Mental Health and the Brain: Working Group

• A Journey Through Darkness http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10Depression-t.html (memoir of a woman with persistent depression)
• The Inner Life of the Broken Brain: Narrative and Neurology http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2005/1334384.htm (interview with Oliver Sacks and Ann Harrington, historian of science, author of Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain.
• Intriguing similarities? between descriptions of internal states by David Hume (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/davidhume) and Alice James (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/alicejames)
• A Life Interrupted (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01miss.html) and dissociative fugue
• The Story Hour: Use of Narrative Therapy with Familities http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/577 

Have just finished reading the diary Alice James kept during the last few years of her life: a remarkable account of a 19th century American woman (who lived in England, had several breakdowns, and was diagnosed as "hysteric") in conversation with herself: "the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too."

Study Links Depression to Thinning of Brain's Cortex:

“We think that’s what makes them vulnerable to developing anxiety and depression — it essentially isolates them in an emotional world.”

“We don’t know if this has a genetic origin or if it’s a consequence of growing up with parents or grandparents who are ill. Studies have shown that when parents are depressed, it changes the environment in which children are growing up."

An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke?
about the apparent surge in the # of Somali immigrants
whose children are being diagnosed with autism.

Update: Autism Rates Are Higher for U.S.-Born Somali Children in Minneapolis

Yet another resource, this one w/ a very local interest: the account of Hannah Upp's '07's "dissociative fugue," demonstrating "the glasslike fragility of memory and identity," which are "a lot less stable and have less unity than we want to believe.”

An addition to your resources (=an account of deficits):
Judith Warner's column y'day on
Children in the Mental Health Void