trauma
At its core, trauma can be thought of as the psychological wounds that persist, even when the physical ones are long gone.
When We Closed the Hospitals
The story out of Michigan is not unusual, which is part of the trouble. A man with a long history of psychosis walks into a hospital asking for help. Within days he is dead outside that same hospital after officers open fire, believing he is pointing a gun at them. It turns out to be a lighter shaped like a handgun. In his pocket are a will, a crayon apology to the police department, and years of paperwork from a life spent circling psychiatric systems that never held long enough to keep him safe. Another man, also known to the system for years, is legally back in the community. Court oversight has expired. The forensic committee that once monitored him no longer has authority. Prior petitions for treatment have run out. He is sleeping outside, refusing medication, talking about poison and World War II, and alarming the people around him often enough that police know his name. Two days later, he walks through a Walmart with a folding knife and leaves 11 strangers bleeding on the floor and sidewalk.
By Dr. Mozelle Martinabout 10 hours ago in Psyche
My Doctor Turned Out to Be a Sexual Predator. Content Warning.
As my older sister asked him into the apartment, I was aghast, as I hovered at the other end of the hall. He took a moment to carefully wipe his shiny, black shoes over the tatty, straw-coloured Welcome mat. He then took a step further into the narrow and long, dark hallway and headed cautiously towards where I was standing, shocked, never once taking his eyes off of me.
By Chantal Christieabout 24 hours ago in Psyche
What “Stupid Mistakes” Really Say About a High-Functioning Brain
There is a special kind of humiliation in misspelling the name of someone you know perfectly well. Not a stranger. Not a difficult name from a form you only saw once. I mean the name of somebody close enough to your life that your brain could recognize it half asleep.
By Dr. Mozelle Martin3 days ago in Psyche
The Loneliness Epidemic
Why Governments Are Treating Isolation Like a Public Health Crisis THE SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 🏥 In May 2023, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic, comparing the health impact of chronic loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily and warning that the increasing disconnection of American society was producing health consequences as severe and as deadly as the most recognized public health threats, and this advisory which represented the first time the nation's top public health official had identified loneliness as a crisis requiring urgent coordinated response reflected the culmination of decades of research showing that social isolation is not merely an emotional discomfort but a physiological condition that damages the cardiovascular system, suppresses the immune system, accelerates cognitive decline, increases inflammation throughout the body, and shortens lifespan by an estimated twenty-six percent compared to people with strong social connections 📋
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
The Memory You Think You Have Is a Lie
YOUR BRAIN IS THE WORLD'S BEST STORYTELLER 📖 The memory you are most certain about, the one you would swear on your life is accurate down to the last detail, the childhood birthday party or the first kiss or the moment you heard devastating news, is almost certainly wrong in ways that would shock you if you could compare your memory to a recording of what actually happened, because human memory does not function like a video camera recording events faithfully for later playback but rather like a novelist who takes real events and rewrites them each time they are recalled, adding details that were not there, removing details that were, shifting timelines, combining separate events into single memories, and incorporating information learned after the event into the memory of the event itself until the story your brain tells you about your past is a sophisticated fiction that feels indistinguishable from truth because your brain is the author, the editor, and the only reader, and it has no incentive to fact-check its own work 🧠
By The Curious Writer5 days ago in Psyche
Your Dreams Are Warning You 💤
THE DREAM THAT SAVED MY LIFE 🌙 The night before the accident I dreamed about driving on a wet highway and watching a red truck drift across the center line toward me in slow motion, and the dream was so vivid and so specific that when I woke up I could remember the exact stretch of road, the exact color of the truck, the exact moment of impact, and the sensation of spinning that followed, and I dismissed it as anxiety because I had a long drive ahead of me that day and my subconscious was probably just processing my standard driving-related nervousness into narrative form as brains do during REM sleep when they organize daily concerns into dream scenarios 😴
By The Curious Writer7 days ago in Psyche
When “I’m Good” Isn’t Good Enough
This is not an argument against hope, gratitude, or trying to stay grounded when life gets hard. It is about the pressure people put on themselves and each other to act okay when they are not okay. There is a difference between real resilience and forced positivity, and that difference is more important than some of us like to admit.
By Annam M Gordon7 days ago in Psyche
We Have Fooled Ourselves
I have been writing, in recent months, about human suffering. Not because I enjoy thinking about it, but because I believe that to look away from it, to convert it into abstraction, is itself a kind of complicity. I wrote about a feeling I was not supposed to have. I wrote about the price paid by those who never chose the conflict that consumes them. And now I find myself returning again, pulled back by images I cannot stop seeing.
By Hashem Koohy8 days ago in Psyche
