CPB Classic: Psychiatric Medication, Suicide, and Morality

"Now do you understand why you stay awake all night, horrified that you are wasting your life?"

An assortment of mental health related posts, from May 2013.


Nothing is funny to a psychiatrist...


In my experience, patients are often too eager to attribute positive treatment gains to pharmacological effects. The psychological effects of medication are especially clear when patients report significant improvement within a day or two after starting SSRIs, or after taking homeopathic doses of their prescribed medications, or when they say that they "only take my Wellbutrin when I'm having a bad day."


Lost in Medication


Some psychiatrists seem to be more effective than others, and their patients tend to do better whether or not the patient is receiving active or placebo medication.


The Lethality of Loneliness


This is one of the best psychology-related magazine articles that I have encountered in a long while. It is well worth reading by anyone interested in the field. The scope is remarkable: from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann to the biology of stress to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics to MRI studies to Romanian orphans to Harlow's and Suomi's monkeys.


More Americans die by suicide than in car crashes


"The number of deaths caused by suicide has risen precipitously in the last decade, surpassing those caused by car crashes and even some of the most fatal diseases, according to a government report released Thursday."






The moral burden of war


"Soldiers know all too well how much killing — mostly of civilians — goes on in war. Congratulations make them feel that people back home have no idea what happens when a human body encounters the machinery of war.


...the obscenity of war is not diminished when that conflict is righteous or necessary or noble. And when soldiers come home spiritually polluted by the killing that they committed, or even just witnessed, many hope that their country will share the moral responsibility of such a grave event.

Their country doesn’t."


"Finding our way through is what we are called to do."


A spiritual response to the Newtown elementary school mass murder.