In a major milestone, a powerful organization of mental health researchers has said it will not be using the new, fifth edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), a handbook that has virtually defined the field of psychiatry in the United States for decades. Here's what this means.

It's been four decades since futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted a wave of "future shock," the sensation of panic and unease that happens when people are "overwhelmed by change." And, depending on who you talk to you, we're either in the middle of a huge epidemic of future shock, with people struggling to adapt to…

On December 1, 2012, the American Psychiatric Association officially approved the final diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). The new ‘psychiatric bible' features a number of important changes to the existing canon, including the elimination and …

Chances are, you've at least seen the term. It refers to someone in an altered mental state creating havoc. Anything from a bunch of kids getting too crazy at a birthday party to a mass murder can "run amok." Except it can't, because the term refers to an actual psychiatric condition, albeit one that was originally…

Over the course of its 69-year history, the Soviet Union was notorious for its heavy-handed suppression of political dissent — most infamously through its use of the Siberian GULAGs. But it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the Communist Party took their intolerance for ideological deviance to extremes by diagnosing …

Mention psychedelics to almost anyone and inevitably you get the usual associations to spaced-out hippies and back-alley junkies. There's little question that the current impression of psychedelics is a very negative one, and for those who choose to use them, it can often carry a fairly heavy social stigma. But as…

All drugs affect your brain differently... that's assuming, of course, that these drugs have a brain to affect in the first place.

The New York Times has published two thought-provoking opinion pieces relating to Attention Deficit Disorder and the medications used to treat it.

A new therapy, called cognitive-bias modification, has allowed people to relieve anxiety and the strain of certain addictions. It doesn't involve a doctor or medications, just a few minutes a day on a computer performing some simple tasks.

Human sexuality can present itself in an almost infinite variety of ways, but outside the occasional David Cronenberg movie, most people don't think of car crashes as particularly sexy. But one fifty-year-old scientific paper just might change your mind forever.