Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
For most of its history, psychiatric treatment has focused on changing how people think, behave, or what medications they take. Neurofeedback takes a different approach: it trains the brain itself, in...
Read article →Trichotillomania — the compulsive urge to pull out one's own hair — affects somewhere between one and two percent of the population, yet it remains one of the least discussed body-focused repetitive b...
Read article →Talk therapy has long been the dominant model for treating psychological trauma. Sitting across from a therapist, putting words to painful memories, making meaning of what happened — this is the frame...
Read article →Imagine sitting at a dinner table and feeling a wave of rage, panic, or profound disgust — not because of anything said or done, but because of the sound of someone chewing. Or the rhythmic click of a...
Read article →Selective mutism is most often discussed in the context of early childhood — the quiet child who speaks freely at home but cannot produce a word in the classroom. That framing, while accurate for many...
Read article →Borderline personality disorder is frequently described in terms of emotional intensity, unstable relationships, and fear of abandonment. But one of the most disorienting and least-discussed features...
Read article →Hoarding disorder is one of the most misunderstood mental health conditions, often reduced to punchlines about messy houses or eccentric collectors. But for the estimated 2 to 6 percent of the populat...
Read article →Bipolar disorder is already one of the more misunderstood conditions in mental health, but rapid cycling — a specifier that describes four or more mood episodes within a single year — adds a layer of...
Read article →When the pandemic arrived in 2020 and formal institutions seized up overnight, something else emerged in city after city: neighbors organizing to help neighbors without waiting for anyone's permission...
Read article →When adults describe extreme selectivity around food, they are often met with eye rolls or gentle suggestions to just try something new. The assumption is that picky eating is a preference, a phase, o...
Read article →Most people have experienced a fleeting sense of strangeness — a momentary feeling that the world looks slightly off, or that they are watching themselves from a slight distance. For most, these sensa...
Read article →Premenstrual syndrome is so widely referenced in everyday conversation that it has become something of a cultural shorthand — a catch-all explanation for mood changes in the days before menstruation....
Read article →Imagine a building where a twenty-two-year-old music student lives down the hall from an eighty-year-old retired librarian, where the student occasionally helps carry groceries and the librarian occas...
Read article →In most market economies, your value to others is expressed in money. You sell your time, your skills, your labor, and you receive a number in return that can be exchanged for anything else that also...
Read article →The loneliness crisis is often framed in terms of what people lack: community, purpose, close relationships, meaningful routine. Animal shelters offer all four inside a single building, and they despe...
Read article →For millions of older adults living alone, the telephone remains one of the most reliable threads connecting them to the outside world. Phone tree programs — organized networks where volunteers call a...
Read article →Most people, when they think of OCD, picture someone washing their hands repeatedly or checking the stove multiple times before leaving the house. These visible, repetitive behaviors are what popular...
Read article →There is a body of research, now substantial enough to constitute a consensus, showing that time in natural environments reliably reduces stress, improves mood, and lowers markers of physiological aro...
Read article →Somewhere in your city, there is probably a refrigerator on a sidewalk or attached to the outside of a building. It is stocked with food that someone left there on their way home from the grocery stor...
Read article →In sheds across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, something quiet and significant is happening. Men, most of them older, many of them recently retired or widowed or simp...
Read article →Most people have heard the pitch: Bumble BFF is like Bumble, but for friends. You set up a profile, swipe on people who seem like your kind of person, match, and then have to actually start a conversa...
Read article →A book club that meets over Zoom sounds, on the surface, like a consolation prize. The real thing — the one with wine and someone's living room and arguments that run past midnight — seems like what y...
Read article →Pen Pals in the Digital Age: Why Slow Letters Still Matter Somewhere right now, someone is sitting down to handwrite a letter to a person they have never met in person. They are choosing their words w...
Read article →There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a LinkedIn session that technically went well. You connected with someone interesting. You exchanged a few messages. You engaged with a thought...
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