The other definition of senile is “pertaining to old age”.  Senile is not “being demented.” That mistake comes from the earlier definition of dementia when in 1895 Arnold Pick identified premature dementia as separate from dementia of old people—senile dementia. Later of course, Emil Kraeplein defined Alzheimer’s dementia, which quickly separated old  (senile) dementia from young (Alzheimer’s disease) dementia. But we still confuse “senile” with “dementia”.

The single most important factor that accelerates aging is negativity—our own and other people’s. In the blue zones we see people living past 100 years of age. Twenty years more than the average, nearly a quarter of a life more. What they do not have in these zones is negative stereotypes.  Although stereotypes exist for everyone—race, gender, sexual preference, size, height, intelligence and even geographic residence—for older adults it is transient and develops fast and have little time to develop resilience.

Richard Eibach from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and his colleagues explained how older people internalize negative stereotypes. In one study the authors asked older adults to read text that had small type and low contrast. Some participants were told that the lack of clarity was due to a photocopying problem, while the rest received no explanation. Older adults that did not receive an explanation reported feeling 10 years older than the participants who had an explanation. And it is not just about feeling old but that they associated feeling old as a negative. Accepting the term “old” you accept an omnibus of negative stereotypes.

Thomas Hess and his colleagues from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC explored how stereotypes create a world of negative memes. There is a self-fulfilling prophesy. When older adults encounter negative stereotypes about age-related cognitive decline, their memory performance decreases, rate their own health as being worse than others, and rate themselves as lonelier.  Stereotypes play a significant self-fulfilling role in diagnosis as well. Physicians who have been primed about the connection between memory loss and dementia—and it is now everywhere in the media—diagnosed 70% of their older adult patients who reported having memory problems, as having dementia rather than 14% when there was no stereotype.

And the stereotype does not have to be transmitted negatively. Even providing assistance while completing a puzzle—implicitly suggesting that they need help—resulted in decreased performance over time, whereas those older adults who were only provided with verbal encouragement showed increased performance over time. Don't let others patronize. Lets take over the concept of senile again. That pertaining to old age is not a negative. Be aware of accepting such negative judgments and of making them about yourself.  We can reverse this process by starting with recognizing that senile does not have to be a negative term.

You may have blushed in situations where you were embarrassed, humiliated, discouraged, or mortified. Although blushing is an innately patterned emotional response, it can be conceived simply as a reaction to heightened self-consciousness.¹ Blushing occurs in situations that you perceive as involving a social transgression, however, it can happen in an exciting situation as well, such as in the self-consciousness of being physically attracted to another person. Such exposure experiences cause you to blush because they activate feelings of shame.² You think of yourself as “caught” in the eyes of others and you may feel as though you are inadequate, lacking, or vulnerable in terms of any number of important attributes.

Yet making matters worse, shame feelings create awareness of your own face, and blushing of the face leads to even greater face-consciousness and self-consciousness.³ When you blush you will have a desire to hide your face from being seen. However, rather than decrease what you are broadcasting from your facial expression, you increase it by blushing. Specifically, the effect of blushing is an increase in facial communication and, consequently, it increases shame.⁴ Although such self-consciousness may lead you to avoid eye contact, some researchers maintain that in these situations individuals look for emotional feedback from their audience.⁵ Thus, although you may shift your gaze and glance down, you may also seek cues about the emotional reactions of other people by glancing at the expressions conveyed through the other person’s eyes.⁶

The face expresses all emotions, however, the face is experienced most prominently in self-conscious shame responses.⁷ Blushing occurs most commonly in the face, given it is the primary source of all communication and emotion. “The face and the eyes are where the self lives,” noted the affect theorist, Silvan Tomkins, “… where it exposes itself and where it receives similar exposures from others.”⁸ So the positive side of your blush is that you are communicating something important about what you feel. Blushing is an honest response, whether it is because you feel “caught” being sexually excited about another person, or mortified about being observed in a social wrongdoing or accident, such as being an important event and spilling something all over yourself.

Physiologically, blushing occurs when an emotional trigger causes your glands to release the hormone adrenaline in your body. Adrenaline has an effect on your nervous system, which in turn causes the capillaries that carry blood to your skin to widen. Since blood is brought closer to the surface of the skin, it causes you to blush. Blushing does not only occur on the face. You may blush in any part of the body to which attention is directed.⁹ What’s interesting about blushing is that receptors in the veins of human necks and cheeks dilate in response to social threat.¹⁰ What’s threatened in the case of such a shame response is not only your self-acceptance, but your social acceptance as well.

Blushing can be to your advantage because it is a distinct signal of sincere regret; it signals to others that you acknowledge your shame, mishap, or social wrongdoing, and promotes trust and positive judgments by observers.¹¹ In other words, if you show embarrassment, for example, by blushing at your transgressions you are more prone to be liked, forgiven, and trusted than those who do not, and, as a result, your blush may help you save face.¹²

References

1. Tomkins, S.S. (1962/2008). Affect Imagery Consciousness. New York: Springer.
2. Nathanson, D. Nathanson, D.L. (1992), Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. New York: Norton.
3. Tomkins, S.S., cited above.
4. Tomkins, S.S., cited above.
5. Darby and Harris
6. Darby and Harris
7. Tomkins, S.S., cited above.
8. Tomkins, S.S., cited above.
9. Tomkins, S.S., cited above.
10. Drummond, P., & Lance, J. (1997). Facial flushing and sweating mediated by the sympathetic nervous system. Brain, 110, 793–803.
11. Dijk, C., Koenig, B., Ketelaar, T., & de Jong, P. (2011). Saved by the blush: Being trusted despite defecting. Emotion, 11(2), 313–319.
12. Keltner, D., & Anderson, C. (2000). Saving face for Darwin: The functions and uses of embarrassment. Current directions in psychological science, 9(6), 187–192.

(For information about my books, please see my website: www.marylamia.com)

Rejection can be a painful process for almost anyone (unless you’re English). For many, rejection is what happens when a (perhaps overly-bloated) ego ends up facing the reality that it really isn’t as good as it likes to tell people it is. For others, rejection is what happens when the person in charge of making the decision doesn’t possess the accuracy of assessment that they think they do (or wish they did), and failed to recognize your genius. One of the most notable examples of the latter is The Beatle’s Decca audition in 1962, during which the band was told they had no future in show business. Well over 250 million certified sales later, “oops” kind of fails to cut it with respect to how large of a blunder that decision was. This is by no means a phenomenon unique to The Beatles either: plenty of notable celebrities had been previously discouraged or rejected from their eventual profession by others. So we have a bit of error management going on here: record labels want to do things like (a) avoid signing artists that are unlikely to go anywhere while (b) avoiding failures to sign the best-selling band of all time. As they can’t do either of those things with perfect accuracy, they’re bound to make some mistakes.

Part of the problem facing companies that put out products such as albums, books, movies, and the rest, is that popularity can be a terribly finicky thing, since popularity can often snowball on itself. It’s not necessarily the objective properties of a song or book that make it popular; a healthy portion of popularity depends on who else likes it (which might sound circular, but it’s not). This tends to make the former problem of weeding out the bad artists easier than finding the superstars: in most cases, people who can’t sing well won’t sell, but just because one can sing well it doesn’t mean they’re going to be a hit. As we’re about to see, these problems are shared not only by people who put out products like music or movies; they’re also shared by people who publish (or fail to publish) scientific research. A recent paper by Siler, Lee, & Bero (2014) sought to examine how good the peer review process – the process through which journal editors and reviewers decide what gets published and what does not – is at catching good papers and filtering out bad ones.

The data examined by the authors focused on approximately 1,000 papers that had been submitted to three of the top medical journals between 2003 and 2004: Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, and The Lancet. Of the 1,008 manuscripts, 946 – or about 94% of them – were rejected. The vast majority of those rejections – about 80% – were desk rejections, which is when an article is not sent out for review before the journal decides to not publish it. From that statistic alone, we can already see that these journals are getting way more submissions than they could conceivably publish or review and, accordingly, lots of people are going to be unhappy with their decision letters. Thankfully, publication isn’t a one-time effort; authors can, and frequently do, resubmit their papers to other journals for publication. In fact, 757 of the rejected papers were found to have been subsequently published in other journals (more might have been published after being modified substantially, which would make them more difficult to track). This allowed Siler, Lee, & Bero (2014) the opportunity to compare the articles that were accepted to those which were rejected in terms of their quality and importance.

Now determining an article’s importance is a rather subjective task, so the authors decided to focus instead on the paper’s citation counts – how often other papers had referenced them – as of April 2014. While by no means a perfect metric, it’s a certainly a reasonable one, as most citations tend to be positive in nature. First, let’s consider the rejected articles. Of the articles that had been desk rejected by one of the three major journals but eventually published in other outlets, the average citation count was 69.8 per article; somewhat lower than the articles which had been sent out for review before they had been rejected (M = 94.65). This overstates the “average” difference by a bit, however, as citation count is not distributed normally. In the academic world, some superstar papers receive hundreds or thousands of the citations, whereas many others hardly receive any. To help account for this, the authors also examined the log-transformed number of citations. When they did so, the mean citation count for the desk rejected papers was 3.44, and 3.92 for the reviewed-then-rejected ones. So that is some evidence consistent with the notion that those who decide whether or not to send papers out for review work as advertised: the less popular papers (which we’re using as a proxy for quality) were rejected more readily, on average.

There’s also evidence that, if the paper gets sent out to reviewers, the peer reviewers are able to assess a paper’s quality with some accuracy. When reviewers send their reviews back to the journal, they suggest that the paper be published as is, with minor/major revisions, or rejected. If those suggestions are coded as numerical values, each paper’s mean reviewer score can be calculated (e.g., fewer recommendations to reject = better paper). As it turns out, these scores correlated weakly – but positively – with an article’s subsequent citation count (r = 0.28 and 0.21 with citation and logged citation counts, respectively), so it seems the reviewers have at least some grasp on the paper’s importance and quality as well. That said, the number of times an article was revised prior to acceptance had no noticeable effect on it’s citation count. While reviewers might be able to discern the good papers from the bad at better-than-chance rates, the revisions they suggested did not appear to have a noticeable impact on later popularity.

What about the lucky papers that managed to get accepted by these prestigious journals? As they had all gone out for peer review, the reviewer’s scores were again compared against citation count, revealing a similarly small but positive correlation (0.21 and 0.26 with citation and logged citation counts). Additionally, the published articles that did not receive any recommendations to reject from the reviewers received higher citation counts on average (162.8 and 4.72) relative to those with at least one recommendation to reject (115.24 and 4.33). Comparing these numbers to the citation counts of the rejected articles, we can see a rather larger difference: articles being accepted by the high-end journals tended to garner substantially more citations than the ones that were rejected, whether before or after peer review.

That said, there’s a complication present in all this: papers rejected from the most prestigious journals tend to subsequently get published in less-prestigious outlets, which fewer people tend to read. As fewer eyes tend to see papers published in less-cited journals, this might mean that even good articles published in worse journals receive less attention. Indeed, the impact factor of the journal (the average citation count of the recent articles published in it) in which an article was published correlated 0.54 with citation and 0.42 with logged citation counts. To help get around that issue, the authors compared the published to rejected-then-published papers in journals with an impact factor of 8 or greater. When they did so, the authors found, interestingly, that the rejected articles were actually cited more than the accepted ones (212.77 vs 143.22 citations and 4.77 and 4.53 logged citations). While such an analysis might bias the number of “mistaken” rejections upwards (as it doesn’t count the papers that were “correctly” bumped down into lower journals), it’s a worthwhile point to bear in mind. It suggests that, above a certain threshold of quality, the acceptance or rejection by a journal might reflect chance differences more than meaningful ones.

But what about the superstar papers? Of the 15 most cited papers, 12 of them (80%) had been desk rejected. As the authors put it, “This finding suggests that in our case study, articles that would eventually become highly cited were roughly equally likely to be desk-rejected as a random submission“. Of the remaining three papers, two had been rejected after review (one of which had been rejected by two of the top 3 journals in question). While it was generally the case, then, that peer review appears to help weed out the “worst” papers, the process does not seem to be particularly good at recognizing the “best” work. Much like The Beatles Decca audition, then, rockstar papers are not often recognized as such immediately. Towards the end of the paper, the authors make reference to some other notable cases of important papers being rejected (one of which being rejected twice for being trivial and then a third time for being too novel).

It is worth bearing in mind that academic journals are looking to do more than just publish papers that will have the highest citation count down the line: sometimes good articles are rejected because they don’t fit the scope of the journal; others are rejected just because the journals just don’t have the space to publish them. When that happens, they thankfully tend to get published elsewhere relatively soon after; though “soon” can be a relative term for academics, it’s often within about half a year.

There are also cases where papers will be rejected because of some personal biases on the part of the reviewers, though, and those are the cases most people agree we want to avoid. It is then that the gatekeepers of scientific thought can do the most damage in hindering new and useful ideas because they find them personally unpalatable. If a particularly good idea ends up published in a particularly bad journal, so much the worse for the scientific community. Unfortunately, most of those biases remain hidden and hard to definitively demonstrate in any given instance, so I don’t know how much there is to do about reducing them. It’s a matter worth thinking about.

References: Siler, K., Lee, K., & Bero, L. (2014). Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), DOI10.1073/pnas.1418218112

When your body got going, your mother mainly owned it. Ownership in law is equivalent to a bundle of rights, in this case relative to use and control. Your father might have had some rights or not, depending on the culture you were conceived in. The State had some ownership as well, from dictating the extent of your mother’s right to end the pregnancy to determining what she was allowed to eat and drink. You had no ownership at all.

Much child development can be usefully construed as a transfer of ownership rights from others to the individual. At age one, the child has no privacy rights but may have some control over what she eats. The child has some ownership by age one of what she does, but she is easily bundled up and taken from one place to another whether she wants to go or not. When one of my sons turned three, the pediatrician told him, “You’re three; nobody touches your dick but you.” I imagine this dominion over the genitals is disputed by many parents, but at some point, nearly every parent yields their access rights to their child’s privates.

Melanie Klein taught us that children’s lying to their parents is a natural and healthy stage of development. It’s the child’s way of claiming dominion over their private thoughts and private behavior. Children will test their parents’ willingness to keep their noses out of the children’s business, and parents either honor these limits or they sneak around them or they teach their children that they are not the owners of themselves, for better or worse. Much conflict in adolescence has to do with the varying definitions of dominion; the child thinks she owns herself and the parents think her ownership is only partial. Perhaps needless to say, when a child is forbidden ownership of some parts of herself, she will concentrate on elaborating her ownership of the rest. Many eating disorders and delinquencies boil down to this, as does some cutting.

Oddly, this is one area of parenting that is almost always done badly. Even the most considerate and attuned parent has just gotten used to the child’s new level of self-ownership when the child moves on. The pace is so rapid and the aspects of ownership are so varied that it isn’t possible for a parent to get it right and stay right. Discussion of the issue should help, as with any conflict. One of my favorite moments in any film was in an otherwise forgettable James Garner movie where his teenage son complains about not being taken seriously. Garner tells him that when he was little, Garner would change his diaper, get him all cleaned and powdered, and then lean over and kiss his soft little butt. Garner says that once you’ve done that to someone, it’s hard to take him seriously. In most of our relationships, we tactfully allow people to claim a role they want to play, and we do not discredit their attempts to play a role by reminding them of old inconsistencies. But with our own children, we can’t help ourselves, even if we manage to keep our mouths shut. In my heart of hearts, no matter how accomplished and intelligent I consider my sons to be, I see them in my mind’s eye as wearing pajamas with feet in them.

Eventually, in adulthood, one has—in contemporary America, at least—pretty widespread dominion over oneself. The State still maintains an interest regarding drugs, various criminal behaviors, whether you are allowed to die, and so on. You may have licensed others to express various ownerships rights, from fondling to medical decision-making. But mainly, you own your own body. It’s up to you to decide how to divide this ownership between your present self and your future self. If you give too much control to your future self, you may miss out on some fun stuff. If you give too much control to your present self, you may live to regret various tattoos, donuts, and selfishness. I think a friendly conversation about the transfer of rights from parents to children helps children, once grown, engage in an internal dialogue about the transfer of rights from a present self to a future self.

Worrying can feel like a way to cover our bases, to find answers, to be responsible, or to keep that plane in the air. In reality, it’s wasted energy. If something bad does happen, worry didn’t stop it. If it doesn’t happen, worry only sucked any joy from the moment. 

Even when we realize that our worries are pointless and quite often irrational, it’s not easy to turn them off. But it’s important that we try. Worry can release stress hormones that trigger health issues, such as digestive and cardiac disorders, and can lead to depression. It can also be a trigger for substance abuse. After all, drinks and pills seem to promise a quick way to blot worry from our minds, at least for the moment. 

The next time you feel that sickening knot building inside you, try these strategies for flipping the worry switch to “off.”

1. Live in the now.

Our lives feel as though they take a linear path, but in reality, everything that has ever happened to us or will happen to us occurs now. Appreciating that all we have is this moment can help us realize the pointlessness of worry, with its projection into a future that may never be.

2. Don’t try to brace yourself for the bad stuff.

Bad things will come in life. Worrying about them won’t stop them or better prepare you for them; it will simply exhaust you. Rather than using your energy to anticipate problems, save it to deal with them when, and if, they come.

3. Give yourself permission not to worry.

Worry can feel like a responsibility — it can even seem like the sign of a compassionate person. After all, good parents worry about their kids, hard workers worry about their jobs, involved citizens worry about the environment, and so on, right? They may well do so, but it doesn’t do much good. Caring, however, along with positive action, does.

4. Give yourself permission to worry.

If you can’t shake your worry, give yourself permission not to fight it. Instead, try to contain it; set aside a few minutes to worry about the issue each day. You may find that time or circumstances eventually make your worry moot. At the very least, you may be able to minimize the impact on your life.

5. Think positive.

Much has been written about the power of positive thinking to make us healthier and happier. Try it the next time the “what ifs” start to pile up. For example, instead of thinking “What if I mess up this presentation?” tell yourself, “I’m going to do great.” You’re much more likely to do well with a positive mindset. Surrounding yourself with positive people also helps - worry can be contagious. 

6. Be aware of distorted thinking.

Is your worry based on a legitimate concern, or has it taken on a life of its own? Worry can have an almost superstitious quality, as though by worrying about something, we are making it less likely to happen. We may even worry about the good times, convinced that they will turn bad. The next time you find yourself worrying, ask yourself what is really worrying you, what would happen if you stop, and what you are accomplishing by continuing to worry.

7. Analyze your worry history.

Think back to times when you were worried. Did what you feared come to pass? And if so, were you able to handle it? Did your worry help in any way? Do those past worries now seem inconsequential? A realistic assessment will probably show you that not only do worries get easily overblown, you are more capable than you think of dealing with problems that come your way.

8. Let go of control.

When things are out of your control, it’s healthy to embrace a little fatalism. There’s not much we can do, for example, when taking a cruise other than picking a reputable company and making sure we know where the lifeboat station is. At some point, we simply have to hand off control if we want to be able to enjoy the experience - and our lives.

9. Embrace imperfection.

Strive for quality and the peace that it brings, but recognize that just like everyone else, you are going to mess up sometimes. You will not please everyone. You are going to have failures. That’s life. It’s messy. Realizing this can make worry seem much less necessary.

10. Let it out.

When worries are shared, they have much less chance to take hold and grow. Talk to a trusted friend or relative, or seek help from a professional therapist. The simple act of opening up to someone can sometimes be all you need to regain your peace of mind.

David Sack, M.D., is a triple board-certified psychiatrist and addiction specialist who serves as CEO of Elements Behavioral Health, a network of addiction and mental health centers that includes Malibu Vista women’s mental health program, Promises Treatment Centers in Southern California, The Recovery Place, and Lucida Treatment Center in Florida.

By Carlo Siracusa, DVM, MS, PhD, Dip. ACVB, Dip. ECAWBM

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and share the emotional state of another sentient. Though animal and human emotions are controlled by the invisible brain, individuals are able to show their emotions through language. A species-typical language is formed by vocalizations, body posture and facial expressions, and chemical signals like odors and pheromones. While communication between individuals of different species is likely to be difficult, it is usually easy among individuals of the same species because of the common genetic and environmental background.

But things can devolve within the same species when language is influenced by the environment. This is the case with human verbal communication. If you have lived in a foreign country, you have experienced the frustration caused by miscommunication, misunderstandings and consequent incidental conflicts. We often forget that people speaking a different language live in a different cultural environment, and may find unacceptable and emotionally challenging what for us is “normal”. This difficulty in communication is something that our pets experience everyday. As individuals belonging to very different species, pets and people have very different languages and perceptions of the environment.

Languages have evolved to favor communication among individuals of the same species living in a specific environment. What may be useful and safe for a species adapted to an environment may be useless and/or threatening to a different species that evolved in another environment. The same is true for humans, dogs, cats and all other animals. Domestication has made it possible for some animals to share their lives with us with an acceptable degree of safety and comfort. The domestication of the dog has greatly improved its communicative skills with humans; dogs are able to understand human verbal and body signals perhaps better than any other species. A dog will often understand what the emotional state of the owner is from his tone of voice, and will reach for an object that the owner signals with his finger. This has been essential to the survival of a domestic species that is so dependant upon and attached to humans.

However humans, dogs and cats are still species with enormously different communicative skills. Their respective languages have evolved primarily for communication within their own species in their typical environment, and then have partially adapted to a life together. Cats have lived most of their evolutionary life in an environment in which they did not share resources (there is not too much to share when your prey is a small mouse!) and therefore were rarely in close contact. When cats started to live around humans, resources became more abundant and cats congregated around them. The felines then tolerated better proximity because they were feeling less threatened by each other. But their communicative skills were still relatively poor, having lived most of their evolutionary life in “solitude”. This is true also for our purring household cat, which will express his affection rubbing for a few seconds and lying close to us on the couch. On the other hand, we love petting, hugging and kissing our cats for a long time, because close physical contact is a prevalent way of expressing affection among humans. This difference can be a source of conflict when, for example, we pet our cat for 10 minutes while watching TV and do not pay any attention to his body language. He will suddenly turn around and bite your hand to say, “Stop it!"

Certainly the history of dog evolution is different, as dogs have always been social animals, sharing their territory and resources. They developed sophisticated communicative skills, partially adapted to life with humans, and they use close physical interaction with conspecifics and humans. But do they always enjoy the exuberance that some people show when interacting with an unfamiliar dog? To answer this question, let’s observe what most dogs would do to greet another dog or a human. They would approach an unfamiliar individual with some caution, while their tail is wagging, and smell him to perceive odors and pheromones carrying important information. Only after this would they decide the next step to take. The wagging tail does not necessarily signal happiness; it just says that the dog is involved in a social interaction. If we want to know what the dog thinks about the interaction, we have to look at the rest of his body. If he is “play bowing”, he may be happy to start a playful interaction. Conversely, if his ears are positioned backward and his tongue is repeatedly licking his lips and nose, then the dog probably needs some more time before engaging in a closer interaction. There are many other behaviors that a dog can show in similar circumstances, and each of them comes with a different message. Unfortunately we don’t always pay attention to these messages and, unless a dog is clearly showing an aggressive behavior, we assume that he is fine with us. So we move forward too quickly and start a close physical interaction that might make feel the dog threatened.

When I moved out of Southern Italy, I used to do what most people do there when they greet someone… hugging and kissing. Then I realized that this was making many people uncomfortable, and therefore I start greeting people in a less exuberant manner! Even though my intention was very benign, my behavior was not appropriate in that cultural context. How did I realize this? Observing people’s behavior to understand what was an appropriate way of communicating “affection.”  Similarly, this is what we should do with our pets:

-          Know the species-typical behavior;

-          Observe the behavior of the single individual to understand his messages;

-          Respond appropriately, in accordance with the pet’s point of view!

This is a great exercise to improve our communication skills and promote empathy towards those species, cultures, and individuals that see the world in a different way. We have to share Planet Earth with many other creatures, so we should make an effort to understand their emotions and respect them. Let’s start with the people and animals that live with us!

Carlo Siracusa
DVM, MS, PhD, Dip. ACVB, Dip. ECAWBM

Director, Animal Behavior Service
Matthew J. Ryan Veterinary Hospital
School of Veterinary Medicine
University of Pennsylvania
3900 Delancey St.
Philadelphia, PA  19104

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There was never an official diagnosis, but I knew my seasonal, winter depression was a case of serious HOLIDAY caused by being Jewish at Christmas.  Oh sure, we had Chanukah. It’s billed as “the festival of light” but it’s really Christmas-light. “Dreidel” isn’t even in MS spellcheck. You won’t find a latkeh with Judah Maccabee’s face on E-bay.

Growing up, my family tried to put on a festive face. We’d stick a tarnished menorah in the window, our way of saying “us too” in the neighborhood’s winter wonderland of sleighs, reindeers and elves, each house giving off more light than a shuttle launch. We had those blue and white streamers attached to banisters and we spun plastic Dreidels, but what I was lusting for was Santa, the first unavailable man in my life. I yearned to sit in his oversized lap and whisper what I wanted. Unlike my mother, he wouldn’t have scoffed, “You don’t need a training bra!” He would have, I knew, found me adorable and “ho ho ho’ed” at my jokes, making sure I got not only the training bra, but a cocker spaniel puppy as a bonus.

If I was caught moping, I’d be reminded, “We have our own holiday.” Uncle Norman never tired of telling us about the victory of the Jews over the Hellenistic Syrians in the battle of the Maccabees – hardly your warm-hearted, Hallmark moment. Christmas and Chanukah are apples and oranges. The story of Jesus born in a manger to a virgin is a guaranteed ratings win over a forgotten tribe, even with the long-lasting oil miracle thrown in as a B-story. If there’s a miracle, it’s that anyone converts to Judaism when it means giving up chocolate Easter bunnies and eating bitter herbs! Christian holidays have been “Disneyfied,” escalating in proportion and visibility. Christmas has the longest shelf life of any holiday, which is why my holiday depression extended to spring, when the last of the Christmas decorations would finally wilt from the heat.

You’d think eight days of gift giving might make up for something, but not when your family is “practical”. They didn’t want to “spoil” us. On the first day of Chanukah, I’d get one glove. On the second day, I’d get the other one. And we lived in LA, where nobody wore gloves. By day three we were out of brisket and the fun of trying to shove candles into slots filled with last year’s wax had worn off. I wanted to be part of the ritual of holiday shopping, but the only presents I needed were for were the newspaper delivery guy and my hairdresser, people whose last names I didn’t know. Everyone would be saying, “Merry Christmas” and I, who thought of myself as quick-witted, would be stumped for a response. This was no piece of honey cake.

Never mind how many scientific theories or vaccines our people have come up with, in December, we’re not a main event. Try looking for Chanukah wrapping paper in the Rite-Aid in North Dakota. Even in Manhattan, where Hispanics speak fluent Yiddish, a supermarket had put out matzo for Chanukah. And don’t think I was the only Christmas wannabe; Jewish superstar Barbra Streisand made a Christmas album. That’s right, our Yentl! You don’t get Taylor Swift singing “Chillin’ in the Gefillen.”

I’m not sure when things were recast for me, maybe when I heard “Put on your yalmuka. Here comes Chanukah”. As unlikely a guru as Adam Sandler got me out of my funk, getting me to see there is, in fact, a bright side to celebrating the holiday of lights. I had time off and didn’t have to go to church. Christmas Eve I’d gotten into a first-run movie without dialing Fandango. Their holidays get more press, but that’s all they get; we get theirs and ours. And if we want to take a day off, we can make up a holiday. “I can’t come in tomorrow because it’s the first day of “Cha…anything”. I started counting the perks.

Here are 10 REASONS why we Jewish people should be happy at Christmas:

1. We’ll never end up in an emergency room because we fell off a roof putting up reindeer.

2. We’re not traveling during black-out periods to see family. Because of the quirky timing of Chanukah, we can actually use frequent flyer miles.

3. There’s none of that lying to our kids about Santa Claus or pretending the toys are made by elves, not by children in China.

4. We’re not pressured to be happy, which is why it’s not such a Jewish thing to commit suicide during Christmas.

5. Nobody will ever knit us a red wool sweater with reindeer on it.

6. We don’t have to climb a ladder and hang tinsel on a tree with most of it ending up clinging to our clothes.

7. We’re not spending most of January standing on long lines, without receipts yet, to return a fondue set.

8. We can send cards, such as a New Years or Passover card won’t get lost in a huge stack of Christmas cards.

9. Less cholesterol in Potato Latkes than ham.

10. And if this were the only perk, it would be enough. We get jelly doughnuts for dessert, not a Christmas fruitcake with dried maraschino cherries on top.

Before you ask: I’m not the grinch.

I’d like to propose a radical experiment this holiday season: stop buying each other “stuff.” That means no gadgets, no toys, and especially no gift cards.

Instead, give “experiences.” Tickets to a concert, or the spa, or even better, something you’ve planned yourself (like a camping trip). You, and the recipient, may thank me in the end.

Years of psychology research have made it clear that material possessions aren’t what make us happy.

Why experiences, then? Back in 2009, researchers from San Francisco State University found that people who spent money on vacations, dinners and events (experiences) had more long-term satisfaction than those who spent it on physical items. Spending money on events yields social interaction that physical items don’t, and may provide lasting memories. I’m sure you can recall an amazing concert you went to, but do you really think of your first cellphone with the same kind of fondness?

But it’s not just that experiences are “better” than material things. There’s a bigger problem that psychologist have studied that many call “Keeping up with the Joneses.” The concept is simple: Mr. or Mrs. Jones, next door, has a 4k TV projector, why don’t we? Or, I need to get the new Mustang to impress the guys at work. More often than not, it just doesn’t make financial sense. But aside from the implications for your budget, it also has some pretty alarming psychological effects. Research has found that people who highly valued material possessions were less satisfied with their lives. And people who have low self-esteem are more likely to “keep up with the Joneses” as a coping mechanism.

Asking for the latest tech this year probably won’t bring you the happiness you want. But that’s not to say giving is bad. Spending money on others yields more satisfaction than spending money on oneself. People who donated to charity or took friends out to lunch were reportedly happier than those who didn’t, for instance.

So how can we be joyful this holiday season? You don’t need to be a spiritual person to get back to the “roots” of the holiday. It’s loving relationships that make humans thrive, not material things. Take your family out to the movies, write those cheesy coupons that say “Good for one home-cooked meal,” and try not to let your family’s nagging get on your case too much.

For more on positive psychology, follow Dr. Fader on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s the 23rd of December: it’s Christmas Eve eve. Children all over the world are lining up in shopping malls and on Main Streets, waiting for a chance to sit in Saint Nicholas’ (or Sinterklaas’, or Santa Claus’) lap. They’re promising they haven’t been naughty, just nice. And they’re rattling off lists of the presents they want.

A little more than 2000 years ago, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David.” So his mother was told. Jesus was descended from Abraham through David, Israel’s great if flawed king; he was brought gold, frankincense and myrrh by 3 magi, or wise men, who followed a star from the east; he was tried by the governor, Pontius Pilate, and made no answer to the question, “Are you the King of the Jews;” but afterwards he sat at the right hand of God, and judged.

The word κύριος, Lord or Master, appears in 771 times in the New Testament, in 665 different verses—237 verses in the gospels, 102 verses in Acts, 305 verses in the letters, and 21 verses in Revelation. That Lord is deferred to (“You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve”); and prayed to (“Lord, help me,” “Lord, have mercy,” “Lord, let me receive my sight”); and praised (“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”); and loved (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”).

At the same time that Jesus was first worshipped in Bethlehem, there was another Lord in Rome. People made sacrifices to Julius Caesar’s successor, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, who dressed up like the sun god at dinner; his friends called him divinum adulescentem, a divine teenager, or gushed mihi semper deus, that he’d always be a god to them. Obedient subjects were rewarded. Disobedient subjects were not. Nero, who was the last member of Julius Caesar’s dynasty, and Augustus’ great-great-grandson, had Christians crucified or beheaded, or worse.

But like other Roman emperors, he was a Saturnalia fan. Starting on the 17th of December, schools and businesses closed for days, and people celebrated Saturn’s Golden Age. Wine flowed, people caroused, presents were exchanged. All of Rome had a party. And status was erased. Masters waited on their servants; Lords were ignored. And everybody put on a pileus—the felt cap that freed slaves wore. 

I love holidays at the winter solstice. I love making the deadest, darkest time of the year light and green. And I love playing Santa. But I too am a fan of the Saturnalia.

With an almost irresistible itch to put on my pileus.

PHOTO CREDIT:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phrygian_cap_on_pole.svg

ACCOMPANIMENT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPM

“The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day 
in Beverly Hills, L.A.


But it's December the twenty-fourth,

And I am longing to be up North…

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

Just like the ones I used to know”

-- Irving Berlin, White Christmas (with original opening lyrics)

As an east coast transplant, when it’s sunny in the 70’s here in Los Angeles, like it usually is year round, it can be hard to get into the Christmas spirit. Without the clear shift of seasons, the holidays often creep up on you without warning. One day you’re sitting out in the sun, the next you’re putting presents under the boughs of a pine tree. But according to the little-known opening lyrics to “White Christmas” (see above), that same disorienting feeling didn’t stop Irving Berlin from writing the most recorded Christmas song of all time. So here’s a little Christmas blogpost for the holiday week.

I was thinking of writing about that most iconic figure of American Saturnalia, Santa Claus. I remember as a child leaving cookies for Santa and proclaiming in an accompanying letter how  “other kids at school don’t believe in you, but I do.” Not too long after, I also recall overhearing my older brother talking to my parents and saying, “you mean, he still believes in him?” Looking back on it, it’s hard not to feel just a little silly and to think twice about the traditional selling of our kids on the folie à millions that is jolly old St. Nick. But no point in playing Scrooge and declaring war on Santa Claus – this has been a well-tread topic here at Psychology Today in past years:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201212/say-goodbye-the-santa-claus-lie

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201312/the-santa-claus-lie-debate-answering-objections

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/singletons/201312/if-and-when-spill-the-beans-about-santa-claus

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/think-well/201209/is-telling-kids-santa-claus-is-real-bad-idea

Santa Claus has even been a subject in the academic literature. An article published in Psychiatric Bulletin with the provocative title, “What if Santa Died? Childhood Myths and Development” (1) argues that we ought not feel guilty about perpetuating the Santa Claus mythology to our kids, whose childhood is defined by the freedom to revel in fantasy. That stance echoes something I wrote some years back in a paper called “Faith or Delusion: At the Crossroads of Religion and Psychosis” (2):

“In a world where only rational thinking existed, there would be no religion or delusion, but also no myth, fiction, or fantasy. This might prove to be a very boring world indeed.”

So, let’s take a different angle on Christmas fantasy and leave Santa alone. Instead, I’m going to discuss a psychology experiment called the White Christmas Test (WCT). In the original version of the WCT published in 1964, female test subjects were instructed to close their eyes and imagine that the Bing Crosby rendition of “White Christmas” was playing. After 30 seconds, 54% of subjects stated that they heard the song and had heard it clearly (3). This was thought to reflect the ability to “hallucinate” as a result of hypnotic suggestion.

A hallucination is a sensory experience that occurs in the absence of any stimulation to our sense organs, like “hearing voices” or “seeing things” that aren’t really there. It is well known that far more people have hallucinatory experiences than have mental illnesses like schizophrenia. In other words, it can be normal to hear voices. For example, a surprisingly large number of college students report having had auditory hallucinations at some point in their lives. But it isn’t at all clear what these experiences really represent. Are they the same as the hallucinations of schizophrenia? Or are they something altogether different?

In a paper published in 1972, the WCT was administered to subjects with hallucinations associated due to schizophrenia as well as normal control subjects (4). As with the original WCT study, a sizeable proportion (40%) of normal subjects reported hearing the “White Christmas” song, but a much larger proportion of those with schizophrenia (85%) did so. This raised the question of whether the hallucinations of schizophrenia might represent a kind of heightened auditory imagination. This early finding is consistent with a now popular theory that the voice hearing experiences reported by seemingly normal people without mental illness and those of people with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia may be essentially the same, separated perhaps by degree or intensity. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to this as the “lumping” hypothesis (5).

The WCT has been used to examine the phenomenon of hallucinations in normal people, with modification from the original test. In the main variant, instead of just asking to imagine the song, subjects first actually listen to a recording of it. Then, they’re told that while listening to a subsequent recording of white noise through headphones, the “White Christmas” song might be “embedded in the white noise below the auditory threshold.” If they hear part of the song clearly during a few minutes of listening to white noise, subjects are instructed to press a button. The twist is that the “White Christmas” song is never actually played within the white noise.

In an experiment using this design by Harald Merckelbach and Vincent van de Ven (6), 32% of a small group of college students reported hearing the “White Christmas” song within white noise as least once. Compared to those who did not hear the song, the students who did scored higher on the Creative Experiences Questionnaire, which measures “fantasy proneness,” a “deep and profound involvement in fantasy and imagination.” In a subsequent study by the same authors, 35% of college students reported hearing the “White Christmas” song, which was again correlated with greater fantasy proneness, and was not related scales that measure self-reported imagery ability or “schizotypal," psychotic-like, experiences like believing in telepathy or sometimes feeling like things aren’t real (7). Together, these findings suggest that more than anything related to hallucinations or psychosis, WCT results are a reflection of heightened fantasy proneness in a large minority of normal people.

In other words, some of us are more likely to report patterns in noise and this seems to be correlated with a psychological trait called fantasy proneness. There’s nothing necessarily pathological about this trait, though Merkelbach and van de Ven cite other research that has shown that people who have a high degree of fantasy proneness tend to be more susceptible to false memories or to report paranormal experiences. They believe that the association between hearing the “White Christmas” song and fantasy proneness demonstrates that some people may simply be more likely to show a “response bias” that favors the reporting of odd or unusual experiences rather than actually experiencing them. This conclusion supports an alternative view of “normal” and “pathological” voice-hearing, namely that they are fundamentally different phenomena. This is what I call the “splitting” hypothesis.

A more recent experiment studied the effects of self-reported stress and caffeine intake on the WCT in normal subjects (8). The authors found that hearing the “White Christmas” song was most influenced, not by fantasy proneness or schizotypal traits, but rather a combination of high stress and high caffeine intake. This provocative finding suggests that alterations in brain chemistry from external sources may play an important role in increasing the likelihood of reporting patterns amidst noise.

In the final analysis, the WCT is a probably a limited tool to understand phenomenological differences among voice-hearing experiences and may not tell us much about anything related to actual hallucinations. Instead, there is ongoing research using a variety of more sophisticated methods, such as functional neuroimaging, to explore differences between “normal” and “pathological” voice hearing. I’ll return to this subject in later posts.

In the meantime, when you’re fueled up on coffee in order to rise to the daunting task of doing your last minute Christmas shopping at a noisy mall, think about whether you happen to hear “White Christmas.” Of course, as the most recorded Christmas song in history, it may actually be playing. But if it’s not, don’t fret. There’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy around Christmas time, whether you’re a kid or an adult.

References

1. Breen L. What if Santa died? Childhood myths and development. Psychiatric Bulletin 2004; 28:455-456.

2. Pierre JM. Faith or delusion: At the crossroads of religion and psychosis. Journal of Psychiatric Practice 2001; 7: 163-172.

3. Barber TX, Calverey DS. An experimental study of hypnotic (auditory and visual) hallucinations. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 1964; 68:13-20.

4. Mintz S, Alpert M. Imagery, vividness, reality testing and schizophrenia hallucinations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 1972; 79:310-316.

5. Pierre JM. Hallucinations in nonpsychotic disorders: Toward a differential diagnosis of ”hearing voices.”  Harvard Review of Psychiatry 2010; 18:22-35.

6. Merkelbach H, van de Ven V. Another White Christmas: fantasy proneness and reports of ‘hallucinatory experiences’ in undergraduate controls. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 2001; 32:137-144.

7. van de Ven V, Merkelbach H. The role of schizotypy, mental imagery, and fantasy proneness in hallucinatory reports of undergraduate students. Personality and Individual Differences 2003; 35:889-896.

8. Crowe SF, Barot J, Caldow S, et al. The effect of caffeine and stress on auditory hallucinations in a non-clinical sample. Personality and Individual Differences 2011; 50:626-630.

With 2014 drawing to an end, I thought I'd share with you this year's most popular posts here at Living Single. I've created two lists. The first shows the most-viewed posts with obvious relevance to single life. The second list includes the most popular articles that were not as directly relevant to single life. After the most-popular lists, I mention a few other things.

Most Popular Living Single Posts for 2014

1. What married and single people do differently
2. 23 ways single people are better: The scientific evidence
3. Are you guilty of friend jealousy, or a victim of it?
4. About those 27 wrong reasons you are single
5. Relationship virgins
6. How to become your true self
7. The happy loner
8. So long, compulsory sex! See ya, Viagra! Asexuality is here
9. Debunking every myth about marriage, all in one place
10. Best things about living alone – for people who mean it
11. The end of marriage
12. Why are so many smart women so clueless about single life?
13. What are friends for? Views from married and single life
14. The deep rewards of a deeply single life

I also want to mention a number of posts not so relevant to the topic of single life, because they attracted tens of thousands of views, or, in the case of the one about boredom, hundreds of thousands. Who knew that being boring could be so interesting? That post knocked out of the most-viewed-ever spot the one that became the most popular Living Single post ever, almost as soon as I posted it, ASEXUALS: Who are they and why are they important? Now that asexuality post is #2 across all years (not just 2014).

Most popular 2014 posts not so relevant to single life

1. The 9 ways boring people can bore you
2. How body language lets us down
3. 10 steps for getting over humiliation
4. 7 ways your negative thoughts can help you
5. The unwritten rules of sharing your news

A few other things:

For some of my new writings on single life (elsewhere) you may or may not have seen yet, take a look at:

• Holiday pity parties for single people
• What is the #1 source of joy in the lives of 25-39 year-olds?
• How marriage undermines equality among Harvard faculty

I'm continuing to put together collections of links to posts on particular topics. You can find them all here. Most of the collections debunk myths about getting married – for example, that getting married makes you happier or healthier or means that you will live longer. But there are other topics, too, such as what we know about the benefits of solitude, the real reasons for living single, and what we know about people who are single at heart. I just added a new collection, Single for the holidays – with attitude! There's much more to be added, and I'll keep at it when I can find the time.

Happy holidays, everyone! Thanks so much for being part of the Living Single community. "Living Single" has been around for almost as long as Psychology Today has been hosting blogs (since 2008) and blogging here has been a great experience. So thanks also to all the people at Psych Today who have been doing the work to make this site a success for so long.

[The image is from the public use images on Google; no attribution was required for this one.]

Regardless of whether you believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, there is no denying his unparalleled impact on western thought and culture. Jesus is the spiritual leader and hero to more than 2 billion people around the world. What accounts for the enduring power of his heroism? An examination of his life reveals five important clues.

1. Jesus Was A ‘Born Hero’

In our studies of heroism, we have found that the "born hero" is a rare breed. Extraordinary situations typically bring out the heroes among us. But in every Sunday Christian service, and especially during every Christmas and Easter, much of the world honors the most powerful story of the born hero in the western world. Being endowed with divine DNA makes Jesus an especially revered hero.

2. Jesus Was A Revolutionary

Jesus was, and is, a polarizing figure. During his lifetime, his followers witnessed him perform miracles and believed in the new morality that he preached: a message of love, gentleness, generosity, and forgiveness. These values conflicted with Roman values of power and strength.

In his day Jesus was a revolutionary who violated Jewish customs and defied Roman law. Like Socrates of ancient Greece, Jesus could have spared his own life by offering some defense of the social disruptions he caused. But he did not. His threat to the status quo was deemed too great by Roman authorities, and he was gruesomely executed.

3. Jesus Suffered On The Cross

Our research on heroes indicates that people especially honor heroes who experience pain and suffering during their heroic acts. The more that heroes suffer for their cause, the higher the pedestal on which we place them.

The Romans made sure than anyone who died by crucifixion would suffer horrifically. Jesus was violently flogged before his crucifixion. Iron balls and sharp sheep bones were fastened near the ends of the whips. The iron balls caused deep bruising and the bones lacerated the skin. There was ample blood loss and Jesus’ level of pain would have put him a state of shock.

Jesus was then forced to carry the heavy cross to the crucifixion area, where his wrists and heels were nailed to the wooden beams. After hours of agony on the cross, Jesus would have succumbed to a combination of asphyxiation and blood loss.

4. Jesus Died To Save Others

Christians believe that Jesus died to save the world. The circumstances surrounding his death are largely responsible for the formation of the Christian faith. The Gospels tell us that three days after he died, Jesus rose from the dead and was lifted to heaven. The story of the resurrection is a central part of Christianity because it signifies to Christians that God approved of Jesus' work on earth and that Jesus lives forever.

After Jesus died, many of his followers were burned, stoned, or crucified by Roman authorities. This persecution backfired. As martyrs, these Christians were the source of inspiration for millions of people who began practicing the faith.

5. Jesus Transformed Society

Jesus was, and is, a transforming leader, inspiring people and elevating them to new levels of morality. Historian and author H. G. Wells wrote, "I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history."

Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, had nothing but praise for Jesus, describing him as "a man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world." Referring to Jesus' sacrifice at the cross, Gandhi said, "It was a perfect act."

- - - - - -

As we’ve shown, there are five reasons for Jesus’ heroism: his birthright, his revolutionary beliefs, his suffering, his mission to save the world, and his transformation of the western world. Will he still be worshipped as a hero 2,000 years from now? We cannot even begin to conjecture. As with many transforming heroes, the legend is compelling, the message is powerful, and there are iconic institutions in place to ensure significant staying power.

Further Reading

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2011). Heroes: What they do and why we need them. New York: Oxford University Press.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2013). Heroic leadership: An influence taxonomy of 100 exceptional individuals. New York: Routledge.

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. New York: New World Library.

Franco, Z. E., Blau, K., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2011). Heroism: A conceptual analysis and differentiation between heroic action and altruism. Review of General Psychology, 15, 99-113.

Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2012). Making heroes: The construction of courage, competence, and virtue. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. San Diego: Elsevier.

Smith, G., & Allison, S. T. (2014). Reel heroes, Volume 1. Agile Writers Press.

Studies show that historically women have reported a more difficult time finding mentors than men do, which has led to a number of mentoring networks aimed specifically at connecting women with female mentors. In a 2010 World Economic Forum report on corporate practices for gender diversity in 20 countries, 59 percent of the companies surveyed said they offer internally led mentoring and networking programs, and 28 percent said they have women-specific programs. But with women squarely positioned as the driving force behind U.S. labor force growth—projected to account for 51 percent of the increase in total growth through 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Labor—what will happen when there aren’t enough mentors to go around? A 2011 report by McKinsey Research pointed out that women are claiming 53 percent of entry-level management jobs, but after that, the numbers drop: to 37 percent for mid-managers, and even lower, to 26 percent, for vice presidents and up.

Women are already feeling the impact. According to a 2011 survey of more than 1,000 working women conducted by networking site LinkedIn, 1 out of 5 women say they’ve never had a mentor at work. The comparatively low numbers of female managers to females in entry levels offers one explanation. Another: those women who remain in the workforce often feel too strapped for time. A 2000 article from the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology reported that those women who were both leaders and had family responsibilities were the ones that younger psychologists most wanted to emulate—but they were also those who had the least time to mentor. Another reason is women are reluctant to ask for mentors, even when they want them. Women’s networking organization Levo League conducted a survey of users and found that a whopping 95 percent had never sought out a mentor at work.

When women are younger,they often find an intern to take under their wing. But as they get older,and job and family responsibilities grow more complicated and time consuming, They discover they have a hard time placing mentoring others near the top of a priority list.

But there is a darker truth as well. In business, new, eager talent very often trumps experience.So in this way, women are afraid to give those below them too much good advice, though many hate admitting it. Some would like to say they are secure enough in their talent and abilities to be giving without reservation but feel threatened by giving away all the secrets to their successes.

This is an important point in the discussion of women mentoring women. Successful females are milder embodiments of Queen Bees—those career women who not only have zero interest in fostering the careers of other women who follow, but may actively attempt to cut them off at the pass. Queen Bees exist largely as a result of a still-patriarchal work culture in which comparatively few women rise to the top. And though not mentoring is quite different from actively undermining, both may operate from the same position of fear. And neither benefits the cause of workplace equality.Still,some argue that,for women, the simple act of mentoring may not even make a difference.

A 2010 study by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that promotes inclusive workplaces for women, found that mentors benefited men more than women even when women are mentored earlier and more often in their careers. This is in part because men secure mentors in more senior positions. But it’s also because male mentors tend to sponsor rather than just mentor—similar to the difference between coaching and selling. In fact, a 2010 Harvard Business Review report argued that women may actually be over-mentored, but under-sponsored. And that sponsoring—advocating to get somebody a job or promotion, mentioning their name in an appointments meeting, actively helping that person advance—is what makes the real difference in women helping women get ahead. Mentoring is one thing, but actual follow-through is quite another; the difference between talk and action. And something that, as the rise in Queen Bees and Queen Bee-tinged behavior suggests, may be but a dream for women in the workplace.

Mother Teresa once said, “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.”

Have you ever felt so lonely that you thought your heart was breaking and you couldn’t make it through the night? Have you looked at your life and wondered where you went wrong and asked why you deserve to be so alone?

Unfortunate circumstances or our own decisions can sometimes put us in a position where we have no one to turn to. Even if your lifestyle is a comfortable one, the pain of feeling unloved can be so overwhelming that you can start to think about not wanting to be here.

More suicides take place during the summer, especially in late July and August, than at any other time of year. No one knows why this is the case, but emotional pain seems to become more intense for some people at this time of year.

If you have been thinking about taking your own life, your mental state could be more fragile than you may believe, and you should seek help as soon as possible.

To help you heal, it’s very important to make connections with other people. Isolating yourself is only going to make you feel worse. I know people who have gotten roommates, just to have another human being in the house, and it has helped. Others who are in need of companionship get involved in community events or go back to school. The idea is to spend time with other people, so you can feel their warmth and let it help you out of your pain. A warm smile from a good friend can make the difference between hiding under the covers and getting out into the world to see what it has to offer. Many folks find going out to be far easier with someone else than by themselves.

Texting and emailing are helpful, but they can never take the place of a real conversation with a real person right in front of you. I know people who text each other all day long, and they say it makes them feel more connected. Don’t get me wrong—I love getting messages from my sweetheart, but it will never take the place of hearing her reassuring voice and feeling her gentle touch. And touch can make the difference between living a healthy life and living one that is sickly.

If you spend more time in front of a computer or television than with your fellow human beings, you are setting yourself up for any loneliness you may be feeling to get worse. It is so important for you to get out of your own head for at least a few hours each day.

Life is about balance, and it is important that we learn to take care of ourselves and of each other. When you are done with your reading, pick up the phone and call a friend or a relative and make some plans to get together. You and the person you reach will both be better for it.

My mother passed away about four years ago at age 85 and my father thirty years ago this January. He was 58. Now that I’m in my mid-fifties, many of my friends are encountering the first holiday season without a parent or parents. For them, I want to pass along this message – it does get better.                                                                                              

My parents inevitably visit me this time of year, in subtle ways, which I often miss if I’m too busy or stressed to sense their presence. This year, they appeared in a broken-down cardboard box. In a binge cleaning spree on Christmas Day, I found a cardboard box I’d filled and set aside with memorabilia from my parents’ house.

From this box I lifted my father’s flight bag complete with helmet, oxygen mask, and a miniature Polish bible signed with love from his parents. My son Daniel is a pilot, born almost a decade after my Dad’s death. Daniel showed me how the visor drops down on the helmet, and explained the need for oxygen above 12,000 feet. Daniel’s build and athleticism mirror my father’s. Although my father never held my son, I could sense Dad as Daniel held that knicked and scuffed helmet and explained the facts of their mutual passion to me, the intermediary, who always felt safer with her feet planted on the ground.

My Dad, always the filmmaker/photographer, long before these hobbies were digital or easy, made a film of Christmas morning in the mid 1960s. In this film, he delicately lifted the folded wrapping paper label that revealed the names assigned to each present. This Christmas, my Jewish husband, Ken, created those same folded labels, scrawled with our children’s names. Ken always insists that my father, an ardent Catholic, would have rejected him outright. They never met because Dad died about four years before I met Ken. Why do I feel like these tiny labels on packages are my father’s silent defense to his ability to change and embrace?

In the memorabilia box, I also found my mother’s journals, one in particular, from March of 1998 to August 7, 2001, less than a week before my third suicide attempt. She signed each entry with “I love you Lord. I love you Joe.” The depth of her sadness, her loneliness, fills most pages of this journal, which concludes more than fifteen years after my father’s death. As I read these pages, filled with sentences where she depicted her insomnia, isolation and feelings of uselessness, the genetic link of my depression stared back at me from the page. I was struck with how much easier the last two decades of her life might have been if she had used an antidepressant.

My mom, a counselor, was convinced she could solve her depression through meditation, prayer and positive thinking. No doubt those actions helped her. I suggested antidepressants for years, and she finally tried one late in life with great success.  In the meantime, she spent much of the last ten years of her life in misery, and her children bore the brunt of that misery. Those pages read like an apology, which I granted without hesitation.

I don’t know if this blog will help anyone over the holidays, but on the small chance it might, I am offering it up to you. Whether you have lost your parents young or old, or if you never knew your parents at all – healing exists where you least expect it. I found mine in a tattered cardboard box, in a forgotten storage room, in my mother’s hand and in the hands of my son.

For more information about Julie K. Hersh or Struck by Living, got to the Struck by Living website.

I was awaked in the middle of the night by my au pair, a young woman from overseas who helped care for my children. She was crying, shaking, and terrified. As I struggled to understand what she was telling me I surmised that my husband had secretly entered her room in the middle of the night. She opened her eyes to see his shadow looming over her with a threatening glare in his eyes. “My children are my cubs and I am a lion who will protect them!” he hissed.  She thought she was going to be killed or raped, before he finally stormed off. “Call the police!” she sobbed. “Something has to be done.”

My husband, a physics professor at a local university, had tipped into psychosis as part of his recurrent bipolar disorder.  His behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre. I feared coming home each day to discover what new thing he had done. Sometimes he disassembled appliances and spread the parts all over the floor. Another time he took all the children’s elementary school projects and school notices and taped them over the walls, covering every spot. He would only communicate with me via written post-it notes. My worried calls to his therapist were met with skepticism and non-action. I felt helpless.

That night, I found my husband sitting in the basement, sullen and refusing to speak. He had a delusion that I was trying to hurt our children. This was not the first time I had to call the police. They came to the home, took a report, and ultimately did nothing. After all, my husband had harmed no one and was not suicidal. My au pair quit the next day, leaving me without child care for four small children while in full-time graduate school with a mentally compromised partner at home. I don’t blame her. At times I wanted to quit too.

It can be difficult when someone you care about struggles with mental illness.  They may behave in ways that don’t make sense or are even frightening. It's easy to believe that those with mental illness are doing it on purpose, but these behaviors and states are a part of the disorder.

People with mental illness have a problem that is like any physical illness. Major mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorders are brain problems that cause people to have thoughts and feelings they don’t want to have. These problems are largely genetic in nature, although other factors contribute as well. The temptation is to condemn and shame people who are suffering from these conditions. One problem is that shame and stigma are often what keep people from getting the help they need. Those who suffer do not want to have these problems, and usually don’t want others to know they have them either. The best medicine that loved ones can offer is compassion and loving encouragement to get help.

Although compassion and encouragement are essential, it can be very hard to live with someone who is ill.  It is not their fault that they have these problems, but it is their responsibility to get help and stay well, if they are able. You can help yourself by getting support and education from organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness, many of which offer educational lectures and support groups for family members.  I found this very helpful in dealing with my own distress and confusion over my husband’s behavior. 

You will need to decide what your limits are, and you may need to reduce your role in your loved one’s life for your own mental health.  Eventually, I had to move out of my home for the well-being of myself and children, and we divorced shortly thereafter.

The best thing you can for your loved one is to help them find a mental health professional who has a lot of experience with the specific problem he or she is facing. Many clinicians claim they can treat anything, but that is just not so. Make sure the therapist you are vetting has the training and experience needed to be effective. One problem that I faced was a mental health professional who was in over her head. She conceptualized my husband’s major mental illness as a marriage problem, so her techniques were ineffective.

There is a joke that goes “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has got to want to change.” So, we want to encourage our loved ones to get help, but can’t make them do it. Badgering may be counterproductive as it makes people want to dig in their heels. Humans generally have an innate need for autonomy, and often don’t like being told what to do. You can only decide what you are going to do in the face of this challenge.

If your loved one is a danger to self or others, you may be able to have the person involuntarily admitted for inpatient treatment. This may be helpful or even life-saving. Conversely, many people with mental illness leave the hospital and don’t continue with needed medication or follow-up services, so they end up back where they started. They may be hospitalized many, many times in what we sometimes refer to as the psychiatric revolving door.

It can be hard when you don’t know where your loved one is and if the person is safe. I know the pain of this firsthand.  My ex-husband has been in and out of mental health facilities over the years. Although we no longer have an emotional connection, my children worry about him.  I feel for them and hope he is well, but at the moment he is homeless.  Sometimes I see pictures of him on FaceBook playing guitar on the street for money.

In a situation like this there is not much you can do, and sometimes the hard part is letting go of your feelings of responsibility. You may feel guilt for not having done enough or shame for believing that you caused the problem in some way.  You may need to admit that you cannot fix it. You can pray for your loved one, if that is part of your belief system, and you can find personal meaning in the experience by being a support to others who are also suffering. 

In terms of finding meaning for myself, although I would not wish this on anyone, I believe it has made me a stronger person and better clinician.  I felt like a failure for a long time after these things happened, and it took years before I could talk about my experiences to anyone outside my closest circles.  Although no two people have the same experience, there is much I do share with the worried parents, partners, and other family members I see. When they are hurting because of someone in their lives that has major metal illness, and I can say, “I understand,” and I think I really do.

Are you in a toxic relationship?  My last post describes what a toxic relationship looks like. Briefly, I wrote about criticism and contempt, avoidance, and negative energy as the key signs of toxic relationships.

You did not get into your relationship to be treated poorly, ignored, or abandoned. Being abused or denigrated, subjected to reckless spending, deprived of a sex life, or forced to put up with problematic, immature behavior is not healthy for you. If this is occurring in your relationship, your partner needs to make major changes. Individual and couple's counseling may be needed. And if your partner will not cooperate with counseling, you need to face the fact that he or she will probably never change, and then decide to try living with him or her the best you can, or move on to a new and hopefully more satisfying relationship. I am all for trying to save relationships, but in the face of repeated hurts and insensitivity, it may be best to move on.

If you want out of your toxic relationship, follow these three steps:

1. Have a mantra. Jean, a forty year old client of mine, tried to leave a relationship with a man who was highly manipulative and emotionally abusive. Each time she attempted to leave, he showed her remorse and lured her back with his charming and seductive displays. This was maddening for Jean who felt demoralized each time after not being able to extricate herself from this coercive, destructive cycle. 

To help Jean begin to break free, she came up with a phrase, a mantra of sorts that she repeatedly told herself: "He may be good for someone else, but he is a wrecking ball for me." Jean paired this mantra with a visualization of a big crane swinging a wrecking ball every time she thought of him or saw him. 

2. Stop all possible contact. If you really want out, then contact with your about-to-be ex needs to be very tightly managed. Strive for no contact. Most highly toxic partners have softer sides and this can hold strong allure. If you are feeling vulnerable, you will likely be at risk to go back to your toxic ex if you reengage contact with him or her. In Jean's situation, we discussed how she could minimize contact with her ex given her difficult challenge of him being a work colleague. This involved having her be courteous and say nothing more at business meetings. We also came up with the "not breaking stride rule" when she was saying "hi" to him in the hallways.

3. Keep knowing your value.  Feel good about who you are, how you have grown, and what you offer in your personal and professional relationships. Jean realized that knowing her value meant putting her emotional health first. Have compassion for yourself if you want to go back into your toxic relationship. It's normal to miss your ex, Stay mindful, however, that missing times that felt good does not mean that he was, or is, good for you. If you have trouble remembering your own value then think about what you would say to a family member or close friend who wanted to return to a toxic relationship. Thinking about how you may value or advise someone else can help you treasure yourself and to move on. 

Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein is a psychologist with over 23 years of experience specializing in child, adolescent, couples, and family therapy.  He holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the State University of New York at Albany and completed his post-doctoral internship at the University of Pennsylvania Counseling Center. He has appeared on the Today Show, Court TV as an expert advisor, CBS Eyewitness News Philadelphia, 10! Philadelphia—NBC, and public radio. Dr. Bernstein has authored four books, including the highly popular 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child (Perseus Books, 2006), 10 Days to a Less Distracted Child (Perseus, 2007), Why Can't You Read My Mind?, and Liking the Child You Love, Perseus, 2009).

All the Rage: A Film About John Sarno MD and Psychosomatic Pain

What do Howard Stern, Larry David, John Stossel, Senator Tom Harkin, and pro-golfer Ben Crane have in common? They all suffered from debilitating pain until they met Dr. John Sarno. All the Rage is a feature film about Sarno and others who are pioneering mind body approaches to treating chronic illness. I am one of several psychotherapists who treats people suffering from psychosomatic pain, and may be interviewed in the film. To take a look at All the Rage, go to this link after you've read this blog or while reading it It will be a real eye-opener.:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rumur/all-the-rage-a-documen...

In an earlier blog, Chronic Pain Syndrome and Other Psychosomatic Illness, I wrote about my friend, on bed rest and awaiting the back surgery recommended by several orthopedic surgeons. I urged her to have a consultation with John Sarno, M.D. at the Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in New York. I had worked there at the beginning of my professional career and found that there were certain patients who did not get better, despite state of the art medical treatment. Some, however, started to improve after talking candidly with me about painful lifetime experiences, matters they had never fully disclosed to anyone.

According to Dr. John. E. Clarke (2007), in more than half of all medical patients, diagnostic tests cannot find the cause of symptoms because most of them are psychosomatic. Yet physicians continue to send patients for batteries of tests that continue to show nothing,running up enormous bills for insurance companies. Most physicians in the western world are not knowledgeable about psychosomatic illness and do not know what to do about it. Sometimes they will tell the patient that it is all in the mind and may refer them to a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, which makes them angry because they feel that their doctor has not been really listening to them. Their pain may originate in the mind or psychic pain might greatly exacerbate the pain of a physical disorder. But in any case, it is not all in the mind. It is in the mindbrainbody. It is psychosomatic.

Sarno said in his recent book The Divided Mind The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders (2006):

The enormity of this miscarriage of medical practice may be compared to what

would exist if medicine refused to acknowledge the existence of bacteria and

viruses. Perhaps the most heinous manifestation of this scientific medievalism

has been the elimination of the term psychosomatic from recent editions of the

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the official

publication of the American Psychiatric Association. One might as well eliminate

the word infection from medical dictionaries (2006, p. 3),

As I wrote (Farber 2012) in my book Hungry for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Bain and the influence of the Sixties ,

Long before Descartes (1637) said that the mind and body were separate,

even as far back as Plato, in Western medicine there existed a philosophical

dichotomy between mind and body, while Eastern traditions saw the mind

and body as coming from the same energy or source. In the West, this mind/

body disconnect has directed the clinical evolution of Western medicine. It

has had a powerfully negative effect on how patients are perceived and

treated, based on the assumption that there is mental pain and there is physical

pain and never the twain shall meet (Farber 2012, p. 166)..

Descartes held that that the mind is a nonphysical substance. This is true but what he did not understand was that the mind is a function of the physical brain, interacting all the time with the body's various systems and hormones and chemicals.the body produces. The body has been described as an enormous switchboard housing trillions of interconnected pathways, and as a giant pharmaceutical factory that manufactures powerful, mind-altering chemicals. (Milkman and Sunderwirth 1987). This is how the mind and body are connected.

The title of the film, All the Rage, is provocative. It refers to unconscious rage, believed to be a major contributor to psychosomatic pain. And it occurs in some of the nicest people you will meet. In fact it occurs because they may be too nice for their own good If you tend to be a people pleaser, caring more about pleasing others than doing what you need to do to take care of yourself, then you may be among the huge group of people Sarno described as tending to have psychosomatic pain.

John Sarno , a few physicians, and a number of psychotherapists, myself among them, know what to do about psychosomatic pain. Filmmakers Suki Hawley, David Beilinson and Michael Galinsky (RUMUR Inc) are currently in post-production on All the Rage. It took ten years to make, beginning as a profile of Dr. John E. Sarno, a back pain and rehabilitation specialist who has pioneered a successful mind body approach to treating chronic pain.. He wrote several books on the subject, including the New York Times best-selling Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (1991) .Others include The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain (1999 )and The Divided Mind (2006). The first three focus on muscular-skeletal pain because that was what Sarno was most familiar with. In The Divided Mind, Sarno broadened his understanding to include all kinds of mind-body illness. Amazon.com described it as follows.

The Divided Mind is the crowning achievement of Dr. John E. Sarno's distinguished career as a groundbreaking medical pioneer, going beyond pain to address the entire spectrum of psychosomatic (mindbody) disorders.

The interaction between the generally reasonable, rational, ethical, moral conscious mind and the repressed feelings of emotional pain, hurt, sadness, and anger characteristic of the unconscious mind appears to be the basis for mindbody disorders. The Divided Mind traces the history of psychosomatic medicine, including Freud's crucial role, and describes the psychology responsible for the broad range of psychosomatic illness. The failure of medicine's practitioners to recognize and appropriately treat mindbody disorders has produced public health and economic problems of major proportions in the United States. One of the most important aspects of psychosomatic phenomena is that knowledge and awareness of the process clearly have healing powers. Thousands of people have become pain-free simply by reading Dr. Sarno's previous books.

Sarno retired recently at age 90 but continuing his work at the Rusk Institute is Ira Rashbaum, M.D., who studied with Sarno there. He wrote a chapter in The Divided Mind about how he came to understand psychosomatic illness Several other physicians contributed chapters as well,

Beginning in the 1970's at Rusk, Sarno came to understand the problem and predicted the epidemic of chronic pain. When comparing his patients’ charts, more than 80% had a history of at least two other psychosomatic illnesses like ulcers, migraines, eczema, or colitis. It occurred to him that the stresses of life might be causing the pain. When he talked to his patients further, he found that most were perfectionists who put themselves under unreasonable pressure to be perfect and good. When Sarno suggested his patients make the connection between their emotions, their tendency to put themselves under such pressure,- and their pain, most rapidly improved. He came to understand that the unconscious mind was activating the autonomic nervous system.

Chronic psychosomatic illness is all about experiencing terrible physical pain in order not to tolerate feeling the emotional pain in one's life. In other words, as bad as the physical pain is, for the person who has it, it is preferable to feeling the emotional pain. The workings of the unconscious mind make this possible. Sarno popularized these ideas, which come from a psychoanalytic understanding, and made them quite understandable to the reader. The great majority of people suffering chronic psychosomatic pain start to feel better after becoming educated about the nature of psychosomatic pain. To heal, Sarno's recommendations are two-fold: Individuals need to address their unconscious anger and, since the pain they are experiencing is psychological, should resume all normal physical activity. For some, however, this is not enough. They require psychotherapy with a psychotherapist experienced in treatment of mind-body disorders.

I treated one man who had had the back surgery recommended by several orthopedic surgeons, and still suffered terrible pain. It began lessening after the first session. As much as I understand intellectually how this works, when I see people who have suffered for years start moving around without pain, it feels like magic, to them and to me. It is an extraordinary experience. Around a year ago I began treating a woman who had been bedridden for six weeks with a severe case of shingles, a dermatological condition for which a pain management doctor had prescribed hydrocodone, a narcotic painkiller. She knew of Sarno's work and went online to find a psychotherapist experienced in treating mind-body problems. By the end of her first session, after telling me of a painfully abusive childhood, she was feeling so much better that she stopped her pain medication, to which she had become addicted, and tolerated the withdrawal symptoms so that she could be free of it. It was such a dramatic recovery that it seemed to her, and to me too, like the religious miracle healings seen on television.

If you suffer from pain that does not respond to conventional treatment, a wonderful resource is the Tension Myositis Syndrome Wiki (TMS) online, at http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/The_Tension_Myositis_Syndrome_Wiki

Read about it. You will also find a list of physicians and psychotherapists who can help you. This website is concerned primarily about muscular-skeletal pain but if you suffer from dermatological pain or pain associated with the digestive system or any other system, you might find some help here as well.

I Don’t Like You and I Don’t Know Why

Have you ever met someone for the first time and thought, “I don’t like you and I don’t know why?” The answer could be as simple as you are an introvert and the person you just met is an extrovert. Introverts tend to view extroverts as arrogant, overconfident, brash, and pushy. Extroverts, on the other hand, tend to see introverts as quiet, nerdy, insecure, and socially inept. This natural, almost subconscious, tendency serves as a filter, often referred to as a first impression, through which a person’s future words and actions are judged.

People like others who share the same attitudes and perspectives as they do. Since introverts and extroverts have different world perspectives, they view each other as different and thus are naturally predisposed to dislike one another. Extroverts focus on the outside world, while introverts remain introspective. Extroverts get their energy from other people. Introverts get their energy from within. Introverts typically begin their day with fully charged “social” batteries. Each social interaction drains their social batteries. When their batteries are drained, introverts withdrawal into themselves to recharge. Since extroverts get their energy from others, their “social” batteries are constantly being charged by human interactions.

The differences in these worldviews can cause social discomfort. Introverts are introspective and tend not to outwardly express their feelings. Consequently, the frustration caused by the actions of extroverts builds up over time. When the pent up frustration reaches a certain threshold, the frustrated introvert explodes with a litany of past transgressions. Extraverts are often caught off guard wondering what they did to offend the other person.

Why do extroverts frustrate introverts? Extroverts think stream of consciousness. What they think, they say, and sometimes what they say offends others. Introverts think before they speak and don’t understand how someone could say something without first thinking about what they say. Extroverts finish other people’s sentences. Introverts think before they speak and usually pause between thoughts to plan the next thing they want to say. Extroverts see the pause in the conversation, finish the other person’s sentence, and continue the conversation, leaving the introvert frustrated and unheard. Extroverts are spontaneous. If they want to buy something, they just buy it. If they want to do something, they just do it. Extroverts tend to buy things they don’t really want and do things they really don’t want to do. Introverts tend to research the items they want to buy and the things they do. The extrovert’s trial and error method frustrates introverts. These and other peccadillos reinforce the introvert’s negative first impression of extroverts.

Changing negative first impressions is difficult. A person who forms a negative impression of another person will be less inclined to meet that person a second time because that person has been judged in a negative light. Without subsequent meetings, the person who has been judged negatively does not have an opportunity to change the mind of the person who judged them. Additionally, once a first impression is formed, people are less likely to change their minds due to the psychological principle of consistency. When a person articulates an idea, they are less likely to change their minds because they must first admit that they were initially wrong. Maintaining an erroneous notion, such as a first impression, causes less anxiety than admitting an error and adopting another position.

Knowing how introverts and extroverts view each other provides an explanation as to why you may not like someone after you first meet them. Knowing why a person may not like you will help you adjust your communication style to foster good relationships in both business and social settings. There is a certain amount of comfort knowing people don’t like you not because of you, but because of who you are.

For more information regarding how to build and maintain human relationships, refer to The Like Switch.

“I thought he must die. He had no future, nothing good. I thought I was saving the child.”

Nerlin Sarmiento had expressed disturbing thoughts about her children long before tragedy struck her small family of four. On many occasions the 32-year-old Edmonton mother had confessed to doctors and family members that she had thoughts of harming herself and her children.

Precautions were taken: Sarmiento was admitted to hospital several times, prescribed psychiatric medication, discharged, and had her mother move in to help care for the children. 

On the morning of February 12th 2013 in Edmonton, Alberta, Sarmiento sent her ten-year-old daughter to school, then forced her seven-year-old son into the bathroom where she held him under water until he stopped breathing.

Sarmiento did not deny murdering her son. She called the police herself to report the crime. Her lawyers, however, argued that she should not be held responsible on account of her mental illness that prevented her from appreciating the moral wrongfulness of her actions.

Two psychiatrists testified at Sarmiento’s trial. They explained that she was experiencing a severe depressive episode as part of her previously diagnosed bipolar disorder. She felt despair so extreme she became convinced she was committing an altruistic act, saving her son from a life of predestined poverty and hardship. 

On September 12th, 2013, Justice Sterling Sanderman agreed. Nerlin Sarmiento was found not criminally responsible (NCR) on a charge of first-degree murder. 

The public outcry against the ruling was reminiscent of the aftermath of the Vincent Li and Guy Turcotte trials; they were found NCR on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree murder respectively.

NCR has been a hot topic featured prominently in the press following several high profile cases, but is often misunderstood.

In Canada, if the court decides that an individual has committed a criminal act (i.e., they are guilty), but lacked the capacity to know that their actions were not only criminally wrong, but also morally wrong at the time, a verdict of not criminally responsible may be given.

Psychiatrist Robert Dickey with Correctional Service Canada and the University of Toronto helped the Trauma & Mental Health Report gain a better understanding of NCR and bust some of the myths surrounding the defense. 

Myth 1: Almost anyone can claim they have a mental disorder and use the NCR defense.

Technically, this is true. But whether or not they would be successful is another story, says Dickey, explaining that if you don’t have a severe mental illness, it is very hard to malinger your way through an NCR assessment and defense.

He further explains that the finding of NCR is based on the exact mental state of the accused at the time of the crime. By the time someone is referred for assessment by the courts, their state of mind may be quite different than it was when the offense was committed. 

A good clinician will seek clear corroborating information that the individual was suffering from a psychotic illness at the time they were arrested. The police, jail and institutional records should give information as to the individual’s mental state at the time.

This is not a matter of being a little depressed, states Dickey. The individual must be so ill that they would not have been able to tell right from wrong, appreciate the wrongfulness of their actions or engage in rational choice when the crime occurred.

Myth 2: The NCR defense is a tactic for offenders to skirt the justice system.

Mostly false, says Dickey. If an individual does not suffer from a psychotic illness, pure psychopathy or criminality alone is not considered – by the law – to be a disease of the mind severe enough to qualify for a finding of NCR.

If the NCR defense is successful, the individual is remanded to the custody of the Provincial Review Board, where the offender is encouraged to receive treatment. Interestingly, the board itself has no power to order the accused to engage in treatment. 

But if an accused does refuse, they are often detained in a secure facility. Dickey explains that with cases of major mental illness and the refusal of treatment, the physician can refer the offender to the Consent and Capacity Review Board. And the individual may be declared incapable to refuse psychiatric treatment and treated against their will.

Myth 3: When a person is found NCR for a crime, they essentially walk free. 

False. The vast majority of offenders found NCR spend a lot more time detained in a secure facility than if they had been found guilty and served a regular prison sentence, Dickey explains. Because the consequences of NCR are more restrictive and more ensuring of treatment, the issue is now more readily raised by the crown (prosecution) than the defense.

After the individual has been remanded to the Provincial Review Board, the forensic psychiatrist will testify as to the necessary level of security needed to manage the offender and their psychiatric care, while still ensuring the safety of the community.

So what’s in store for Nerlin Sarmiento?

When her trial concluded, she was remanded to the custody of the Alberta Review Board (ARB). At a hearing within 45 days from the end of her trial, the ARB determined whether she would receive an absolute discharge, a conditional discharge or be detained in custody. The results of Sarmiento’s hearing have yet to be made public.

 - Contributing Writer: Jennifer Parlee, The Trauma and Mental Health Report

 - Chief Editor: Robert T. Muller, The Trauma and Mental Health Report

 Copyright Robert T. Muller

Photo Credit: Shutterstock