“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
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...
The connection is sometimes illusory It is a commonplace that when bad things happen, people feel bad. Feeling depressed is just one of the many emotional states that constitute a reaction to the constantly varying conditions of our lives. We are at any one time...
A feat of imagination Dieting successfully does not mean simply losing weight—it means eating and exercising properly so that it is possible to maintain a proper weight indefinitely. By that standard few people diet successfully. Most people consider losing weight...
For the same reasons they lie to everybody else. (I have followed my usual practice in this post of disguising the patient.) Someone responded to a previous blog post by asking why her therapist suspected the things she told him about family experiences were not true....
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...
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...
How do you measure growth?It is the conviction of most psychotherapists that their efforts produce a significant effect. For one thing, patients report that they are being helped. However, clinical studies examining the benefits of psychotherapy have given ambiguous...
Helping those who have emotional problems The number of people living as patients in psychiatric hospitals has declined over the last forty years by more than one half, partly as the result of new antipsychotic drugs and as the result of new attitudes toward the...
Confrontation is the best way to deal with fear Agoraphobia and the panic disorder that provokes it is the most common and most severe phobia. Affected individuals are not so much afraid of particular circumstances, as they are afraid of their own feelings. They...
People who are phobic, paranoid, and obsessional—and everybody else Each of us comes to believe certain things about the world. We take for granted that our perspective is objective and accurate—whether it has to do with religious or political ideas, or simple facts,...
Only two things need to be learned Doctors do not like to talk about cure. Too many illnesses are remitting and relapsing—that is, they seem to go away only to return again at a future time. Psychiatric conditions in particular tend to be chronic. Besides, they...
Confronting fears is critical–as it is in the treatment of the other anxiety disorders. It is easy to set down in a few sentences the principles underlying the treatment of health anxiety, but implementing these principles in a practical program of treatment is not...