As we prepare to send a "surge" of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we must look urgently and squarely at the mental health as well as the military and political consequences of our deployment. This means preparing American men and women to deal as effectively as they can with the...

This is a repost of an article that appeared in the Washington Post September 29, 2009.

A middle-aged, working-class woman recently came to my medical office complaining that her back had "seized up." Her husband had lost both his jobs and was feeling quite disheartened; not long...

Dear President Obama,

Before you even took office you asked us Americans to share our ideas about health care reform with your new Administration. Thousands of us, thrilled to be invited to participate, gathered in small groups and offered our vision to you. Now, tonight, as you address...

Hey, I know I'm a little late, but I was a little late to Woodstock too. I hadn't planned on going, but then another doctor as young as I was then called me up, desperate -- actually, crazed. "You've got to get up here, man. They've got hundreds of thousands...

On Sunday July 26, 2009, the New York Times Magazine ran a piece on Radovan Karadzic, the now-imprisoned psychiatrist and war criminal who orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the recent war in that country. The piece was called "Radovan Karadzic's New Age Adventure." I...

David Leonhardt's "prostate cancer test" (The New York Times, July 8, 2009) is a good but incomplete one for healthcare reform.

In addition to removing financial incentives for high tech intervention, we need to educate clinicians in the impartial, critical analysis of all therapeutic options, and in supporting their...

This letter of mine appeared in The New York Times yesterday (in somewhat shortened form), under the title, "Alternatives to New Drugs." I thought you might enjoy the unabridged version.

Richard Friedman ("New Drugs Have Allure, Not Track Record," May 19, 2009) is appropriately troubled...

Memoirs of depression like Daphne Merkin's in The Sunday Times (May 10, 2009), and for that matter like William Styron's Darkness Visible, make me sad. Of course I feel sadness for the writers' dense and burdened suffering, set off so strikingly against their lucid, often spritely prose. But more...

Gina Kolata's April 24, 2009 front page New York Times story ("Advances Elusive in the Drive to Cure Cancer") on the significant failure of our near-forty-year "war on cancer" provided a sobering and necessary corrective to inflated claims about cures already arrived or just around the corner. Kolata rightly...

Last Tuesday in a major address to both houses of Congress, President Obama eloquently invoked images of the healing crisis that wise physicians from antiquity on have commended to patients, urging us Americans, who are suffering a crisis of cash flow and confidence, to discover "promise amid peril". His plans...

"You don't have to go to Gaza to treat posttraumatic stress disorder," my friend said. "Just come to New York."

It's not that the mental and emotional state of the US population is indistinguishable from that of Gaza's Palestinians -- many of whom have lived with eight years of...