Word: mentally
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford; 287 pages), we now have a "legal drug culture" built around the widely accepted idea that feeling blue is an illness. Horwitz, dean of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers, and Wakefield, an expert on mental-illness diagnosis at New York University, agree that depression can have biological roots. But they persuasively argue that many instances of normal sadness--the kind that descends after you lose a job or get dumped--are now misdiagnosed as depressive disorder. They also point out that the human capacity...
...while it's tempting to blame our culture--fear of terrorists, too much caffeine, living by BlackBerry--there's a more straightforward explanation for the boom in dejection. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association published a new definition of depression in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--usually shortened to DSM--the compendium used by mental-health professionals to make diagnoses. The new definition was a radical departure from the old one, which had described "depressive neurosis" as "an excessive reaction of depression due to an internal conflict or to an identifiable event such as the loss...
...safer to have a broad definition so that no truly ill person slips through? Yes and no. Untreated mental illness can be serious, but misdiagnosis can also be harmful: a healthy individual might take unneeded drugs that have side effects, for instance. Also, a psychiatric diagnosis can be used against you in a divorce proceeding or disqualify you from, say, a cancer-drug trial...
...might want to return to a simple definition of mental illness offered by Aristotle: "If fear or sadness lasts for a long time, it is melancholia." In that case, see a doctor. But if your boyfriend just left you and you can barely get out of bed, don't assume you're ill. Your brain is probably doing exactly what it was designed...
...could play against any player in history, who would it be? -Simon Coakley, Stanford-le-Hope, England I'd choose [Bjorn] Borg. He had such an incredible mental approach to the game. He had ice in his veins, and I'd love to see what I could do against him. If I had to say, I suppose...