“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
Suppose somebody is a child psychiatrist? When I was a senior psychiatric resident I was approached by an attending psychiatrist to cover for him –that is, be available to his private patients– while he went away on vacation. It was a common practice. This courtesy...
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...
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...
Depends When your life hangs in the balance, you should not trust your doctor. There is too much at stake. If you are a defendant in a criminal trial confronting a life sentence, you should not trust your lawyer either. You need to get involved personally. You need to...
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...
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...
I read recently an explanation for yawning that is plainly wrong. The same idea has surfaced regularly over the years. Any idea, good or bad, is hard to kill. Yawning by this account is performed in order “to get more oxygen to the brain.” First of all, why should the...
The Cyclops ChildProbably every physician can think of one patient who affected him more than any other. The patient who has haunted me through the years was a child that I saw for only a little time at the very beginning of my career. I was an intern at a Catholic...
I treat very anxious patients. Many are afraid of germs. They avoid sick people, and they wash their hands innumerable times over the course of a day. Their children are not allowed to play with children who have been sick recently. They will not use public toilets....
There is a condition called generalized anxiety disorder, which isn’t really a disorder, but which describes people who seem to be worrying all the time. Some typical worries: that this mole on my arm may be malignant, that the children will be kidnapped on the way to...
There has been some controversy about whether anti-depressants are really effective. Some studies have shown that they are little better than a placebo. I think these results are explainable by the fact that anti-depressants are given sometimes when there was no...
I have been running a program at the Anxiety and Phobia Center for the last ten years for people suffering from health anxiety. These people represent a number of different diagnostic categories: hypocondriasis, somatization disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder...