Section 5: The Death of Tragedy: Tragedy has had a long history and has always been, and indeed continues to be, of great cultural significance.  Who has not heard of Shakespeare ?  Even my own mother, who left school when she was 15 in 1932 had studied Julius Caesar (not ranked as a trage...

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effort to “grade” the 50 states in the U.S. on their mental health care, the problem with such reports is that they are out-of-date and virtually useless from the moment they are published.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...

Daniel Siegel: A System's View of Disintegration & Integration (He's still cute, he's still brilliant, he speaks in easy-to-remember aphorisms and he's still heartful. What's not to like?) "Integration is the linking of differentiated parts. The concept is useful for ass...

Chapter 2 of John Gray’s book is divided into 15 subsections. Section 1: At The Masked Ball In popular psychology we read about all the different masks we wear as we go about our daily business, e.g., that of parent, teacher, bus driver, patient, student or whatever, and, indeed, we change those m...

Portland, Oregon has been recently declared the most depressed city in the country. BusinessWeek determined this based on "antidepressant sales, suicide rates, unemployment, divorce, and crappy weather." Philly didn't make the top 20 list. That's because we're too busy enjoying......

Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick wrote of a world in which people could select their moods every day on a “Penfield mood organ.� We're a long way from building that device, but there are already machines that can alter your brain. One example is a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) machine. Whe...

Many years ago when this author was at college he had a wonderful director for his master’s thesis, one Rev Dr. Brian McNamara, S.J .  Brian was an inspiration as he taught me how to read with an extra edge, or, if you prefer with purpose and focus.  He was a wonderful scholar to whom I ...

In her new book “An Altar in the World,” bestselling author Barbara Brown Taylor writes about “the practice of paying attention.” She explains: The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore. To see takes ti...

if   and the   would just figure out what the hell they want to do when they grow up and do it. This scrapping myself up off Dr. Sanity's carpet in search of the real me is getting, well I certainly can't say boring, but exhausting.  The brilliant (Dr. Sanity...

As reported by The New York Times, people with bipolar disorder have a higher risk of suffering from fatal illness according to a study (that reviewed 17 other studies involving more than 331,000 people) reported in the February issue of......