Mental Health

Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia by Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D., St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005

 

 

Aaron T. Beck, the founder of modern cognitive therapy, in his book Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, provides a clear and concise portrait of what cognitive therapy is, where and when it can be useful, and its relationship to other forms of psychotherapy. Devotion to common sense is the common vein that runs throughout the book. This lends credibility and coherenceto Beck's argument in support of cognitive therapy as the most appropriate form of psychotherapy in dealing with pure emotional disorders.

Between the top two most common mental illnesses in the US are anxiety and mood disorders, which includes depression. Often a depressed person will suffer from anxiety, but more often still an anxious person suffers from depression. However, anxiety and depression, while intricately entwined, are not one and the same. This paper aims to explore each and the relationship between the two mental disorders.

The relationship one has with oneself is not only of personal interest but an important determinant of mental health.  It is this relationship that can make or break persons, or that can render them successful, well-balanced individuals or unstable and unhappy shadows of the persons that they could have become at their full potential.  One would think that this very important, personal bond human beings share internally could only be affected by one’s own self.  But a great deal of human behavior is socially constructed and a large percentage of those social constructs are created to control and survive social situations.

One of the most important factors that affect child development is the relationship of the child with their primary caregiver.  This common sense statement is a tenet of developmental psychology known as attachment theory.  John Bowlby, the creator of this theory, wanted to examine how early childhood experiences influence personality development.  Attachment theory specifically examines infant’s reactions to being separated from their primary caregiver.  Bowlby hypothesized that the differences in how children react to these situations demonstrates basic behavioral differences in infancy that will have consequences for later social and emotional development.

Julia Lewis

11/7/08

Project Draft

Motor Imagery, Mental Health, and the Brain

Introduction:

Humans are storytellers.  Ever since we developed our characteristically largeneo-cortexes, stories have been the main means for communicating ourunderstandings of the world to ourselves and to others.  Stories give meaning and texture to thelives we live. 

It is well known that our unconscious is receiving many more signals than the conscious mind eventually becomes aware of, or than the unconscious is choosing to use in its creation of the coherent story of “reality” it makes available to the conscious (7). Neuroscience and neurobiology increasingly support the idea that much of what we eventually understand to be behavior governed by our free will is in fact initiated by the unconscious slightly before the conscious mind even becomes aware of it (2).