Tag: Mental illness
The 10 Best Books of 2023
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
With unnerving rapidity, books are on their way to becoming a countercultural medium—one whose insistence on focus and complexity, on the slow building of story and argument, stands against so much else that daily assaults our eyes and ears. At The Atlantic, we hold on tight to books because of the unique space they offer for ideas to roam. When we
Why Did So Many People Stop Going to Church?
Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith
What COVID Revealed About American Psychiatry
Meanwhile, the institute shed some of its original congressional mandate for treatment and prevention, by giving the job of funding mental-health services to a new federal entity, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From then on, as one former N.I.M.H. director told me, undertreatment and homelessness were SAMHSA’s responsibilities. As the Human Genome Project launched, and brain-scanning technology leapt forward thanks to functional MRI, pressure to find genetic and brain signatures for psychiatric illnesses grew. Yet, as
Would You Buy a Home With Friends?
What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?
In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended
The System That Failed Jordan Neely
In 1954, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication called Thorazine, which could be used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. For the first time, it was possible to provide meaningful care for the mentally ill on an outpatient basis. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, hundreds of thousands of patients across the country were released from derelict state-run asylums. (A key provision of the Medicare and Medicaid Act, passed in 1965, was that the federal government would
America needs more lawyers. This isn’t a joke.
For decades, a myth about civil-rights lawyers has been spread by court decisions, legislative testimony, and popular culture. Courthouses, the story goes, are filled to the brim with plaintiffs’ attorneys desperate to make a dollar off someone else’s misery; ambulance chasers all too happy to file frivolous civil-rights cases and squeeze a few bucks out of a cash-strapped city that would otherwise spend the money on its community center or library.
In fact, the opposite is true. The
Adults Are Letting Teen Girls Down
Readers weigh in on the causes, and potential solutions, for teen girls’ worsening mental health.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked readers for insights into why teenage girls might
The Obvious Answer to Homelessness
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh
What the Body Means to Say
Patient: Mechanism of injury: self-immolation. Pt conscious upon EMT arrival. Lighter fluid and matches on scene. When asked about the incident, pt reported intent to “turn herself into a phoenix.” Psych eval ordered.
The summer before last, I met a woman who lit herself on fire. I’ll call her R. One evening in June, she poured lighter fluid over and into her body—down her mouth and up her rectum—and struck a match.
Self-immolation isn’t unheard of on the burn unit.
Why People Sacrifice Happiness for Addiction
When the behaviors we thought would make us happy don’t, we’re forced to bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be. But our happiness goals are often stifled by the disease of addiction—and its complex neurochemical influence on our desires.
A conversation with psychiatrist Anna Lembke helps us understand the gap between the cravings that drive us and the happiness we seek.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks.