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Mood Disorders
A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates a big increase in the percentage of teenage suicides from 2003 to 2004.   For all young people between the ages of 10 and 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent.  This is the biggest single year increase in fifteen years.  The largest increase was in...
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Two recent articles highlight the positive dimensions of mental health conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In the journal Nature, an article by Canadian neuroscientist Laurent Mottron, emphasizes the advantages of autism (Mottron, 2011). Mottron suggests that, in addition to the well-known savant abilities of a small sub-section of autistic individuals, there are...
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An article appeared this last week in the New York Times, that attempted to answer the question:  why is depression still in the gene pool if it leads to despair and even suicide?  I was very interested in the piece because I’ve suffered from depression since adolescence, and believe me, it’s been no picnic.  The author...
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 Over the past sixty years, we’ve witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of new psychiatric illnesses.  The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, first published in 1952, originally listed about 100 categories of illness.  By the year 2000, that number had tripled.  We’ve become accustomed to hearing in the news about “learning disabilities,”...
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Researchers at Stanford Medical School have demonstrated that children of bipolar parents score higher on a non-verbal creativity test than children of “healthy” parents.  The study compared creativity scores of 40 bipolar parents and 40 offspring (half of whom had bipolar disorder and the other half of whom had ADHD), with 18 healthy adults and 18 healthy...
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