Tolstoy on Marriage

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Evangelicals a rising force inside Argentine prisons

A remarkable story of what God is doing inside Argentine prisons. Click here to read full article. 

Helpful Things You Can Say to Grieving Parents

This article is written by a pastor who lost a son, who collected ideas from others who had lost children and has reflected on what was most helpful to them. Click here to read full article. 

10 Ways to Bring Calm and Organization Back into Your Daily Life

People with ADHD reportedly experience more disorganization and chaos than those of us who do not have ADHD. Here are some suggestions from a person with ADHD and a psychiatrist of things that have helped this patient and others bring calm and organization into their lives. Click here to read full article. 

A Long, Strange Trip: Psychedelics Meet Mainstream Medicine

A balanced article on psychedelics that are being combined with psychotherapy and the clinical results. It’s important to stay informed about some of these new trends, whether or not you intend to use them in your own practice. Click here to read full article. 

Minimalism: A Trend worth Considering

Recently I’ve run across a few articles on minimalism, the idea of deciding what things you are no longer using and keeping only those things that bring value to your life. Although I’ve not started doing it in my own life, the rationale is starting to make more sense. Here’s a good article about why it can benefit your life, and how to get started. Click here to read full article. 

Updated DSM-5 Text Revisions to Be Released in March

Here is a listing of the text revisions of the DSM-5 scheduled to be released this Spring. Click here to read full article. 

Parents Fight for Control Over Harmful TikTok Videos

Another article on the harms that TikTok can have on adolescents. Click here to read full article. 

Brain Health and Exercise

Two more pieces of research saying that exercise benefits brain health in later life. One study found that pre-synaptic levels of protein were higher in physically active seniors, regardless of presence of Alzheimer’s plaques (perhaps this is the reason that physically active seniors show less signs of Alzheimer’s even though they have brain plaques showing they have the beginning brain pathology of Alzheimer’s). The second study also indicated that exercise helped those with Parkinson’s Disease. Click here to read full article. 

Cookies? chips? pizza? Here’s how to own your cravings

Probably most if not all human beings experience cravings for junk food. Tara Parker-Pope has been doing a series on this in the New York Times, but since most of you can’t get these articles without a subscription to the Times, I’ve avoided including those. Here is an article by Pope not in the New York Times about dealing with cravings which you can read in its entirety. The solution she suggests is a technique you’re undoubtedly familiar with and probably already use with some of your clients—mindfulness. So this is probably an article you, or at least many of your clients, can use. Click here to read full article. 

Studying Acquired Savant Syndrome May Increase Understanding of Creativity   

This is an interesting article about a rare phenomenon that you might run across in counseling. Acquired savant syndrome is a situation that occurs after a person has a brain injury. When they wake up they have a new talent such as music or art that they never studied before.

It is from a free journal (Brain and Life) that might be of interest to you if you have a neurological disorder or if you occasionally work with clients who have neurological disorders. You can get a free subscription by going to www.brainandlife.org. Click here to read full article. 

Death During Sex: Not Just an Old Man Thing

Some people with cardiac conditions may fear that having sex could trigger a heart attack. This study found that sex was quite safe even for those with cardiac conditions. Mortalities occurred during or within 1 hour after sexual intercourse in just 0.2% of 6,847 SCD cases reviewed in England. However, the average age for mortalities was 38, and approximately 1/3 of these deaths were for women. But the emphasis of this article was that for both men and women with cardiac issues, making love with your partner is not generally dangerous.

Another older study, not cited in this article, was that having sex with someone who is not your spouse substantially increases the risk of a heart attack, just one more reason among many of remaining faithful to your wedding vows. Click here to read full article. 

The Problem of Fatally Flawed Prenatal Testing

We have all read stories of Christians who were told by doctors that their unborn child had a serious chromosomal abnormality and encouraged them to get an abortion: when those Christian mothers carried the baby to term their baby turned out to be perfectly normal. Now a major study reported in the New York Times said that these prenatal tests have a high degree of false positives. Click here to read full article. 

82-year-old skateboarder

For those of you who dread the idea of getting older, here’s the story (and the video) of an 82-year-old who picked up skateboarding and demonstrates that you can still have fun at any age. Click here to read full article. 

Inside the deranged mind of Clara Phillips, Hollywood’s first female psychopath

If you would like a stomach-churning story, this true-life story could be it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more disquieting story about a psychopath than this one. Click here to read full article. 

Hope to see some of you at Clara Bossie’s SFACC workshop next Friday!