Mind and Body - Page 57

November 27, 2015

Understanding Female Pedophiles

Aimee Sword, 36, of Waterford Township, Mich., has been sentenced to nine to 30 years in prison for having sex with her 14-year-old son, whom she had given up for adoption as an infant. Sword used the Internet to track down the adolescent boy, and then seduced him.

November 27, 2015

The Psychological Value of Pets

Last week, my 8-year-old son and I buried his pet hamster, Frosty. He chose a spot in the wooded part of our yard, along a path where he walks to a little pond where he has several tadpoles he is patiently watching as they grow into frogs.

November 27, 2015

Psychiatry and Spirituality

Psychiatry is a medical specialty. In the quiver of arrows we psychiatrists use to defeat depression and panic disorder and a host of afflictions, we have powerful and effective medications. We must screen for metabolic abnormalities that can affect mood. And we can sometimes find clues to our patients' suffering by looking through windows opened by technology-like MRIs and PET (positron emission tomography) scans.

November 27, 2015

The Sexualization of Children & Adolescents in America

As a forensic psychiatrist, I have been called upon more than once to provide an expert opinion to a court on how dangerous an adult male is who has had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl. Such relationships are illegal in almost every state and can carry very long prison terms. This is true whether the man engaging in the sexual acts with his underage victim is 19 years old or 29 years old. And it is true whether he is the girl's first sexual partner, or her tenth (as is sometimes the case).

November 27, 2015

Technology-Based Personality Disorder: A New Psychiatric Disorder

The official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association is known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, known as the DSM-IV-TR. It catalogues those signs and symptoms psychiatrists observe in patients and groups them into recognizable disorders, like major depression, panic disorder and borderline personality disorder.

November 27, 2015

Housebound: Paralyzed With Anxiety

Within the last six months, I have treated two patients whose visits to my office were among the very few times they had left their homes-in years. They are just a few of the million or more Americans who suffer from anxiety conditions or weight problems or psychotic illnesses that lead them to dread leaving the house. Some are literally houseboundand never venture outside, even confining themselves to a single room or barricading doors and windows. The housebound population is a kind of secret in America, because these folks are often embarrassed about their situation and don't know how to get help for it. House calls, after all, went out of vogue decades ago. Conditions leading people to be housebound include agoraphobia, an intense fear of crowds and being publicly humiliated, and panic disorder, sudden bursts of anxiety often accompanied by a sense of impending doom, rapid heart beat and sweating.

November 27, 2015

Marriage in America: On Life Support?

The fact that Al Gore and Tipper Gore are separating after 40 years together has been billed by many as the "failure" of their marriage. But I think there's another way to see it_ Any marriage that lasts 40 years (or 20 years, for that matter), which results in children and which includes many years of mutual support and fulfillment is a wild, out-of-this-world success. A grand slam homerun. There's really nothing to grieve and certainly nothing to criticize here.

November 27, 2015

Emotional Vampires

In myth, vampires drink the blood of others in order to keep themselves "alive," if only marginally. The story of the "living dead" is essentially one of desperate and thirsty people draining the life blood out of others.

November 27, 2015

Irrational Markets

As Americans watch their stock accounts rise and fall precipitously in the coming months and years, it will become necessary to determine whether financial markets are behaving in predictable ways, or are seemingly cut loose from fundamentals entirely. In other words, volatility seems assured, but the basis for it may be tied more and more to perception and less and less to objective facts.

November 27, 2015

Woman Fakes Kidnapping, May Find Truth

At 6_30 a.m. May 12, Nancy Salas, 22, disappeared from her family's home in Glendale, California, prompting a massive search. Late on May 13, nearly two days after she had vanished, she walked into a carpet store in Merced, California, hundreds of miles away, seemingly disoriented and reporting that she had been abducted at knifepoint and managed to escape her captors.