Out of Balance: Experiencing Psychological Disorders
Stephen Hinshaw and Kay Redfield Jameson share their experiences with bipolar illness, one as a child whose father suffered from the disease, the other from a very personal point of view. The line between normality and abnormality is blurry, as one ...
Getting It Together: Biomedical Therapies
In recent years biomedical therapies have joined psychotherapies to revolutionize treatment for severe mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The first antipsychotic drug Thorazine, discovered accidentally, caused side effects,...
Going to Extremes: Researching the Causes of Schizophrenia
The sources for complex psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia involve looking for contributions from many different gene variants. These gene combinations do not exhibit the cognitive impairment that characterizes the disease until the brain reac...
Getting It Together: Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud used a technique called psychoanalysis to discover the origins of his patient's illnesses, origins thought to deeply buried in the subconscious. For years, whatever the disorder, psychoanalysis was the therapy of choice. But as t...