11/26/07 A searing account of life with schizophrenia

• Most of us have never had to live inside our heads as all hell is breaking loose. We've never faced the terror of falling apart, of totally losing our grip on reality. We've never experienced the horror of hearing strange voices tell us to do terrible things. Most of us, in other words, have never had schizophrenia, one of the most common and most severe forms of mental illness. Elyn Saks has.

06/03/03 - Brain Scanning and OCD

• The sophisticated science of brain scanning may be on the brink of revolutionizing the intuitive art of psychiatry, one of the few domains left in medicine in which a doctor’s educated guess is still the most common way to figure out what’s wrong. Sure, brain scanning is still too young a science to be used for routine diagnosis of the most common psychiatric ills. But it is already proving invaluable in understanding the underlying abnormalities in a wide range of psychiatric disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, anxiety and depression.

05/06/03 - "Cutting" - Understanding Self-Mutilation…

• Years ago, Boston University psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk tried a simple experiment to understand one of the most disturbing, and bizarre, of all psychiatric disorders: self-mutilation, or more simply, cutting. He asked his cutters, mostly young women, to come see him when they felt the urge to scratch, slash or burn themselves. When they came, he asked them to put their hands in ice water. They were able to keep their arms buried in ice much longer than normal people, he found, because they didn’t feel the pain.

04/22/03 - Meditation and the Brain ....?

• For decades, open-minded Westerners - patients and doctors alike - have been touting the medical benefits of meditation, an ancient Eastern practice that comes in hundreds if not thousands of different flavors but consists basically of quieting the mind through moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness.

07/17/01 - When Illness Tests Marriage Vows

• Several years ago, Dr. Michael J. Glantz, a brain cancer specialist, was struck by what appeared to be an extraordinary number of divorces and separations among his patients, who had primary brain tumors that were expected to kill them in 15 months

12/06/99 - E-therapy is hardly a bargain

• We've got e-commerce, e-banking, e-pharmacy and of course, e-mail. So why not e-therapy?

06/21/99 - Clues but no answers on schizophrenia

• As a high school kid, Moe Armstrong had lots going for him. ``We were poor people,'' he says, but he was captain of the football team in Bushnell, Ill., and with his high hopes for a military career, was clearly his parents' ``dream.'' While serving in Vietnam, however, Armstrong, now 55 and living in Cambridge, says he ``cracked up.'' He heard ``rustling and whistling sounds,'' then voices. He had visual hallucinations, too, but thought he was just ``nervous because of the war.''

05/31/99 - Instant grief therapy may be no quick fix

• Boston University psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk likes to tell the story of his trip to Puerto Rico 10 years ago after Hurricane Hugo. The place was humming. ``Everybody was rebuilding houses. I came into this devastated island scene of human resiliency,'' he says. Then the feds swooped in, telling people how to get reimbursed and go about recovery. ``All the rebuilding stopped. People sat in homeless shelters. It interrupted the natural healing process.''

05/24/99 - Some just say yes to novel detox program

• For Monica Cianci, a 38-year-old housewife in Cranston, R.I., hell began five years ago -- and getting cancer was just the beginning. Before her cancer surgery, she'd had ``no trouble with drugs.'' But afterward, she wound up addicted to prescription painkillers, opiate drugs like Vicodin and Percocet.

05/03/99 - Beating anger

• Blame it on Aristotle, who believed that watching tragic plays led to a healthy catharsis of emotions like pity and fear. Or on Freud, who, at least in his early days, also took the hydraulic view -- that pent-up feelings, like steam in a pressure cooker, need release lest they cause hysteria or phobia.

12/28/98 - Clues, but still no cure for autism

• Parker Beck, now 5, seemed normal when he was born, say his parents, Victoria and Gary Beck of New Hampshire, who run an educational-products business out of their home. He grew, learned a few words, did all the usual ``toddler things.'' Then, at 15 months, he suddenly stopped speaking. He developed chronic diarrhea. Most bizarrely, he began spinning in circles.

09/14/98 - New therapy for trauma is doubted

• Eleven years ago, Francine Shapiro was strolling through a park in Los Gatos, Calif., thinking dark thoughts. Suddenly, her eyes started darting back and forth, a spontaneous burst of what scientists call saccadic movement, much like the rapid eye movements that occur during dreams.

12/15/97 - Making it through the holidays

• Too much to do, too little time. Too many people to buy holiday gifts for, too little money. Too much food and alcohol, too little will power. And sometimes most important, too little companionship for those who live alone or have lost loved ones, and too much for others suddenly plunged back into chaotic or abusive families.

12/23/96 - Eat, drink and be miserable

• First you have the eggnog. Then the turkey and stuffing and the puddles of gravy, or maybe a huge slab of roast beef surrounded by a sea of mashed potatoes. Then the rolls, with butter, of course. Maybe a veggie or two for color. And wine, naturally, the more the merrier.

09/23/96 - Women shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad

• When a stressed-out man walks into Alice Domar's office and walks out an hour later with a relaxation tape in hand, chances are he'll do what she recommends -- take 20 minutes a day to listen to it. And feel much better. But when a woman with the same -- or worse -- symptoms gets those tips and stress-reduction tapes, things turn out quite differently, says Domar, a psychologist at Deaconess Hospital.

06/24/96 - The other heart attacks risks - anger - grief - fear

• Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate. This suggested, at least to Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos, that mental stress had triggered the increased deaths, most of them from heart attacks.

03/18/96 - We may be putting too much stress on stress

• You spend months, maybe years, trying to get pregnant, watching in despair as friend after friend accomplishes this most elemental of biological tasks with apparent ease. Sooner or later, one of these blissfully fertile souls will look you in the eye and, with the best of intentions, diagnose your problem: Stress