[Ed note: Originally posted March 2012. See note at bottom.] In 1864, in a move crucial to winning the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman led his army of some 80,000 men to Atlanta, burned it to the ground, and then marched to the coast of South Carolina, destroying almost all in his path. It was […]
Continue reading →Below find #4 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party — a run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s tenure at WIRED, posted as I moved the blog here. This post, “The PTSD Trap,” is a substantially longer version — call it the director’s cut — of a feature I published […]
Continue reading →Below find #2 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party — a run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s tenure at WIRED, as I prepared to move them to this site. In this post, on the Batman-movie shootings last summer, I took advantage of a blog’s reiterative freedoms to clarify an […]
Continue reading →This post, originally published 14 September, 2010, examines how genes and culture can apparently shape one another’s development and expression — a topic much in my mind as I write my book The Orchid and the Dandelion, about how genes, environment, and culture shape temperament, behavior, and destiny The Depression Map: Genes, Culture, Environment, and a […]
Continue reading →For a single post that shows how weirdly and unevenly psychiatric diagnosis actually works (and fails to work) in this country, and what that means for the new DSM, get over to Maia Svalavitz’s clear-eyed account of her own five diagnoses (and the one she never got): Over the course of my life, I have […]
Continue reading →As the fallout over DSM-V continues, UK psychologist Graham Davey probes the question: Once scientists establish a paradigm in a particular area this has the effect of (1) framing the questions to be asked, (2) defining the procedures to answer them, and (3) mainstreams the models, theories and constructs within which new facts should be […]
Continue reading →Over at Slate I have a story, “The New Temper Tantrum Disorder,” about the “Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder” I wrote about more briefly here a couple weeks ago, when DMDD was still a proposed diagnosis. Last week the DMDD diagnosis was approved for inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association’s forthcoming Diagnostic Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition — […]
Continue reading →Every decade or two, the American Psychiatric Association reworks its Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or DSM, to try to have diagnostic categories reflect the current state of theory and practice. Given enormous evidence that we’re currently overdiagnosing things and medicalizing normal behavior, many had hope that the upcoming DMS-5 — the fifth major revision — would show some restraint. Instead it seems that the DSM-5 may include a new proposed “mood disorder” called “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” or DMDD.
Continue reading →In an age of laboratory medicine, psychiatry’s reliance on interviews, confession, and often funky diagnoses remain the disciplines great bugbear. The move over the last two or three decades to ‘biological psychiatry,’ which got hijacked by the drug industry, has hovered between disappointment and disaster. Neurocritic looks at the dilemma from a neuroscientist’s point of view: […]
Continue reading →How long has PTSD been around? Is the response to trauma outlined in our current PTSD diagnosis something that has long happened to a subset of people facing trauma? Or did our current concept of PTSD rise from cultural and medical concerns and definitions peculiar to a particular time in history? This question is debated fiercely. […]
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