Family Dysfunction and Mental Health Blog

  Michael Shermer is the man behind Skeptic and the Skeptic Society. The group talks about all the crazy stuff people believe in and promotes science and critical thinking. This book was or...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2023/03/book-review-why-people-believe-weird.html

  A new article in a nursing journal discusses the experience of Swedish families of people with members who have borderline personality disorder (BPD), and who have access to something they c...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2023/02/family-dysfunction-and-bpd-behavior.html

  In my last post, I mentioned that the American Psychiatric Association rejected the diagnosis of Developmental Trauma Disorder in 2011, and refused to acknowledge that “…childhood ad...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2023/01/adverse-childhood-experiences-and.html

As I stated in my Review of Nadine Harris’s The Deepest Well , every mental health professional should know that adverse (traumatic) childhood experiences (ACE’s) - especially with parent...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2023/01/book-review-body-keeps-score-by-bissel.html

  There has been a lot of news recently about the significant increase lately in the number of drug overdoses resulting in fatalities. Most of these overdoses are labeled “accidental,�...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/12/accidental-overdose-or-suicide.html

  If a mental health provider has you on a whole lot of different psych meds on the basis of a cursory diagnostic interview without much follow up and almost no attention to what is going o...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/11/time-to-get-second-opinion.html

YouTube web address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBiI7uJqnHc&t=2s 

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-new-video-i-discuss-family-issues.html

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner states in his book Changing Minds that by about age 10 a child’s peers rather than parents assume primary importance in the child’s decisions about wha...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/10/who-influences-teens-more-peers-or.html

The predominant and most widely-used school of thought in use for the psychotherapy of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is called dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Marsha Linehan, a ps...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/09/book-review-building-life-worth-living.html

  In an article in the Atlantic magazine, author and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz opines that in determining how parents affect their children in the long run, almost none of the...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/09/problematic-parenting-or-problematic.html

Despite protestations in some quarters that it’s just a brain disorder and that’s all, almost all studies of subjects of borderline personality disorder (BPD) show a significant percentag...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/08/new-study-questions-history-of.html

  There are a plethora of self-help books out, including the one I wrote (pictured above), advising adult children of toxic parents on what to do. Some recommend cutting them off, some reco...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/07/contact-with-toxic-parents-ambivalence.html

Judith Morgan, Ph.D. University of Pittsburg  As my readers surely know, the nature-nurture debate in science continues unabated. Especially in psychiatry. When it comes to certain repetit...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-effects-of-mothers-with-history-of.html

  When I was teaching psychotherapy techniques to psychiatry residents and psychology interns, one piece of advice I gave them ran counter to the advice most frequently given by other super...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/05/family-roles-form-of-method-acting.html

One of the current theories about what creates borderline personality disorder is that somehow they are defective in their ability to mentalize, or have an accurate “theory of mind.” This...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/04/are-people-with-borderline-personality.html

A recent review of the literature on the use of medications in cases of people with borderline personality (BPD) disorder (“Pharmacological Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder: A...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/03/medication-for-symptoms-of-borderline.html

  In a recent Dear Abby advice column from 10/26/21,  a mother who had been an addict when her daughter was young complains about the guilt trips the daughter always seems to lay on her. A...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/02/hidden-altruism-in-repetitive-family.html

  One of the big problems in both psychiatric and psychological research that I have written about extensively is the tendency of researchers to think that their subjects are usually being ...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/02/review-everybody-lies-big-data-new-data.html

ASK David Allen how to cope with dysfunctional parents Psychwire.com https://psychwire.com/ask/topics/102htrn/ask-david-allen-how-to-cope-with-dysfunctional-parents

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/01/i-am-answering-reader-questions-about.html

Every mental health professional should know that adverse childhood experiences (especially with parents who are abusive, neglectful, are perpetrators or victims of domestic violence, have mu...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2022/01/book-review-deepest-well-by-nadine.html

  One thing that is a major theme in this blog is that many if not most therapists seem to think that most people’s problems are “all in their heads” and have nothing to do with the o...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2021/12/psychotherapists-ignore-powerful.html

IMO, industry uses psychology to get people to change their behavior far more effectively and scientifically than psychotherapists. In an article in Environmental Health, (2021; 20: 33. http...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-science-of-spin-big-pharma.html

  This post is the second about media describing organizations that practice a hateful form of groupthink. The Netflix documentary Pray Away focuses on gay adult Christians who used to pr...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2021/10/review-netflix-documentary-pray-away.html

  A startling and fascinating new book and an equally mesmerizing new Netflix documentary look at organizations which are designed to destroy people’s self actualization and their true se...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2021/09/book-review-stolen-by-elizabeth-gilpin.html

  In my continued effort to beat a dead horse, this post concerns yet another not-so-science-based characteristic of authors of the literature on ADHD: their refusal to consider any alternat...

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2021/09/parenting-styles-and-adhd-symptoms.html