Remembering to take daily medications can be a challenge, but new research offers tips for strengthening those memories.
 A silly pat on the head helps seniors remember daily med, study suggests
Doing something unusual, like knocking on wood or patting yourself on the head, while taking a daily dose of medicine may be an effective strategy to help seniors remember whether they’ve already taken their daily medications, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis. [continue reading…]
In Prescriptions for the Mind, McGill University psychiatrist Joel Paris contends that psychiatry has moved so far toward drug therapy that talk therapy, tarred by the decline of psychoanalysis, has been marginalized. Once a mainstay of any psychiatrist’s identity, training in talk therapy is now more likely to be viewed as career suicide. Paris laments this folly, arguing that psychotherapy should remain a useful part of every psychiatric practice. 
For Bentall, the triumphalist interpretation of biomedical psychiatry’s ascendancy is a con job, driven in part by the “ruthless manipulation” of truth by Big Pharma. Actually, Bentall’s thesis is so old that it’s new again: “Distress in human beings is usually caused by unsatisfactory relationships with other human beings.” Consequently, humane psychiatric treatment should begin by recognizing the complex interaction of biology and environment in the creation of emotional distress. 
