I have an announcement so earth-shaking that I will, just for today, suspend all scientific citations. I am here to liberate you from a great deal of suffering.

I hereby give you permission to go to bed angry.

Here are ten perfectly good reasons: Read more →

Just when I was complaining that the hypothetical stress-cancer link is still controversial, a new study takes a new approach to look at this question.

Researchers at the University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Yahatanishi-ku, Kitakyushu, Japan, looked at a variety of psychosocial stressors and psychological coping mechanisms, and compared them with levels of a cancer biomarker, more specifically, a biomarker of cancer-related oxidative DNA damage, 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OH-dG) (1). The subjects in this study weren’t already sick (a non-clinical sample). Read more →

Think about what it would be like to spend most of your time alone because being around other people is just too difficult. You feel that others are judging you for your mental illness, and so you are scared to face the world. You withdraw to avoid this stigmatization. This social withdrawal is emotionally very costly. But this is a two-way street — the mentally ill withdraw from society–society withdraws from them.

An Australian survey reported that two-thirds of people affected by a mental illness feel lonely “often” or “all of the time”. The research says in contrast, just 10 per cent of the general population reported feelings of loneliness. Read more →