Saturday, May 18, 2013
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John McManamy's Posts

Mother's Day and Your Mother Issues: The Bipolar Question of the Week

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. You know the drill. But what about if you have issues about your mother? What then?   I’m not prepared to air my mother issues in public. All you need to know is that all of my life I had to deal with a certain cognitive dissonance between what society saw as the ideal and what I experienced in reality.... Read moreChevron

Beyond the DSM: Thomas Insel and Understanding Mental Illness

You may have heard that several days ago, Thomas Insel, head of the NIMH, announced in a blog post, Transforming Diagnosis, that “the NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”   He went on to say that: “We will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide... Read moreChevron

Your Hero's Journey - The Bipolar Question of the Week

I may have mentioned that I have been working on a novel. I finished my first draft a few weeks ago. First draft is a polite term for a piece of writing that is as incomprehensible as it is unreadable. In this regard, there is little difference between the amateur and the master. A few drafts later, there is all the difference in the... Read moreChevron

Human Behavior - A Small Sampling

We know that bipolar and other mental illnesses affect behavior, but what precisely is behavior? Rather than go for a definition, maybe it’s best to look at a select sampling of classic experiments and observations representing wildly disparate fields. Let’s get started:   Conditioned Reflex - Ivan Pavlov’s celebrated... Read moreChevron

An Upside to Depression? A Darwinian Perspective

Perhaps some of you have figured out this riddle: If depression is heritable, what are its selective advantages? How could such a disadvantageous condition be passed on from generation to generation?   As I see it, there are two possible answers to this question, and both have to do with a branch of evolutionary biology called evolutionary... Read moreChevron