We are instructed from a very early age to apologize when we have done something wrong. Why? What is the purpose of apologizing? It cannot undo the offense. Parents explain to their children that when they apologize, they acknowledge having done something wrong, and...
Family Matters Articles
So, You Finally Got Around to Calling
A mother’s lament In the typical way of human affairs, children grow up and become independent Being independent means having one’s own values and being able to express them no matter what others think. In the context of living with parents, it means being able to...
The Role of the Family in Treating the Very Depressed
In the treatment of the very depressed, the role of the family is more often defined in terms of what they ought not to do rather than what they should do. Certainly they ought not to quarrel with or preempt the authority of the treating psychiatrist. They...
How To Tell the Living From the Dead
Declaring someone “almost dead” is not good enough. When I was just entering my upper-class years in medical school, I found myself working on one of those very long, crowded wards they had at Bellevue Hospital in those days. One afternoon I finished my assignment...
Psychiatric Hospitalization vs. Treatment at Home
In the early days of civilization and for a very long time afterward, the mentally ill lived at home for the same reasons that everyone else lived at home: there was no place else to live. Certainly there were no institutions in which those so afflicted could be...
Caring For the Dying Patient
Patients who are near to dying are still alive Dying patients usually have all the emotional problems they have always had. The image of death growing up in front of them does not obliterate everything that went before. Money problems have not evaporated. Family...
The Dying Patient
Preventing things from going wrong Death is a fact of everyone’s life—not so much our own death, which is projected into some indefinite, unthinkable, future, but rather the death of others– of those people we care about. Usually as early as childhood many of us have...
Dangerous Sexual Practices
This anecdote appears in “Come One, Come All.” I wrote it as fiction, but the story is real. I read about it in The New York Times. The speaker is the gynecologist who works at the Woman’s Health Center. “Dr. Redden, I think you’ll be interested in this case. This is...
A True Story–But Very Strange
The advantages of fiction (I have followed my usual practice in this post of disguising the patient) There was a time a number of years ago when I had the occasion to treat just the sort of patient therapists like to work with, that is, she was intelligent, attractive...
Depression in Childhood and Adolescence
Most discussions of depression assume that all depressed people resemble each other. In many ways they do, especially when the depression is of psychotic degree. But in many other ways they do not. Not every depressed person complains of being sad. A depression may...
I Almost Forgot the Crystal Skulls
More psychic adventures in my family. In this week’s Skeptical Inquirer (Vol.37 No.3) there is a report of an archeologist suing the makers of the Indiana Jones movies for a piece of their profits because their movie, the plaintiffs claimed, is based on a...
First Sexual Experiences–and Menarche
Different elements of a sexual history. I glanced at a blog recently that made the case that first sexual experiences are always memorable and indicative of a future sexual adjustment. That would be interesting if it were so. A sexual history, like every other...