Word: mentally
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Before he was an accomplished psychologist, Steven Hayes was a mental patient. His first panic attack came on suddenly, in 1978, as he sat in a psychology-department meeting at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was an assistant professor. The meeting had turned into one of those icy personal and philosophical debates common on campuses, but when Hayes tried to make a point, he couldn't speak. As everyone turned to him, his mouth could only open and close wordlessly, as though it were a broken toy. His heart raced, and he thought he might...
...Hayes is correct, the way most of us think about psychology is wrong. In the years since Hayes suffered his first panic attacks, an approach called cognitive therapy has become the gold-standard treatment (with or without supplementary drugs) for a wide range of mental illnesses, from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. And although a good cognitive therapist would never advise a panic patient merely to try to will away his anxiety, the main long-term strategy of cognitive therapy is to attack and ultimately change negative thoughts and beliefs rather than accept them. "I always screw...
Hayes is often asked if acceptance isn't just a gimmick that would fail for those with serious mental illnesses. He usually responds by pointing to the studies in which ACT has been used successfully with psychotics. But one of the things that troubles me about ACT is the convenient plasticity that allows it to treat everything from schizophrenia to a chronic backache. Most psychologists slowly build research out from one or two disorders, but Hayes and his followers seem to be offering ACT as a sort of psychological Rosetta stone, a key for interpreting all interior events...
...time, in the 1990s, we seemed to think that curing mental illness was a matter of manipulating a couple of brain chemicals. But after decades of side effects and the recent debate over whether antidepressants carry suicide risk for teens, we have seen only marginal gains in public mental health. A 2002 study in Prevention & Treatment found that approximately 80% of the response to the six biggest antidepressants of the '90s was duplicated in control groups who got a sugar pill. So we may be ready for something different...
...pages of data, researchers are now all but convinced that by exercising their brains people can substantially reduce their risk of dementia. Ideally, regular intellectual stimulation would begin early in life and continue through the twilight years. But there's mounting evidence that a late-life surge in mental activity - taking up board games, crosswords, arts and craft - can help stave off the ravages of this dreadful illness...