The February 1st edition of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that suffering a concussion in Iraq after a bomb attack was strongly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Read more →

Back in September, Sudip Ghosh offered a review at Brain Blogger of a new book on anorexia, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.

One of the many aspects of the complex problem of eating disorders is body image. It was informative, then to come across an article summarizing a wide variety of research findings on body image. I’ve picked out a few of the more interesting and perhaps less well-known ones: Read more →

October 10th was World Mental Health day. This year, the focus was on the interplay between culture and mental health. Let’s see what we can learn on the topic: Read more →

Earlier this week, I attended the annual general meeting at the Canadian Mental Health Association (Vancouver – Burnaby branch). As always, people who have used the CMHA’s services over the years stood up and told their stories. What remained most with me was one person mentioning that at a certain age, he “experienced symptoms associated with paranoid schizophrenia.” How different that sounded from saying “I am a paranoid schizophrenic.” Read more →

Brain implants, or neural implants, have been around since the 1940’s. They can allow people who are paralyzed, deaf or blind to function again. Such an implant is a type of biomedical prosthesis that circumvents areas in the brain which are dysfunctional, perhaps as a result of a stroke or head injuries. Brain implants create a bridge between neural systems and computer chips. Other medical research involves drug delivery via neural implants.

Brain implants also have the capacity to be used in more sinister ways. Read more →

Are you reading this at work during your lunch break? Has anyone come into the lunchroom to tell you about the cold they had lately, or their children’s chicken pox, or their aging father’s hip replacement?

I bet this happens quite a bit. Just about everyone talks about these maladies, small and large, fleeting or chronic.

When’s the last time you tossed a “How ya doin’?” at a co-worker, and instead of talking about that flu that just doesn’t seem to go away, she mentioned casually, “Ah, well, I’m going through another depression, don’t you just hate that?” Read more →