Feeling anxious? Join the club. People are not just worried about this pandemic, but the next. Take a look at the National Center for Health Statistics survey of anxiety and depression in this country ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/mental-health.htm). In late April about a third of U.S. adults had symptoms of depression and anxiety – 40.2% for those aged […]
What Brain Genetics Says About Mental Health
Brainstorms Heard of the Brainstorm Consortium? A worldwide group of dozens of researchers is trying to understand diagnosis from the bottom up, starting with your genes. In a recent paper in Science, the group looked at 25 “brain associated” disorder, ten of them psychiatric, fifteen neurologic. They sorted them through GWASS – genome wide association […]
Marketing Medical Marijuana
Mother’s Milk California’s Big Daddy Jesse Unruh often intoned, “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” yet today we can say “money is the mother’s milk of medicine.” Any industry which takes up 17-18% of the economy leaves a lot of cash slashing around. And the latest entrant to the giant cash prize of $3.3 trillion a year […]
Unsafe: Surviving the New Age of Anxiety
A different, new age of anxiety is brewing. To understand why, look around. One of the world’s favored centers of “chill” just burned to the ground. In the peacefully pleasant California wine country residents woke to winds whipping fire. Within minutes their homes reduced to ashes, their vehicles melted. They had no warning. In the morning light […]
Noisy Anxiety
Anxiety is all around us, the air noisily electric with it. The environment is filling with noxious sound. And an era stuffed with massacres of the innocents does not induce calm. So it’s instructive to see how one major sense – hearing – affects our ability to rest and self-soothe. And to see how we do it, […]