Anyone wandering into theattentiondoctor.com of late may have noticed a hiatus in postings. This reflects the difficulty of coordinating editors, designers and printers towards the actual publication and sale on this site of my book Getting Unstuck. We have an official publication date of October 15th, and we hope to have books for sale here by the middle of September.

Bipolar illness is a very common but poorly understood set of conditions, a group of conditions that, like its cousin ADD, is routinely misdiagnosed and mistreated. When people are stuck, when they seem to be mysteriously unable to function at a level commensurate with their intellect, bipolar illness is often the lurking culprit.

            A few important points about bipolar illness

Its been a busy few weeks here at theattentiondoctor.com; On Thursday the 10th of January I spoke to about a hundred people at the Manhattan Adult ADD support group. Although I gave a number of presentations on ADD and Hypnosis in the mid 90's, its been about ten years since I've talked about my work in a group setting. Many of those attending seems very interested in my take on the interaction of mood and trauma with underlying attentional disorders, and there was a robust question and answer period following the talk. Both the talk and the questions that followed are available for downloads, here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Its been a busy month for mental health in the media. First there was another university shooting; this time five were killed. This was followed rather quickly by the bloody stabbing and murder of a private psychotherapist in her manhattan office. In between were two front page articles in the New York Times, one that reported depression spiking worldwide across all cultures in the fortties and fifties; and the second that reported an alarming and rapid rise in the rate of suicides among forty and fifty year old americans.

Hey there everyone

Welcome to the first installment of Dr Don's blog, where we'll be talking about stuff that going on as we try to launch both my book "Getting Unstuck; Unraveling the Knot of Attention Depression and Trauma, and a group therapy program based on the material thats inside the book.The book will be available in June, for now you can download the first chapter from this site if you'd like. The exact start of the group therapy program will announced in a few months; meanwhile we'll be gathering the names of folks who are interested in more information about it.

Last week The New York Times printed an article on its front page calling attention to the fact that pharmaceutical companies have been routinely failing to report and publish studies of anti-depressant efficacy that do not support the drugs they are manufacturing/testing. Even the most positive interpretation of antidepressant efficacy studies only claim a 60/40 advantage over placebo;according to the Times when a fuller sample of studies is taken this advantage gets even smaller, perhaps even to the point of nonexistence.

A study has been conducted at the UCLA department of psychiatry testing the proposition that training in mindfulness meditation in a group setting can have a positive effects on the symptoms of adult ADD. Results were highly promising and suggest that there is a role for structured mental exercise of various sorts in the treatment of both the underlying neurophysiology of ADD as well as in addressing the accumulated secondary complications im mood and executive functioning.(Journal of Attention Disorders jad.sagepub.com)

This ia a simply wonderful book by seventh degree black belt and zen priest Jeff Brooks. Jeff runs a dojo ( a karate studio ) and a zendo (a school for buddhist study and practice) in Northamptom Massachusetts and I found his book so inspiring that I began recommending to my patients the very next day. The book describes his journey as a martial artist and as a Buddhist meditator, and talks about the relation between the two, which he views as inextricably bound.