“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
V An odd suicide When I was a senior psychiatry resident, it was common practice for the psychiatric attending physicians to ask the residents to cover their patients for them when they went on vacation. It was a reasonable arrangement. The psychiatrist would know...
Not all of these men and women are depressed. Many thousands of Americans kill themselves every year. It is said that for every successful suicide, there are ten men and women who attempt suicide. And for every one of those, there are ten who think of killing...
There are two medical conditions that come up very frequently in consideration of panic disorder. They are said variously to be confused with the disorder because of a similarity of symptoms or to be related to it because they occur together. They are reactive...
Violence is extremely common, violent crimes occurring literally in the hundreds of thousands every year. Individuals assault each other impulsively, almost casually, even those whom they love. The causes of violence are, consequently, the subject of much attention....
On a psychiatric ward. This is a trick that works every time. Imagine a patient on a psychiatric ward who has managed to obtain a knife and is menacing everyone with it. I have no trouble imagining this scene since I have found myself on a couple of occasions in the...
The stubborn nature of belief In the early 1960s, when I was trained, psychoanalysis had a death’s grip on the practice of psychiatry. All of the psychiatric disorders were explained as disturbances of childhood experience. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example,...
I developed an interest in phobias, and in agoraphobia in particular, in 1954, as the result of developing the condition myself. One day without any evident reason I became panicky. I had the feeling I was going to go crazy or scream or in some way lose control of...
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...
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...
What are people really afraid of? The Anxiety and Phobia Center of White Plains Hospital has been running a “fear of flying” clinic for many years along with programs to treat the other anxiety disorders, including social phobia and health anxiety. It is the only...
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...
Some suggestions. I am frequently asked if I can recommend a psychiatrist or a therapist in various locations, most recently in Des Moines and somewhere in Pakistan. Not only do I not know any psychiatrists in these places, I would not even feel confident making a...