Category Archives: Mental Illness

January 26

Striking and Totally Unexpected

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If you would like to learn a little more about how epilepsy affects memory and more about my personal accounts, one of my previous articles, Shaken Memory, also talks about thes things. I consider this current article a revision, however, since I have learned a bit more about my condition. When Brenda Milner and William […]

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December 22

Fatal Attraction: What is Sex and Love Addiction?

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Have you ever been in love? Has it made you do crazy things? Whether it was sending your lover bundles of flowers, stalking their social media (or stalking them in person), or boiling a rabbit in a pot of water, we’ve all been there. We know that love is enthralling. It is potent enough in […]

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November 17

A Series of Exciting Events

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Have you ever wondered what it is like to have a seizure? Well, I have epilepsy, and let me tell you: so do I. That is because there are many different types of seizures and of epilepsy, and some—like mine—involve a loss of consciousness, as well as memory deficits. What all seizures have in common, […]

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October 13

The Wandering Nerve

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What do epilepsy, depression, and anxiety all have in common? No, this is not some one-liner joke, there is an actual answer to this question. Could it be that they all could be targeted by a single treatment? To understand how this could be, let’s look into what these disorders are, first. Epilepsy is a […]

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July 21

Media Misrepresentations of Mental Illness: Dissociative Identity Disorder

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It’s no secret that watching movies can create lasting impressions on viewers. This is true in cases of medical dramas, where viewers are introduced to rare diseases through interactions with fictional patients seeking help. It is also true of mental health conditions – both in the cases of television and movies, it has become increasingly […]

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July 07

The Forgotten:

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Image source: “New Awakenings: The Legacy & Future of Encephalitis Lethargica (EL)” (Sparacin 2012) Some call it “the sleepy-sickness”, others encephalitis lethargica. This mysterious disease, lost to time, bears its colloquial name because those who contracted it entered an “all-enveloping trancelike sleep” (1); and some of those who entered this sleep, did not awake for […]

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June 23

A Genetic Identity Crisis: Mosaicism in the Brain

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We carry with us every day trillions of copies of one of the best stories ever written: the human genome. Carefully drafted and edited over 4 billion years, our genome contains all the information necessary, and then some, for making a human being from scratch. Often we think of this recipe book as a monolith: […]

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May 05

Brainspotting: Are the eyes the window to the soul?

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“On the first session, I started by focusing on a difficult memory while concentrating on the pain that it caused me … This pain reached a climax, then … it died down, giving way to a feeling of peace and well-being … I sometimes felt myself shedding tears, but for each memory, the pain climaxed […]

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February 24

The Neuroscience of Stress

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Not to brag, but I would consider myself to be an expert in stress – not the study of it, but because of how often I’ve experienced it throughout my adult life (yay, grad school!). If you’re reading this article, I’m guessing you can think of a time when you’ve experienced stress, whether that’s cramming […]

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January 21

Ketamine and Psychedelics: Next-Wave Antidepressants

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Ketamine and psychedelics are making headlines as new alternative antidepressant therapeutics. For years scientists have been studying the benefits of these drugs on the brain and exciting new research has led to the idea that our understanding of what underlies depression could be wrong and these next-wave antidepressants could be another remedy of one of […]

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