Word: mentally
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...meditation is nothing other than focused awareness. Although it can be used as a relaxation technique, I find it most valuable as a method of restructuring the mind, breaking habitual patterns of thought and creating seeds of balance to oppose erratic mood swings. Over time it can provide great mental-health benefits: relief from ordinary anxiety and depression, better rest and sleep, and increased resistance to disturbing influences on emotional equilibrium. Meditation has also proved quite valuable in preparing patients for surgery (see following story...
...actually liked jokes--in fact, he wrote a book about them, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. But he probably wouldn't have liked that one. Freudian psychoanalysis was one of the great innovations of the 20th century, and only 50 years ago, it was a mainstay of mental-health care. But since then it has gone from a medical and cultural institution to the punch line of a mildly dirty joke told by psychiatry residents. The members of the American Psychoanalytic Association today treat fewer than 5,000 patients in the U.S. How did the treatment Freud called...
...forced to update his theories to compete with new drugs and new therapies, even if it means using methods that would have been unthinkable to their patriarch. At the same time, post-Freudian psychotherapists are figuring out that the old master still has something to offer the science of mental health: an understanding of the human mind and its many malfunctions that's richer, fuller and more exciting than anything invented since...
...what if antidepressants like Prozac were one day made completely free of side effects and served only to elevate mood? Would there be an objection to prescribing them for the entire nation? Every psychiatrist I spoke with still answered "probably." Some see SSRIs as a kind of mental shortcut that relieves patients of the need to work through their problems. Others fear that a nation on Prozac would miss the inherent value of struggle and strife. Dr. Kramer thinks there may be an intrinsic virtue in what he calls the "unmodified personality." Although this month the FDA approved Prozac...
...hope of finding a place in modern mental-health care, however, its practitioners are trying to change with the times. One way they're doing that is by dropping the austere, formal pose of the classic Freudian analyst. "The image of Sigmund Freud sitting there smoking on his pipe is nothing like the modern 21st century analyst," says Kerry Sulkowicz, chairman of the committee on public information at the American Psychoanalytic Association. In modern psychoanalysis, that formal reserve is disappearing, and the analyst's personality comes much more into play in treatment. "The process is far more transparent today," says...