An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. …we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. Sigmund Freud: The […]
Finally, the curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naïvely, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it — the present, that is to say, must have become the past — before it can […]
In 1973, in the early days of preparing to lead the group that would produce the DSM-III, Dr. Robert Spitzer decided that homosexuality would be removed from the list of psychiatric diagnoses in the coming manual – a contraversial decision that had a major impact on our culture but remained a focus of debate for […]
Are future psychiatric treatments doomed? Be careful what you ask for…you just might get it. NEI Blog Neuroscience Education Institute by Stephen Stahl August 23, 2011 Nobody likes drug companies these days. Worse than tobacco companies and big oil companies! Supposedly they have ruined CME and have corrupted psychiatric experts as consultants, lecturers and research […]
06/03/2011 Psychiatry: Where are we going? 04/20/2012 The Future of Psychiatry (= Clinical Neuroscience) Having noticed last night that Dr. Tom Insel, Director of the NIMH, had reproduced last year’s post-APA blog post this year a couple of weeks before the APA Meeting, I went to bed. This morning, I had a spontaneous wakening thought. What the […]
I had a strong feeling of déjà vu when I was writing about today’s blog by NIMH Director Tom Insel [not for me to say…]. It’s because it’s almost the same as one he wrote in June last year after the APA Meeting. I blogged about it [one of those people…] right after Christmas and […]
[click the graphic to link to the original] Sometimes, the best course of action when confronted with something very large is not to react quickly – to place it squarely on the front burner, but refrain from turning on the heat for a while and let the mind work on it – see what bubbles […]
The Future of Psychiatry (= Clinical Neuroscience) NIMH Director’s Blog by Thomas Insel April 20, 2012 Last week a short piece in the British medical journal, The Lancet, described an “identity crisis” in psychiatry. In the U.K., the number of medical students choosing psychiatry has dropped more than 50 percent since 2009 and over the […]
…you haven’t heard Dudamel
Back in the 1980s when I was trying to adapt to the arrival of the new DSM-III psychiatry, I was told that the new brain scanners were going to revolutionize psychiatry by finding the physiologic basis for mental diseases. I didn’t know how that was going to happen, but we’re still hearing the same thing […]