  • The 1960s in North American psychiatry

    Mary SeemanToronto, Ontario, Canada When I graduated from medical school in 1960, an unprecedented wave of optimism was sweeping the field of psychiatry. Effective antipsychotic medication, the offspring of chlorpromazine,1 was clearing out mental asylums. New antidepressants, such as imipramine and its many progeny, had recently come on the market.2 Anxiolytics such as meprobamate promised…

  • Listening to the patient

    Marina MaffoniFrancesca DionigiPavia, Italy Alex was a smart thirty-nine year old man with drug-resistant lymphoma. In four years he had undergone two unsuccessful bone marrow transplants. That is all my senior psychologist tutor and I were told by the referring clinician, except that the patient himself had asked for psychological support. So we went to…

  • Medical murder

    Susan JacobAustralia Medical murder or clinicide is defined by the psychiatrist Robert Kaplan as the “unnatural death of multiple patients in the course of treatment by a doctor.”1 Medical murder must be distinguished from euthanasia in that patients do not request the termination of their life. It must also be differentiated from death resulting from…

  • Dr. Meadow’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy: The history and the controversy

    Nereida EsparzaChicago, Illinois, United States Munchausen syndrome is a severe psychiatric disorder described in the DSM-IV. In 1951 Dr. Richard Asher named the illness after Baron Munchausen (full name Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen, 1720–1797).1 The German-born baron served in the Russian army until 1750. On his return from the army he was known…

  • “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…