Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain.
College life isn’t easy.
Steve, my patient, fancied himself a poet, first and foremost. Brilliant, yet sadly bedeviled by schizoaffective disorder — a condition somewhere between schizophrenia and bipolar — he feared he would die before his gift was discovered. “I think I’m dying,” he said every week. His poetry reflected this preoccupation. For example:
Katie Joy Crawford, 23, has struggled with anxiety for over a decade. She says there were times when it was debilitating and staying in bed seemed far easier than facing the real world.
In her new play, Amanda Seyfriend plays someone who gets drunk and has sex at a wedding.
A few days ago, I had a panic attack and I can safely say it is the worst one I have ever had. Panic attacks and anxiety, in general, are nothing new. A couple times a month, I will succumb to the anxiety that builds inside me. There are also anxiety triggers that hang over my head and surprise me from time-to-time. But the room spinning, fight or flight, lose consciousness type of panic attacks I thought were long in the rearview mirror. It’s good to know, even after all these years, anxiety can still surprise me.
Anxiety is not an easy to untangle and resolve emotion because its roots can run deep into your psyche. There are times when you’re feeling anxious and you simply can’t put your finger on the reasons behind it and yet other times when the culprit for its’ presence is known and yet you feel like there is nothing you can do to quiet it down or put a stop to it. Your emotions (anxiety) will dictate that you find a way right here, right now because otherwise things will get even worse (gravitating toward panic).
As civilized human beings, we like to console ourselves with visions of progress, illusory as that concept often proves to be. Perhaps we have not seen progress in the realms of literature and art (though some would dispute that claim), but surely science moves forward, and medicine too, insofar as it is a science rather than an art. In the developed world, at least, we now enjoy longer, and certainly more materially abundant if not culturally richer and happier lives.
When a pilot crashed a Germanwings plane into a mountainside in the French Alps last month, one word kept coming up over and over in the media coverage: depression. What did the airline know about the pilot’s mental health, and what was he required to tell them?
Mental illness remains highly stigmatized, even after celebrities like Brooke Shields, Mel Gibson and Robin Williams went public with their stories.