Recently I was listening to NPR on the car radio. The program was about so-called obsessive compulsive disorder, and a woman was describing her difficulty in this area. I didn’t record her actual words, but it went something like this: I have all these checks and rituals that I have to do each day. And… Continue Reading
Business As Usual
Christopher Lane, author of Shyness has written an interesting post. The gist of the matter is as follows. There’s a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines (benzos for short) that are promoted by Pharma and prescribed by psychiatrists to “treat” anxiety. (As if anxiety were an illness!) See my post on the So-called Anxiety Disorders. Benzos… Continue Reading
DSM and Disability
Every society in every generation makes errors. Some of the errors are minor. Some are major. One of the great errors of the 20th century was this: we accepted the spurious notion that a wide range of life’s problems were in fact illnesses. This spurious notion was initiated with good intentions – to provide shelter… Continue Reading
Anxiety Disorders
Fear is the normal human response to imminent danger. It is an adaptive response, in that it is helpful to survival, and it occurs in almost all animal species. When our cave-dwelling ancestors were attacked by mountain lions, they probably experienced acute fear. This fear gave them an extra burst of energy to flee the… Continue Reading