Challenging the Status Quo on Therapy’s Place in Schizophrenia Treatment
A discussion of recent developments
Historic wisdom has held that high doses of antipsychotic medications are the most effective treatment for schizophrenia — but that wisdom has been challenged by a new study reported in an article in …
On Psychiatric Meds and Forgetting the Person
In Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, Jeffrey A. Lieberman, Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and chair of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and former president of the American Psychiatric Association, states that “psychiatry’s dramatic transformation from a profession of shrinks to a profession of pill-pushers came through sheer …
ISIS Slaughters, Iranians Get Punished
A threat to democratic efforts in Iran
Last Tuesday, December 8, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill, supported by the White House, which, if signed into law this week, would punish Iranians for crimes they have never committed. Moreover, it would provoke the hardliners in Iran, only a few months after a nuclear deal was reached between Iran …
Shakespeare and Trump: What’s in a Name?
Thoughts on headless bodies in tombless graves
One seeks in vain for references to Shakespeare in Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices: A Memoir (2007) and Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015). There are no lessons from Shakespeare in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996). Nor are there any in her more recent books …
Agnes Heller and “Everyday Revolutions”
Portrait of a Philosopher
The forms of the southern clouds at the dawn of April 30th, 1882, are comparable to those mottled streaks on this one book he had only seen once (a Spanish edition). Following the Naturalis Historia, he recounts exactly four historically exemplary cases of prodigious memory: Cyrus …
Tunisia: Invisible Alienation, Visible Violence
A relational view of Tunisian youths
Analyzing the youth is notoriously a difficult task. How should we define this social group? Can we even speak of “the youth” in the singular? With regard to the Arab Uprisings (a phrase which I prefer to the loaded “Arab Spring”), many did not …
When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?
Time is running out for Israel-Palestine
On a cold, dreary November morning in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, I finally understood why owls are seen as wise, why in the ancient world they represented Athena and Minerva, the goddesses of wisdom. On my way from an academic symposium in Great Barrington …