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.
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 …
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,
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.
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 …
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.
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 …
Is monogamy unnatural? Is the nuclear family bad for people’s mental health? Can a child have more than one biological father?
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Should people who take legally prescribed painkillers on the job be fired for failing a drug test? A story in Monday’s New York Times examines the case of a woman who is part of a lawsuit against her employer for doing just that.
