“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
To believe or not to believe: that is the question I remember, when I was a kid, listening to a radio program in which a man who had started a movement to dress up farm animals was being interviewed. The position he took was that cows standing around with their udders...
Different kinds of depression Speaking to patients about depression is difficult because the word depression is used in different ways. One commonly speaks of being depressed when disappointed or frustrated. It is a universal feeling, immediately understood by...
The concept of physical illness is readily understood: the body becomes infected or inflamed, or grows abnormally, or is affected in any number of ways, all of which can be studied conventionally with laboratory tests or under a microscope. But a mental illness is...
A caution against being too hopeful. It is natural in the face of a calamity to set out to prevent it happening again. “Do something,” people will demand. But sometimes it is not clear exactly what can or should be done. If nothing useful can be done, there is...
The particular incident I want to tell about took place in the first month of my psychiatric residency, a very long time ago. But in order to make my reaction understandable, I have to go back even further, to the time when I was in college. I developed a panic...
A colleague complained to me a few days ago about his office. He was troubled by plumbing that was making some gurgling noises and by the sounds of construction from outside the window. I cheered him up by telling him about the time I had The Worst Office in the...
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...
I always feel amused (when I don’t feel annoyed) by therapists of one sort or another telling people to “trust their instincts.” The truth is, people should not trust their instincts– if instincts refer to their immediate perceptions and/or their judgment. The reason...
Another attempt to make psychiatric diagnosis meaningfulRunning in placePsychiatrists are about to come up with the fifth iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 18 years after DSM 4. This important book is a compilation of various...
Small changes make big differencesPsychotherapy is sometimes portrayed grandly as an attempt to change personality– personality being no less than the sum of an individual’s feelings, thoughts and behavior, which together have grown up, in turn, out of the sum of that...
The wish to behave ethically taken to an extreme.Evolution seems to push pack animals (including human beings) in opposite directions. Individuals are rewarded for behaving aggressively and selfishly with a heightened likelihood of success, namely, a greater chance of...
In a previous blog I distinguished between different kinds of depression and indicated that there are certain kinds of depression that I would not want to treat with anti-depressants. Someone who has just been jilted can become very sad and depressed, but this...