While I applaud the intent of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s effort to “grade” the 50 states in the U.S. on their mental health care, the problem with such reports is that they are out-of-date and virtually useless from the moment they are published. The problem with the...

Just as you believe that maybe, perhaps, the tide is turning and the government that is charged with the responsibility and care of those most in need — the severely mentally ill who are hospitalized — actually “gets” it, you read a story like this one. Raquel Padilla was dis...

Many people assume that morality — our sense of what is “right” and just in this world versus what is wrong — is something we formulate through a process of time, experience and thinking. We equate morality with higher reasoning and not a base instinct like hunger or the need...

Sometimes the killer of relationships isn’t a lack of trust, a lack of communication or arguing with your significant other. It’s simple indifference. A relationship can survive most things if both people involved in it are committed to the other person and act with respect toward the ot...

Just when you think journalism from respected news organizations couldn’t sink any lower, the BBC (amongst many other news agencies) is reporting today that “Online networking ‘harms health:’” People’s health could be harmed by social networking sites because they...

According to researchers in Taiwan, the answer is “Yes.” The researchers (Ko & Kuo, 2009) administered a 43-item self-report survey to 596 college students who were mostly between ages 16 and 22 and female (71 percent). The college students were young adults who had blogging experie...

If the Internet can “addict” you to its tempting offerings of Facebook friends and access to information inconceivable even two decades ago, imagine the evils lurking withing your flat-screen TV. That’s what researchers at the University of Pittsburgh did and found that in 4,142 he...

Two research articles were recently published that shed more light on the so-called “Internet addiction”, a concept we’ve long lampooned here due to its continuing lack of scientific validity. The first study (Dowling & Quirk, 2008) looked at one of the common measures of R...

When the economy — or a company’s business — goes south, the quickest way a company can chop its costs is by laying off its employees. It’s never popular and often companies will try other cost-cutting measures long before they have to cut workers, but if you’re among t...

Greg Downey, writing on the blog Neuroanthropology, has a lengthy commentary on a New York Times Magazine article exploring the research on (and the researchers who study) human female sexuality. Naturally, such a complex human behavior is going to take pages to explore, and the NY Times Magazine ar...