mental health

A Spanish proverb says that “the belly rules the mind”.

     You’ve collided with someone, fallen, been struck by flying athletic equipment in a sports game. After an initial evaluation, involving an MRI or a head CT, the doctor tells you that it’s just a concussion, and it is not that bad. After all, your brain is not bleeding, you are not comatose, and with proper monitoring of your health over the next few weeks or months, full recovery is expected.

                                                                                          Yoga and the I-Function

Brought to you by The Slippery Brain Sodality

   a novel by Leslie Feinberg  

“How do you feel today?” my therapist asks me at the start of our session.

“Anxious,” I reply.

“Want to try some EMDR?”

I shrug. “OK.”

It’s not like anything else has helped to ease my social anxiety, except for psychopharmaceuticals.

“What’s EMDR?”

Historically termed “hysteria” and thought to be a physical manifestation of disordered emotions, little is known about the mystery that is conversion disorder (5). In the seventeenth century, some individuals with unexplained paralysis, blindness or “fits” (seizures) were thought to have been involved with witchcraft and were burned at the stake (2). Nowadays, these symptoms are considered relatively common and oftentimes debilitating. Although not much is known about conversion disorder, it seems possible that the neurological processes responsible for its development are related to those involved in anxiety and depression disorders.

             Emotions are a vital part of our lives.  They increase human interaction and allow us to express our feelings to those around us.  But where do emotions come from? How do we interpret a situation which makes us happy or sad? If the definition of emotion varies, then how does this affect the treatment of patients with emotional disorders such as depression?

"Culture as Disability," a 1995 essay by Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne has been on my mind for more than a decade.  In it, McDermott and Varenne argue compellingly (for me at least) that human cultures have interrelated bright and dark sides.  By promulgating stories about what individuals in a given culture should aspire to, cultures provide individuals with a sense of motivation and achievement,  The same stories, however, also "disable" other individuals, by setting standards of achievement which they, for one reason or another, can't adequately satisfy.