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.
Susie Guckin, Reading-Fleming Intermediate School instrumental music teacher, recently released her first book, “The Camouflaged Heart” (Balboa Press; 2015) sharing her personal journey through traumatic brain injury, PTSD, trauma, and the encouragement and wisdom she learned from her experiences volunteering with the wounded warriors of the local U.S. Army base.
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.
I’m in a booth with a computer program called Ellie. She’s on a screen in front of me.
Shawna Wingert is used to preparing for the worst when she flies with her 12-year-old son, who has autism, sensory processing issues and an anxiety disorder.
Pianist and guitarist Tom Sweitzer will perform a free concert on May 24 to thank his hometown of Altoona for supporting his early education, which he said, has led him to a successful career in music therapy.
A small study has found that Naltrexone, a drug used to treat alcoholism, effectively decreased methamphetamine-addicted patients’ desire for the drug and the pleasure they derived from using it.
Christina Bruni seems to have it all. She owns her own co-op, has a gym-toned body and striking good looks, and a career as a librarian. She’s fit and active.
Matty Walls is an only child who’s always been open with his parents, telling them everything. That changed when his grandfather died in January.
Researchers are increasingly investigating the idea that mood disorders may fall along a spectrum, rather than comprise distinct, unrelated diagnoses. And now, two new studies reveal further links between bipolar disorder and depression.
We might think we have a basic understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD: Soldiers in battle see things they’d like to forget, but years later combat memories come back to haunt them. That’s the received wisdom.
In January 2012, two weeks after my discharge from a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, I made a plan to die. My week in an acute care unit that had me on a suicide watch had not diminished my pain.
The statistics on teen suicide are incredibly sobering. According to the CDC, an average of 8 percent of American teens will attempt suicide every year. It’s the second leading cause of death for children and youths aged 10 to 24.