Sublime

David attributed fatigue and inattentiveness to a mental illness rather than to sleep deprivation and overstimulation, a logic he used to justify continued use of pills. I’ve seen a similar paradox in many of my patients over the years: They use drugs, prescribed or otherwise, to compensate for a basic lack of self-care, then attribute the costs to

No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.

An ongoing controversy in the field of addiction medicine is whether people who have been using drugs in an addictive way can return to moderate, nonrisky use. For decades the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous dictated that abstinence is the only option for people with addiction. But emerging evidence suggests that some people who have met criteria fo

A specialist on child development tells me that children’s brains are at their most malleable—that is, the greatest change takes place—before they are two years old and then again when they are teenagers. “The worst time for a person to be tampering with their brains is when they are teenagers,” she says. “Drugs radically alter the way teenagers’ b

Neither the mother’s personality, nor the infant’s neurological anomalies at birth, nor its IQ, nor its temperament—including its activity level and reactivity to stress—predicted whether a child would develop serious behavioral problems in adolescence.20 The key issue, rather, was the nature of the parent-child relationship: how parents felt about