The following text is adapted from a press release of Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow. AMHF applauds the efforts behind this enlightened legislation. In mid-December 2013, the United States Senate Finance Committee approved the bipartisan Excellence in Mental Health Act, authored by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Roy Blunt (R-MO), to expand access to community mental-health […]
From the December 31, 2013, issue of National Review: America’s mental-health system is a failure, as the massacres perpetrated by deranged individuals in Newtown, Aurora, and elsewhere have made tragically clear. While 10 million people in America suffer from serious mental illness—including 200,000 on our streets, and 300,000 in our prisons—the federal government has in […]
At eighty-five-plus years (But who’s counting the timeless work of a great man?), Eugene Kennedy—former Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, novelist, and, oh yes, compassionate psychologist—remains ever relevant and ahead of our times. As we approach the first anniversary of the Newtown-Sandy Hook massacre, with all the horrors and trauma engendered, Eugene Kennedy was way […]
See the Third Annual Report, to Octoer 31, 2013, of The American Mental Health Foundation here.
AMHF presented during Poster Session IV of the 2013 Annual Meeting of NEPA and the Northeast Conference for Teachers of Psychology on October 19, 2013. Many new friends were made at this two-day meeting (Oct. 18-19) as word spread on the work of the Foundation. Special thanks go to Dr. Jeanine Skorinko of Worcester Polytech […]
AMHF Books will exhibit and sell its books, at special half-price discount, at the Brooklyn Book Festival: rain or shine, Sunday, September 22, Booth 72. Please come and learn more about the work of AMHF.
Dr. Henry Kellerman—author and/or editor of nearly thirty books, including Personality: How It Forms and Anatomy of Delusion (from American Mental Health Foundation Books in 2014)—is the latest member of the foundation Professional Advisory Board. Kellerman, who has a practice in New York City, is also the author of Sleep Disorders: Insomnia and Narcolepsy; The […]
This is the final blog in the AMHF series of twenty-one films relating to “Hollywood and Psychiatry.” These blogs have taken us from ca. 1921, and the release of silent classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a mere three years before The American Mental Health Foundation was organized, into the twenty-first century. The first blog […]
This is film number twenty of twenty-one in the AMHF series, focusing on a range of Hollywood depictions of psychiatry, analysts, and individuals under analysis, from the silent era to the present. (The final film for discussion, an updated version of The Bell Jar, will be included as a kind of “what may be” assuming […]
Experts in showing women the world leading to psychological fulfillment, Joanne and David Gavin will be talking and signing copies of the new AMHF publication Live Your Dreams, Change the World, on Sunday, August 4, 4 p.m., Inquiring Minds bookstore, 6 Church Street, New Paltz, New York. Please join us for this inspiring program.
Counting all ten films in the Crime Doctors series as one, this is the nineteenth of twenty-one Hollywood films, from AMHF, devoted to images of psychiatry, psychiatrists, and psychology. These (basically) one-hour films are in a time-honored, formulaic tradition. As comic-book writers fashioned superheroes with separate, mundane identities, so, a little closer to the workings […]
The May 27, 2013, issue of The New Yorker included a cartoon that we think former AMHF director Stefan de Schill especially would have appreciated. A female therapist sits on an easy chair to the left, several framed academic degrees above her shoulder. On a loveseat next to her, and in front of a large […]
Dr. Joyce Brothers, who paved the way for television figures as diverse as Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer and Dr. Drew Pinsky, and was essential in making the mass-cultural discussion of deep-seated and uncomfortable emotions in the U.S. a more open forum, died yesterday. As my friend notes in the Los Angeles Times obituary—which quotes him […]
Once known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the subject of film number eighteen of twenty-one in the AMHF series on psychiatry in Hollywood. The Three Faces of Eve covers a most controversial disorder—often outright debunked as the current (as of this writing) DSM-4 had made significant changes to the diagnosis. […]
April is World Autism Awareness Month, with Autism Awareness Day annually on April 2. What is Autism Spectrum? It is not easily defined, even by professionals. Modalities of treatment likewise vary and are in their infancy—even as strides are made. AMHF calls our readers’ attention to this often-misunderstood and easily misidentified diagnosis. Asperger’s syndrome (or […]
Do you find the concept of a dreaming phrenologist at all funny? I didn’t think so. Once upon a time, psychoanalysis was viewed as nothing but a shabby cousin of phrenology. Freud and his followers changed all this, even though the tired gags of the usually brilliant Woody Allen might leave one to believe otherwise. […]
Do you know what acrophobia is? The 1950s, like the 1940s, was a rich era for Hollywood depictions of “psychological problems” and themes—especially around words, terms, and concepts not generally known to audiences as such are today: in part, though we often do not realize it, thanks to the very movies we are putting “on […]
This is the fifteenth movie in the AMHF series of twenty-one. Rain Man won four Academy Awards at the sixty-first Oscars show: Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Director, and Actor—Dustin Hoffman’s second in a remarkable performance. The film revolves around the relationship between a younger, self-centered brother, likewise played to perfection by Tom Cruise, an inheritance, […]
Where does the study of neurology leave off and that of psychiatry and psychology begin? (After all, Sigmund Freud was a neurologist.) Do we understand the intermingling of memory and time? What is “real” and what is “perceived”? What are some of the challenges of the aging consciousness? Here is film number fourteen, “analyzed” in […]
This is the thirteenth of twenty-one films in the series on psychiatry in film. The plot summary is provided by Judd Blaise Rovi. New Zealand poet Janet Frame is the subject of Jane Campion’s biographical drama, which presents a poetically evocative look at the author’s turbulent life. The film begins with Frame’s childhood, showing her […]
Have you ever felt that you were in hell? As the word pandemonium derives from John Milton’s Satan and his crew in Paradise Lost—in The Screwtape Letters C. S. Lewis refers to the environment/condition as “The Kingdom of Noise” (“the mind is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell and a hell […]
The current February 25, 2013, issue of The New Yorker contains a review of UK psychoanalytic-writer Adam Phillips’s latest book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. The always-interesting Joan Acocella gives and takes in her notice regarding Phillips’s “invitation” to consider Freud as a philosopher. “Phillips loves Freud. He cites him again and […]
“Where’s the rest of me?” Ronald Reagan implores, having had legs amputated. Former President Reagan even used this famous line as the title of a 1960s memoir. Goethe essentially asks the same question in his 1773-74 Goetz von Berlichingen; or, the Man with the Iron Hand. Are we our legs? Our arms? Our faces? Even […]
I feel unusually close to The Snake Pit, personally, if not intimately and daily, working with one of the writers, Millen Brand, during my early days in book publishing. This, the tenth film out of twenty-one in the AMHF series, required significant research from the filmmakers in adapting an autobiographical novel by Jane Ward. The […]
Amygdala. Corpus Collosum. Dendritic Spines. Voxel. These are words Ferris Jahr, writing in Scientific American, had to add to his Microsoft program in order to avoid all those red squiggles. “Neuron” his program knew, and he thought he knew (May 14, 2012). He did not. Now, Mr. Jahr has begun to appreciate the extraordinary diversity […]
Movie number nine in the American Mental Health Foundation series of twenty-one relating to its mission stars Anthony Perkins (who would famously make a career of playing disturbed individuals: for example in the appropriately named, from the standpoint of this series of essays, Psycho) and the superbly versatile Karl Malden as his unreasonably domineering father (reminiscent of […]
Brains, like all human organs and body parts, wear down with age. As the population ages, as Boomers retire in droves and the sheer numbers of elders increase, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports from September 24, 2012 on a man in his eighties, without dementia, who started making a series of bafflingly bad financial decisions. Told […]
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the eighth of twenty-one films discussed in this blog. It is the earliest movie and the only silent one. It works by flashback and is a vivid visual re-creation of intensely scrambled mental states. The story line, somewhat condensed from Wikipedia, is as follows: The main narrative is introduced […]
This is the seventh film under under close scrutiny in the AMHF series of films. (We “analyze” other movies in different blogs. But not all are come within this series of, eventually, twenty-one.) Alfred Hitchcock had worked under David O. Selznick five years before, directing Rebecca. The association of two such egos was more a […]
As readers of this blog and followers of the AMHF Web site know, in August 2012 the foundation embarked on a two-year study of at-risk youth, in partnership with Astor Services for Children & Families of Rhinebeck and the Bronx, New York. Herewith a report, from Dr. Suzanne Button of Astor, on hopes for this […]
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