Columnists, Articles
Mental health on blue line to Tijuana
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
Search the Internet for articles about the mentally ill riding trains and buses and you will find stories about people with mental illness behaving badly on commuter or long-distance bus routes and railway lines. One blogger describes fellow riders on Seattle’s Number 70 bus route ranting about government conspiracies. Another tells the story of an agitated man on a Greyhound bus who slapped a cross dressing passenger and then kissed another elderly man. It should come as no surprise that media reports are skewed. Bad news catches the public’s attention. Now that I have yours, here’s a story about one [More]
A $10 billion metaphor for psychology
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
The only thing worse than struggling is discovering that you have been struggling with the wrong things. I found myself in this situation in early July when scientists at the $10 billion particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland announced that they had discovered the elusive Higgs boson particle. I didn’t even know they were looking. Of course, I’m a psychologist, not a nuclear physicist, so I might be forgiven for not keeping up with the big issues in the subatomic world. Yet how do I excuse my lackluster reaction to the news that the Higgs boson had been found? The morning [More]
Mystery of a hospital’s sacred place
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
Not long ago a man I hardly knew and barely understood agreed to walk with me on the hospital grounds. I wanted to see if he was able to manage more privileges without getting into a fight or taking off. I am not sure exactly what he wanted and the combination of his disordered thinking and impaired speech made it difficult for him to tell me. All I do know is that when he agreed to sit with me at a picnic table, he very clearly said that this was a sacred place. That got me thinking. The idea of [More]
‘Stand Your Ground’ case examined
By Edward Stern J.D.
On Feb. 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida, there was a confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The result was the death of Trayvon Martin. With the exception of Trayvon Martin’s death, there is little agreement as to what happened, why it happened or the law which would be applied to this situation. The location of the event was The Retreat at Twin Lakes a gated community at approximately 7:09 p.m.. Martin was a 17-year-old African American male who was reportedly unarmed. He allegedly was staying with his father’s fiancée, who lived in the community and was on his way [More]
Stop the world, I want to get on
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
The small room where the treatment team meets was crowded with hospital staff and representatives from the community where George would be going after his discharge. George dominated the tableau more by his imposing size than by anything that could be mistaken for a confident manner. He insisted that he was ready to leave the hospital, praised the members of his outpatient team and the staff of his new group home and had nothing but good things to say about the residence itself. Yet he said it all in a tone of voice barely louder than a whisper. Someone suggested [More]
Looking for a reason to believe
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
Everyone has to believe in something.” “What you believe and what you know are different things, and it’s important to keep them separated for your orientation.” These two statements about belief are attributed to Dr. Elvin Semrad, the late Boston psychoanalyst who taught generations of psychiatry residents and psychology interns how to listen and enter into the experience of their patients. What he was saying forty years ago is just as relevant today. Today, like so many days at the hospital where I work, we are discharging people for whom belief is the central issue. One man, now stable on [More]
Privileged communications examined
By Edward Stern J.D.
Societies have provided in law a number of privileges. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, a privilege is “a particular and peculiar benefit or advantage enjoyed by a person, company or class, beyond the common advantages of other citizens. An exception or extraordinary power or exemption, a right, power or exemption, a right, power, franchise or immunity held by a person or class, against or beyond the course of the law.” There are many privileges including protection for ambassadors, public officials and defendants in criminal cases. Privileges can arise by treaties, statutes and the Constitution. Privileged communication is a [More]
A relapse prevention plan
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
When I caught myself humming the refrain of a Frank Sinatra song under my breath after morning rounds, I knew I was in for a rough day. That’s the beauty of relapse prevention plans and the reason why we are spending increasingly more of our scarce professional resources teaching this simple method of keeping track of our stress level and learning to avoid or at least to manage situations that threaten to send us over the edge. Over the edge, otherwise known as relapse behavior, means different things to different people. To the person living with mental illness who has [More]
The birth of a new hospital
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
In the course of my career as a psychologist, I have witnessed the closing of many of the hospitals but I have never seen a new one open. That is about to change with the scheduled opening of the new Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital in July of 2012. Every day is a step closer to the awakening of the sleeping giant that shares a hilltop with the last functioning building of Worcester State Hospital, a 1950s era, eight-story afterthought to the original 1876 structure destroyed in a 1991 fire. All that remains of the original hospital are the shells [More]
Traveling on winter’s broad plain
By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.
Words written in the first week of January meant to be read a month later stand on the threshold of the unknown, always a mystery, but more consciously so at the beginning of a new year. As the last scraps of confetti from last night’s New Year’s Eve celebrations are swept up and carted away to wherever such things are taken, the sun is already shining in a cold blue sky on the sharp outlines of a snowless winter landscape. We are but a grand parade and a few more bowl games away from the official end of the holiday [More]