Featured series 
Tag: Mental Health
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Arts & Culture
A too-short life, examined
D.T. Max, author of a new biography of David Foster Wallace, sat down with professor and critic James Wood to discuss the writer’s legacy and his brief time at Harvard, a catalyst for the breakdown and recovery that inspired much of Wallace’s masterpiece, “Infinite Jest.”
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Campus & Community
Tuned to emotions
Student Mental Health Liaisons promote emotional well-being among their classmates through outreach, events, and activities.
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Health
A therapist at your fingertips
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Harvard are exploring the use of gamelike programs on smartphones to treat anxiety disorders.
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Campus & Community
Breaking away
Harvard College officials applaud students who choose to spend Winter Break away from campus, where they can recharge and reconnect with loved ones. Officials say that the “nothing” that undergraduates often think they’re doing — sleeping, eating well, and tending to relationships — is actually vital for academic success, and for physical and mental health.
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Campus & Community
Finding meaning in loss
Jennifer Page Hughes, a psychologist at the Bureau of Study Counsel, coped with a senseless death by helping others — from Harvard students to the families of 9/11 victims — deal with grief.
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Health
Helping Chinese with depression
A treatment model designed to accommodate the beliefs and concerns of Chinese immigrants appears to significantly improve the recognition and treatment of major depression in this typically underserved group.
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Campus & Community
Relaxation station
The Center for Wellness has a new space in Harvard’s Holyoke Center, but its focus on health and quality of life remain the same.
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Nation & World
Unseen victims of war
Mental health ailments are widespread among Iraqi children and teenagers, a problem compounded by a lack of mental health treatment facilities and inattention to the problem, an Iraqi psychiatrist says.
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Nation & World
Sumner M. Redstone donates $1M
Harvard University today (April 23) announced that Sumner M. Redstone has contributed $1 million to be used by Harvard College and Harvard Law School. This contribution by Redstone, a graduate of both Schools, will establish scholarships for 20 Redstone Scholars to attend Harvard College for the 2010–11 academic year.
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Campus & Community
Farmer’s Tiyatien Health wins mental health competition
Tiyatien Health, a social justice organization co-founded by Paul Farmer, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School, was named the grand prize winner in the Ashoka Foundation’s “Rethinking Mental Health: Improving Community Wellbeing” competition, which seeks “the best solutions to improve mental health in communities around the world.”
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Arts & Culture
Child psychiatrist pens her past
Psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport uncovers a relationship with the mother she scarcely knew in her powerful familial memoir. Infused with accounts of treating her own teenage patients, Rappaport plumbs the bond between parents and children while closing in on healing.
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Health
Researchers identify the brain’s on-off switch for fear
Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital have identified a particular protein in the brain that serves as a trigger for the body’s innate fear response. This discovery suggests a potential target…
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Health
Scholars discuss ‘medicalization’ of formerly normal characteristics
Not long ago, a majority of Americans described themselves as “shy,” a condition of reticence or caution that for ages just seemed natural.
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Health
Study: Key to happiness is listen to others
Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess.
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Science & Tech
A mother’s criticism strikes nerve
Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never-depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed…
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Science & Tech
Fijian girls succumb to Western dysmorphia
In 1982, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Anne E. Becker was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe when she traveled to Fiji for a summer of anthropology fieldwork. What struck her about this South Pacific island nation — and has in many research trips since — was “the absolute preoccupation with food and eating,” she said. “Family…
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Health
Congressmen highlight challenges of mental illness, substance abuse
In 2008, 54 million Americans suffered with mental illness; 35,000 Americans committed suicide due to untreated depression; and 180,000 people died as a direct result of an untreated addiction. Congressmen Jim Ramstad (R-Minn.) and Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) spoke at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Monday (March 2) on the truths and realities of mental…
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Health
Low-income diabetic women at increased risk for postpartum depression
Researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the University of Minnesota have found that living just above the poverty line and having diabetes increases by 50 percent a woman’s chance of developing postpartum depression — a serious illness that affects about one in 10 new mothers.
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Health
Gene variants probably increase risk for anxiety disorders
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers — in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University — have discovered perhaps the strongest evidence yet linking variation in a particular gene with anxiety-related traits. In the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, the team describes finding that particular versions of a…
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Health
University, students unite for mental health
If a student is struggling, stressed-out, or having trouble coping with pressure, the University is here to listen and help. That’s the theme behind this year’s “Speak Out, Mental Health at Harvard,” a weeklong series of events to engage the student body in active campus dialogues about mental health.
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Campus & Community
Robert Dorwart
Robert Dorwart was an academic of the highest rank and a physician committed to understanding and improving the lives of those who could not access quality health care.
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Campus & Community
Statistics captures unpredictability of real world
Harvard’s small but active statistics department celebrated its 50th anniversary last week. There were two days of lectures and panels Oct. 26-27 at the Gutman Conference Center, and a noisy, social, and musical banquet at the Harvard Club of Boston.
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Health
Mental disorders cause 1.3 billion ‘out of role’ days annually
The importance of role disability, that is, inability to work or carry out usual activities, has become increasingly recognized as a major source of indirect costs of illness because of…
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Arts & Culture
‘A place that can be wandered’
In the early 1990s, while still in high school, Anna Schuleit discovered mystery by taking long walks through the deserted grounds of the Northampton State Hospital. This cluster of Victorian buildings — with its iron-bar windows, crumbling red brick, and chest-high grass — touched a deep chord in the young artist.
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Health
Adjusting to death of a loved one
“Is my grief normal?” That is one of the most common questions posed by people who have lost a loved one. A new study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has helped answer that question by affirming the commonly accepted stages of grief – disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance – and the sequence in which…
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Nation & World
Terror war could strain veterans’ health, benefit systems
The cost of caring for veterans of the war on terror could reach $662 billion over the next 40 years, while demand from returning soldiers is already clogging the two major veterans’ assistance programs, according to recent research by Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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Campus & Community
A short history: Psychiatry in modern Africa
Psychiatrists working in Africa during the colonial period held to the belief that Africans did not suffer from depression. They based this idea on the assumption that Africans lacked the…
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Health
Mental casualties of Vietnam War persist
More than 30 years after the end of the war in Vietnam, the effect of lingering stress on Americans who fought there continues to cause stress among researchers.
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Science & Tech
Under-diagnosed rage disorder more prevalent than previously thought
A seldom-studied mental illness called Intermittent Explosive Disorder, characterized by recurrent episodes of angry and potentially violent outbursts — seen in cases of road rage or spousal abuse — has…