“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
The Worry Wheel The start of health anxiety and the way it progresses When I first developed a program for the treatment of health anxiety, I sent out a letter to the physicians affiliated with White Plains Hospital informing them that we were offering a behavioral...
Books—and hoarding Owning valuable things –in fact, owning anything–exacts a price. When I was growing up, in a world without television– not to mention video games and cell phones– books were very important to me. There was radio too, of course; and I spent dinner...
People are different, and, in a way, what makes each of us different is the recollection we have of our lives. We remember ourselves in certain ways—having done particular things at particular times. If we were to develop amnesia, as is depicted sometimes in the...
All of the psychiatric illnesses can be defined by particular disturbances of thought, and feeling, and the behaviors associated with them. The characteristic speech of an acutely schizophrenic individual is often called “loosening of associations,” which reflects a...
The treatment of an idea. In order to recover from agoraphobia and panic disorder, only two things need to be learned: No one is ever trapped, truly, in any of the settings phobics dread, obviously not in restaurants or on a line at a bank, or standing about at a...
It Seems No One Ever Dies a Natural Death. Someone is always to blame. Some time ago a patient told me she was really angry at her brother for not taking their father to the hospital. “If he had got to the hospital in time, maybe they would have been able to save...
Why boasting is unpleasant I had a memorable experience a number of years ago. I ran into an acquaintance of mine who was standing on a street corner waiting for a red light to change. I had not seen him since I had graduated college ten years before. “Hey, Walter,” I...
Some peculiarities of the delusional state (The patients described below have been disguised.) In a way, everything about the delusional state is peculiar. An affected person (usually a paranoid schizophrenic) comes to believe that an outlandish series of...
Certain habits of mind are so common they are usually taken for granted, yet they can cause emotional distress and can contribute to the development of certain emotional disorders. Take, for example, the inclination some people have to be “very private.” Most people...
A Theory of Déjà vu and Jamais Vu. Every once in a while, for no obvious reason, some people experience distortions of perception. Some of these are named. Depersonalization, for example, is a sudden sense of disorientation – a queer feeling of not being oneself. It...
Most people have heard that winning a lottery does not usually bring happiness. In fact, there are reports of people’s lives being disrupted permanently by the sudden possession of very large amounts of money. Most of us think deep down that that kind of problem could...
The purpose of feelingsFeelings are often spoken of as if they are a thing. “Get rid of those negative feelings,” some people say, as if one could turn away from unpleasant feelings by an effort of will alone. Emotional responses, however, are obligatory. They are an...