Category Archives: Anxiety

The successes and tragedies faced by Mariel Hemingway’s family have played out in the public eye, for better or worse.

We’re all familiar with Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens’ classic has been retold in many ways. The tale of the miser poring over his ledger, unaware and uncaring of the misery around him, touches something deep inside each of us, as we see his cold heart transformed by the visitation of three spirits.

Shows such as Jessica Jones and Mr Robot changed the way mental illness and depression are depicted onscreen, but are labels such as ‘sadcom’ helpful – or do they oversimplify the situation?

Philosophers and literary scholars can choose to interpret facts within “the most convincing perspectives, assumptions and causal frameworks,” as Harriet A. Washington explains in the opening chapter of her latest book, Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We Catch Mental Illness. Hard scientists, she says, don’t have the same luxury. They’re bound by a “shared overarching theory,” a worldview that the physicist Thomas Kuhn called Weltanschauung, meaning “what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” Biologists couldn’t embrace evolutionary theory, for example, without abandoning creationism.

As Americans debate how the country should respond to gun violence, they should not lose sight of the biggest category of firearm deaths: suicides. About two-thirds of people killed by guns, or 20,000 a year, kill themselves.