Brain Injury Services Group

Meet with fellow contractors and colleagues at Ashburn Psychological Services today with members of a neat Springfield, Va.-based group called the Brain Injury Services Group and I wanted to pass along the link. The group's work is particularly relevant with so many veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries, but also for folks who have taken falls, had car accidents or gone through similar experiences.

The Truthfully Maddening Dilemna of John Nash's Story

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...

The Gift of Fear (or the Gift of Intution in Protecting Yourself and Lie Detecting)

A friend was recently on the phone with me walking down a New York street and she noticed a man starring at a street pole, and it didn't make her comfortable. Now, as the boys at Matchbox Twenty would put it, this is from a woman who makes friends with shadows on her wall, hears voices telling her that she should get some sleep, takes to herself in public and dodges glances on the train. What, on Earth, could bug this woman out? After first she dismissed her reaction. Could it be because the man was black and she racial stereotyping was making it worse? No. She lives in New York, and sees blacks all of all ethical and moral stripes and sizes every day. Could it be the neighborhood? Nah. It was familiar too her. Maybe something was different about the street lights? That could be it. Eventually, I said, "Who cares, why? If it doesn't feel right, just move, move." Gavin de Becker, a personal security professional, received acclaim for his book "The Gift of Fear...

Down the Road from McLean

My fascination with the sprawling 240 acre campus of McLean Hospital , in Belmont, Mass., and what was done there, began in 2003, the year I lost my job at The New York Times and days later found myself 270 miles south, at Silver Hill Hospital , in New Canaan, Conn., a premiere hospital that rivals, and in some estimations, is stronger than McLean . There, I was treated to my first experience in an acute, inpatient locked ward where I was evaluated for the first time by a psychiatrist and quickly diagnosed with a mood d isorder that later turned out to be bipolar disorder. Over more recent years, especially when I struggle to maintain my stability, I think back to that place and wish, for a minute, that I could come up with some reason to return to its 60 acres, complete with a social worker who spends the day checking in on you, the constant psychiatric care, the intense medication management, the priest who comes, if you so choose, to pray with you and the buildings full of fellow ...

Jayson Blair

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