Psychiatric Times Vol 27 No 8

The discipline of evolutionary psychology views modern human behaviors as products of natural selection that acted on the psychological traits of our ancestors. A subdiscipline, evolutionary psychiatry, tries to find evolutionary explanations for mental disorders.

While I sit in the third row of my synagogue on Saturday morning, reciting the traditional portions of the Sabbath service, I have running through my mind an additional and more intensely felt prayer-that none of my fellow congregants will approach me later to discuss their personal psychiatric care.

The contents of this volume are, as the cover emphasizes, “real stories from real people.” Clinicians who practice in a setting that allows time to really listen to patients have already heard these stories. These would be clinicians who have learned that listening to small details in a patient’s history helps one recognize patterns not described in the DSM.

Psychiatric Times bids a very fond farewell to our long-time board member Jeffrey L. Cummings, MD, who was the originator of the Psychiatric Times “Brain and Behavior” column, which he penned for several years.

Houston, we have a problem. There is a critical shortage of psychiatrists. And the problem is not in Houston alone-it includes the entire state of Texas, and every other state in the union (Mid-town Manhattan, Boston’s Beacon Hill, and Sacramento Street in San Francisco might be exceptions).