If someone suddenly collapsed and appeared to be having a heart attack, you wouldn’t just walk on by, right? You’d at least call 911. You’d likely stay with the person while the ambulance was coming. And if you were trained, you might even start CPR. Chances are that human decency would motivate you to do something.
The brains of children who suffer clinical depression as preschoolers develop abnormally, compared with the brains of preschoolers unaffected by the disorder, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
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?
Mental health on TV has been enjoying a quiet transformation in recent years, and in 2015, the change grew louder. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is using a musical format to highlight the complexities of anxiety and depression.You’re the Worst’s Gretchen Cutler got one of the more interesting and accurate representations of depression on TV. BoJack Horseman’s bright, silly universe belies its title character’s depression and substance abuse. Where depictions on TV were once almost exclusively demeaning and dismissive, many now feel nuanced and compassionate.
When soldiers are caught in an explosion, the blast releases intense vibrations. These pressure waves bombard — and damage — tissues throughout their bodies. Most of those tissues will heal with time. But effects on the brain can be severe and long lasting. That damage is called traumatic brain injury, or TBI for short. Scientists still aren’t exactly sure what goes on inside the brain to create TBI. But if they could figure it out, they might be able to help prevent it. One research team suspects those pressure waves create bubbles in the brain. And their new data show that if they do, such bubbles could cause the types of damage that could lead to TBI.
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.
A business student from China who said a bout with depression led to his expulsion for academic reasons has become the face of a labor-driven push for better mental health care at Yale University.