Reflections on Psychiatry, Therapy, and Mental Health

from diagnosis to poetry I almost never hear the word neurotic these days in the conversations and writings of mental health...

Ketamine may be the flower girl that is walking down the isle toward a marriage of biological and psychological psychiatry. We say this because the science tells us that Ketamine has a strong biological effect in benefiting patients. At the same time, it is somewhat of an hallucinogen, and has been described as an abreactive drug, that is, a drug that brings into consciousness thoughts and feelings that may be hard to access in ordinary states. In effect, Ketamine leads to

It's natural to wonder what role psychiatric medications should have in the treatment of mental disorders. I have, of course, thought about this for years and have come to the conclusion that our medications don't treat diagnoses nearly as much as they do dimensions of functioning. What I mean by this is that for any given diagnosis there are a cluster of symptoms associated with that diagnosis. Depression for example is characterized by sleep problems, low mood, often an