Szalavitz's latest book is Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered. It is co-written with Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert in the neuroscience of child trauma and recovery.
Maia Szalavitz
Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist obsessed with addiction, love, evidence-based living, empathy and pretty much everything related to brain and behavior. She is the co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential — and Endangered (Morrow, 2010) and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (Basic, 2006), both with Dr. Bruce D. Perry. Her 2006 book, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead, 2006) is the first book-length exposé of the “tough love” business. Szalavitz has been published in TIME Magazine, the New York Times, Elle, Scientific American Mind, the Washington Post, New Scientist and Psychology Today, among many others. She has been awarded the American Psychological Associations Division 50 Award for Contributions to the Addictions and the Media Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Articles from Contributor
Fighting Teen Drug Use with Plain Facts
Are you smarter than a high-schooler on drugs? The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has declared Nov. 8–14 National Drug Facts Week, with more than 60 events planned online and around the country to help prevent teen …
From ‘God Committee’ to ‘Death Panel,’ Dialysis Investigation Reveals Deadly Conflicts
A shocking and important investigation by the nonprofit journalism group ProPublica has found that kidney dialysis patients are more likely to die in the U.S. than in almost any other industrialized nation,
Addiction Files: The Keith Richards Blueprint for Recovery
Keith Richards isn’t exactly a recovery role model — the Rolling Stones guitarist and songwriter used drugs for much of his life, and he still drinks copiously and smokes marijuana and cigarettes.
Why Has Childhood Bipolar Disorder Become an Epidemic?
When a young child’s behavior problems go beyond mere toddler tantrums, parents face bleak choices about how to treat them. Should they seek psychiatric or psychological help? Should the child be put on medication or some other …
Why We Conform to the Group: It Gets Your Brain High
You may remember the experiment from Psych 101: the one in which people are compelled to doubt their own good judgment and give wrong answers to simple questions, just to go along with the rest of the group.
Study: Some Autistic Brains Really Are Wired Differently
Too many tight connections in frontal-lobe circuits and too few long-distance links between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain may cause some of the language, social problems and repetitive behavior seen in autism …
Q&A: Do Humans Prefer Free Love Over the Bonds of Nuclear Family?
Is monogamy unnatural? Is the nuclear family bad for people’s mental health? Can a child have more than one biological father?
Glass Ceiling Not Always Bad? Only 3 of Top Pharma-Earning Docs Are Women
Want to avoid seeing a doctor who earns big bucks from drug companies? You might want to choose a female physician, if the statistics from ProPublica’s investigation of the doctors who earn the most money in consulting and …
Marijuana as a Gateway Drug: The Myth That Will Not Die
Of all the arguments that have been used to demonize marijuana, few have been more powerful than that of the “gateway effect”: the notion that while marijuana itself may not be especially dangerous, it ineluctably leads to harder …
Q&A: An Interview with Oliver Sacks
Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and professor at Columbia University Medical Center, may be better known to many as a literary pioneer. His books, which include Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, introduced …
7 Tips for California: How to Make Legalizing Marijuana Smart
However residents of California vote next week on Prop 19, the state’s marijuana-legalization initiative, polling among young people shows that they overwhelmingly favor a change in marijuana law — so it’s likely that the …
Bullish or Bearish on Prop 19? Pegging Marijuana Legalization to Market Indicators
After the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and the National Prohibition Act to enforce it passed Congress in 1919 — over a veto by President Woodrow — Americans believed they would be stuck forever with …
