Why is your psychiatrist prescribing a particular drug for you or someone in your family? Is it because it’s the most effective? Or could it be because he or she just attended a conference at which a leading psychiatrist touted the benefits of the drug? Is is possible that your psychiatrist should be sending you to a psychologist for talk therapy instead? What influences his or her thinking when it comes to treatment?

Your psychiatrist stays on top of the current medical research in a couple of ways. He or she reads medical journals and attends medical conferences. Let’s say that at a conference, your doctor attends a talk by a leader in the field of child psychiatry, Dr. Joseph Biederman. Your doctor is confident that he or she can trust Dr. Biderman when he talks about treating children with psychiatric disorders using medication. Or your doctor might read an article that Dr. Biderman wrote for a medical journal about the benefit of psychiatric medication for children, even though that particular medication hasn’t been approved for use in children.
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People crave community. They will create a community around a shared hobby, like sewing or model railroads, or around something more weighty such as the struggle against an addiction. Online communities in particular fill a need for people who don’t have the time to get together in person or perhaps are not geographically near enough like-minded people.

Although I am myself an introvert, I accidentally created one of the most successful depression communities online, exactly ten years ago. In the summer of 1998, I was trying to figure out how to handle all the emails I was receiving through my depression website, Wing of Madness, WoM for short. A completely unexpected consequence of creating it three years prior was being contacted by people visiting the site. I had put my email address up so that anyone who found an error or omission in my articles could contact me, but that was rarely the reason that people emailed me.
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You may have heard that writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September. The author of several critically acclaimed (although “rapturously acclaimed” might be more accurate) books and essays hanged himself in his home at the age of 46. Apparently he had suffered from severe depression for over two decades. Antidepressants, two hospitalizations and even a series of electroshock treatments, the depression treatment of last resort, had not alleviated the depression and anxiety.

I have to confess that I didn’t know anything about David Foster Wallace or his writing before reading about his suicide. Despite a Bachelor of Arts in literature, I’m not much of a straight fiction writer, preferring genre fiction (mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy, thrillers, etc.). But once I started reading about him, three things clearly and poignantly stood out in the stories people told about him: he was funny, sweet and self-effacing.

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Wipes are one of mankind’s greatest inventions. You know, those things that pop up out of a container like Kleenex and come in a lot of different varieties. There are the ones for cleaning baby bottoms (and faces/hands). Then there are the actual cleaning ones that you use to clean your bathroom or kitchen. Of course, now you have wipes for things like computer monitor screens and cleaning leather, but the first two kinds are my favorite.

Okay, I know that if you don’t have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), like me, or clean for a living, you probably are scratching your head. But if you clean for a living, you probably love them as much as I do. And if you have OCD, I’m sure you’re saying “Hell, yeah!”

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