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Whether your understanding of mental illness is limited to what you’ve seen on the silver screen, or as intimate as a firsthand struggle, the topic has occupied a continual space in our national discussion, eliciting controversy and fascination. Today, there are nearly 60 million Americans who suffer from a mental illness, and it continues to present a quality of life, household and community issue.
The National Institute of Mental Health says that up to one-quarter of Americans have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. And the CDC reports that while one in 10 Americans over age 12 use prescribed antidepressants, most don't see a therapist. This is despite evidence that talk therapy can help. A new study from the United Kingdom published in The Lancet shows that while up to two-thirds of people don’t respond fully to antidepressants, they are three times more likely to experience a reduction in their depression symptoms if talk therapy was added to their treatment regimen.
The American Psychiatric Association gave its final approval to the latest guide to psychiatric disorders, despite strong criticism that it created new mental disorders when none exist and could lead to misdiagnosis and unnecessary medication. The first rewrite in 20 years of the diagnostic Bible of psychiatry was approved in the midst of heated controversy. The guide, known as DSM-5, defines a host of symptoms that are categorized to help doctors identify specific mental disorders.
In Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, a sympathetic and engrossing biography of David Foster Wallace, literary journalist D.T. Max deftly outlines the early years of the writer’s life, from his birth in Ithaca, New York, growing up in Champaign, Illinois, where he became a promising junior tennis player, to his education (with a double major in English and philosophy) at Amherst College. The novel he wrote for his senior thesis, The Broom of the System, was published when Wallace was 25 years old, launching a career that went on to see creation of a range of exceptional works of fiction and nonfiction.
While war may be hell in every generation in which it rears its bloody-horned head, the participants are never the same. There is simply no accounting for the differences between the men fighting in Afghanistan and those who fought in, say, the Guadalcanal. Because of this, we must not treat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as if they have a precedent. They do not. Theirs is a war of insidious casualties, where so much fighting takes place in the days, months and years after they've returned home. Although the same could be said for all modern American conflicts, the psychological struggles veterans face have seemingly become darker and more daunting in recent years.