Slate has a post by Molly Pohlig titled “Dating While Mentally Ill: There is no good time to tell a guy I like about my condition:”
My mother thinks I should keep my mouth shut as long as possible. Therapists are trained not to tell you exactly what to do, no matter how much I ask. I’m sure that self-help books are very helpful for some people, but I never make it much past the table of contents. I have seen dating websites for the mentally ill, and although I’m sure there is blessed relief in a partner who knows what you’re going through from the get-go, I don’t think matching us up is a good idea. One of you needs to be able to get out of bed every morning and persuade the other to do the same. And as I know from dating a fellow depressive, I ironically have little patience for it.
Nature has an article titled “Psychological treatments: A call for mental-health science:”
Part of the problem is that for many people, psychological treatments still conjure up notions of couches and quasi-mystical experiences. That evidence-based psychological treatments target processes of learning, emotion regulation and habit formation is not clear to some neuroscientists and cell biologists. In our experience, many even challenge the idea of clinical psychology as a science and many are unaware of its evidence base. Equally, laboratory science can seem abstract and remote to clinicians working with patients with extreme emotional distress and behavioural dysfunction.
The NYT has an article “Examining the Growth of the ‘Spiritual but Not Religious:’”
“Spiritual but not religious.” So many Americans describe their belief system this way that pollsters now give the phrase its own category on questionnaires. In the 2012 survey by the Pew Religion and Public Life Project, nearly a fifth of those polled said that they were not religiously affiliated — and nearly 37 percent of that group said they were “spiritual” but not “religious.” It was 7 percent of all Americans, a bigger group than atheists, and way bigger than Jews, Muslims or Episcopalians.
npr has a post titled “The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress:”
In the mid-1950s, two American cardiologists — Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman — created the idea of the Type A personality.
Their argument, essentially, was that there existed in America an entire class of people who lived lives so full of stress and pressure that their bodies were especially prone to disease, particularly heart attack. The doctors published a study that claimed the coronary disease rate for men with Type A personality was twice as high as other men.
This idea of a special driven and stress-sensitive subset of personality really captured the American imagination.
The New Statesman has an article titled “This won’t hurt a bit: the cultural history of pain:”
Myths about the lower susceptibility of certain patients to painful stimuli justified physicians prescribing fewer and less effective analgesics and anaesthetics. This was demonstrated by the historian Martin Pernick in his work on mid-19th-century hospitals. In A Calculus of Suffering (1985), Pernick showed that one-third of all major limb amputations at the Pennsylvania Hospital between 1853 and 1862 had been done without any anaesthetic, even though it was available. Distinguished surgeons such as Frank Hamilton carried out more than one-sixth of all non-military amputations on fully conscious patients.
(The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers by Joanna Bourke.)
