Psychology and Psychiatry

Content type
Collection
Silhouette of Girl Eating from a Spoon

If You Have an Eating Disorder, You're Not Alone

Emma Barthold

The new year, with its onslaught of messages about “improving” our bodies, can be especially hard for people with eating disorders.

Episode 85: Teens and Mental Health in the (Post)Pandemic

Teens were already struggling before COVID. When the pandemic hit, things just got worse. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we speak with Vanessa Kroll Bennett, co-host of The Puberty Podcast, parenting writer, and mother of four, about teens and mental health—before, during, and after the pandemic—gender differences, and what caregivers and Jewish communities can do to help. We also hear directly from teens about how the pandemic affected them and how they're doing now. 

Episode 84: Modern Loss with Rebecca Soffer

For a long time, Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of the website Modern Loss, had been planning to write a guide to coping with grief. Then the pandemic hit, and the need felt especially urgent. So she wrote The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Resilience. The book came out earlier this year. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we speak with Rebecca about all things grief-related: trigger days, bespoke holidays, Jewish grief rituals, and what to say—and not to say—to someone in mourning. 

Judith Herman

Dr. Judith Herman was a pioneer in identifying the frequency with which sexual abuse of female children occurs within the family, in the treatment of victims of abuse, and in psychotherapeutic confrontations of abusers.

Mirra Burovsky-Eitingon

Mirra Burovsky was the first Jewish actress to star in the mainstream Russian theater. Her stormy life and career brought her to center stage of Jewish cultural, intellectual, and social ferment in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia, Weimar Germany, and mandatory Palestine. Her third marriage, to psychoanalytist Max Eitingon, and the career of her son Yuli Khariton, “the father of the Soviet atomic bomb,” created the background for a continuing espionage controversy.

Carol Nadelson

Carol C. Nadelson is a ground-breaking female psychiatrist whose work has changed how medical practice addresses women’s medical care and encouraged women to break the glass-ceiling. She as the first woman president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and the American Psychiatric Association. Under Nadelson’s editorial leadership, the American Psychiatric Press became a leader in the field of psychiatry.

Blurred Portrait

Mental Health Awareness Month

Sheri Panovka

Sheri Panovka,Director of Communications at the Blue Dove Foundation, discusses Mental Health Awareness Month.

Red Rope Stock Image

Ritual and Obsessions

Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler

“This is the part of your brain that holds your obsessive-compulsive disorder,” she said, her tone firm. “We can fray this cord, but we can’t just break it.” ... I imagined a dark red cable, floating somewhere in the space between my ears, demanding my attention every waking moment of the day. In light of Passover approaching, it seemed particularly cruel that I found myself struggling with the concept of freedom.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 3 Promo

Thankful for Crazy

Bella Book
Emily Cataneo

This isn't some prestige drama about anti-heroes doing “Bad Man Things;” it's a rom-com send-up about a "quirky" woman. The fact that Bloom and Mckenna are willing to go there and delve into that "quirky" woman's very real mental health problems makes an important statement about how pervasive mental health problems are for so many people.

Karen Fox

As a rabbi and a psychotherapist, Karen Fox guides and supports clients, congregants, and students on their different journeys.

Karen Fox

As a rabbi and a psychotherapist, Karen Fox guides and supports clients, congregants, and students on their different journeys.

Joanne Greenberg

Under the pen name Hannah Green, Joanna Greenberg turned her struggle with mental illness into the bestselling novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

Mary Gendler

Mary Loeb Gendler has helped shape social justice movements in indirect but effective ways, from crafting new rituals for Jewish feminists to helping Tibetan exiles leverage the tools of nonviolent protest.
"Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within" Front Cover by Hilde Bruch, 1973

Hilde Bruch and the Persistence of Eating Disorders

Isabel Kirsch

Clinical descriptions of eating disorders date back centuries, yet it took until the 1970s for the pioneering research of doctor, psychologist, and writer Hilde Bruch to bring the issue to public attention. 

Emma Nuschi Plank

Emma Nuschi Plank’s multidisciplinary approach to child development helped doctors, teachers, psychologists, and social workers find a common language to work together.

Betty Berzon

Two years after psychologist Betty Berzon came out as a lesbian in 1971, she won the fight to have the American Psychiatric Association declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.

Alexandra Fine

Using crowdfunding and cutting-edge technology, Alexandra Fine helped create the first successful hands-free couples’ vibrator in 2014 to overcome the difficulties women face in achieving orgasm during sex.

Helen Reddy

Singer Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem “I Am Woman,” the only song she wrote herself, earned her a Grammy and international stardom.

Lainie Breaux

Having just given birth days before the storm, Lainie Breaux was focused on the needs of her new baby in the chaos of evacuation.

Lainie Breaux

When the hospital tending Lainie Breaux’s newborn son temporarily lost contact with her during Hurricane Katrina, Breaux used her fifteen minutes of fame to call attention to the plight of others devastated by the hurricane.

Naomi Weisstein, 1939 - 2015

Naomi sometimes described herself as a female Lenny Bruce. But she was not an imitation anything. She was pure Naomi.

Death of Oregon OB/GYN and Psychiatrist Lena Kenin

March 24, 1968
Dr. Lena Nemerovsky Kenin distinguished herself in three fields of medicine: obstetrics, gynecology, and psychiatry.

Carolyn Goodman

As a psychologist, Carolyn Goodman created early intervention programs for at-risk families, but when her son, Andrew Goodman, was killed during Freedom Summer, she became a powerful civil rights activist.

Roberta Galler, 1936 - 2014

Roberta Galler was among hundreds arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in June 1965 protesting local attempts to subvert implementation of the new Voting Rights Act... Rabbi Perry Nussbaum came into the cell housing Roberta and several other Jewish women. Holding up toothbrushes, soap, and other small necessities, he said, "Okay, who in here are my people?" Roberta stepped forward and said "Either all of us are your people or none of us are your people."

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