Somehow I had pictured the musky smell of a downtown church’s basement or metal folding chairs lined across the free throw line in a YMCA gym, but the meeting was held in a corporate conference room around a giant rectangular table so that everyone faced each other. There was an elaborate rhombus-shaped speakerphone plugged through…
Right Step’s residential teen addiction treatment center in Dallas announces a series of program enhancements, including a new executive director, gender-specific programming and an evidence-based curriculum.
When most people think of schizophrenia, they probably focus on the psychotic symptoms classically associated with the disorder. However, psychosis represents just one aspect of schizophrenia’s impact, and people affected by the illness also commonly experience a range of problems collectively known as “negative” symptoms. A new study, published in July 2013 in the journal…
Movement disorders are a broad-ranging group of conditions that significantly alter the ability to move or control the body’s muscles. Some of these conditions produce unusually or uncontrollably active muscles, while others produce unusually stiff or unresponsive muscles. Movement disorders overlap to a significant degree with various kinds of mental disorders. In some cases, unconnected…
Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life.
Acute schizophrenia is a term used to describe episodes of relatively severe schizophrenia-related symptoms that have a strongly negative impact on a person’s ability to function. Doctors can combat the effects of these episodes with the help of a number of different antipsychotic medications. However, these medications only work in certain individuals and typically come…
Depressive realism is a term mental health professionals sometimes use to describe a tendency among depressed people to realistically judge their relationship to certain features of their surroundings. This tendency goes against the grain of much of a depressed person’s thought processes, which typically distort reality in significant ways. In a study published in August…
Depression is a common term that can refer to either one specific mental health condition—called major depression—or to a larger group of conditions known as depressive disorders. Current statistics indicate that women in the U.S. develop some form of depression much more often than men. However, according to the results of a new study published…
Speech sound disorder is the name of a condition listed for the first time in 2013 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which doctors in the U.S. commonly use when diagnosing mental health problems in their patients. It replaces another condition, called phonological disorder, formerly listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.…
Anxiety is the common term for the presence of certain feelings—such as worry, dread or fear—that can put the brain and body into the unusually alert state known as the “fight-or-flight” response. While this state isn’t harmful in and of itself, its ongoing or recurring effects can lead to the onset of significant mental health…