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A Milestone in Federally Funded Behavioral Science
In the United States, medicine functions too much like a “repair shop,” believes David R. Williams of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health: People only seek medical advice when something goes wrong. This
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Defining Dysfunction: Clinical Psychology’s New Frontier
Diagnosing physical ailments used to depend exclusively on symptoms and observations, but a prodigious surge in new technology has provided 21st century medicine with an array of precision diagnostic tools — from biomarkers to genetic
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The ADHD Explosion
Professional baseball in the United States has seen a dramatic escalation in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses over the past decade. There are now more than 100 players, about 10% of the active Major League Baseball
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Why Depression Needs a New Definition
The Atlantic: In his Aphorisms, Hippocrates defined melancholia, an early understanding of depression, as a state of “fears and despondencies, if they last a long time.” It was caused, he believed, by an excess of
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Belief That Mental Illness Can Be Contagious Contributes To Isolation
NPR: Many illnesses are contagious. You’d do well to avoid your neighbor’s sneeze, for example, and to wash your hands after tending to your sick child. But what about mental illness? The idea that anxiety
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Psychosis and Violence Aren’t Strongly Linked
Violent individuals are often assumed to suffer from a long history of mental illness that compels them to act destructively, but the link between psychosis and aggressive acts may be weak.