We know that stress is unhealthy, but does it have any impact on cancer? A new study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation looked at the effect that chronic stress had on ovarian cancer patients. Anil Sood, MD and his colleagues at the University of Texas implanted ovarian cancer cells into mice and then exposed them to stress. The result – their tumors grew more quickly. How? Anoikis is the term used to describe cells that detach from their environment in a type of programmed cell death. This is important because if cancer cells don’t die after they split off,…

Every day I turn on the news and see reports of violence somewhere. . . . it may be armed conflicts in the Middle East or Africa. . . . it may be child or domestic abuse here at home. As a psychologist, my next thought is how to treat the mental anguish that must be all-encompassing for survivors. I wasn’t taught anything about treating trauma in my graduate program. And most of the trauma recovery techniques that I’d learned soon after graduating have since been found not as useful as originally hoped. Traditional talk therapy can sometimes actually re-traumatize…

In case you haven’t already heard, April is National Stress Awareness Month. Why do we as a nation spend an entire month on this topic? Because we need to. Just to put the insidiousness of stress into perspective, here are a few statistics from the American Psychological Association: Highly stressed teenagers are twice as likely to smoke, drink and use illegal drugs. Stress contributes to such life-threatening problems as heart attack, stroke, depression and infection, as well as to chronic aches and pains. Three quarters of Americans experience symptoms related to stress in a given month. About half of Americans…

Some years ago I met Michael White, the now departed co-founder of Narrative Therapy. Soon after, his star rose rather quickly and he became a very well known teacher and writer. But all was not well in Australia, his home country. As Michael traveled around the world, his colleagues at home began to make snide remarks about him: Who the hell did he think he was? Better than everyone else? Anyone who stood above the crowd was likely to get cut down … An Australian friend of mine told me that this was a reflection of what they called there…

Some years back, managed care swept through the therapy field. Most of my therapist colleagues were freaked out, scared or angry about this phenomenon. They tried to hold on to the old reality, but the new one swept over them. What surprised me was how much many of my colleagues, who worked daily to empower their clients and patients to stop being victims, acted like and sounded like victims themselves. …a new wave is sweeping over the culture and the therapy field. It is the Internet. Well, it seems to me the same thing is happening all over again. The…

Yesterday brought to a close our series on the New Brain Science. You and I…all of us really… created something special and along the way, developed new brain pathways in the process. We’ve fired up our neurons in novel ways. For me personally and for all of us at NICABM, it has been so gratifying to see the community’s response. We had no idea that this Series would attract so much interest, would draw such amazing world-wide response and be so well received. And so we’re going to create an Encore. Next week, we’ll replay one of these great sessions….