Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Experiencing art: it’s a whole-brain issue, stupid!

By Arthur Shimamura
We love art. We put it on our walls, we admire it at museums and on others’ walls, and if we’re inspired, we may even create it. Philosophers, historians, critics, and scientists have bandied about the reasons why we enjoy creating and beholding art, and each has offered important and interesting perspectives.

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On suicide prevention

By Robert Goldney, AO, MD
Not all suicide can be prevented. That is particularly so when help is not sought. On other occasions suicide can be interpreted as the inevitable outcome of a malignant mental disorder, and that can be of some comfort to grieving families and friends who may be feeling guilty at their sense of relief that uncertainty is over. Clinicians may also share those emotions. However, if adequate assessment of each individual is undertaken and appropriate management pursued, on balance there will be an overall reduction in the unacceptable rate of suicide worldwide.

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These days do we really need a Man of Steel?

By Arthur P. Shimamura
As a child, I encountered the Man of Steel in the Adventures of Superman, the 1950s TV series that I watched as morning reruns a decade later. My Superman was “faster than a speeding bullet” and fought for “truth, justice and the American way.” My 26-year-old son, Thomas, encountered a similarly invincible superhero in Superman: The Movie, the 1978 blockbuster which starred Christopher Reeve.

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Days are long—Life is short

Author Christopher Peterson passed away late last year. As the World Congress on Positive Psychology approaches (Oxford University Press will be at booth 110), we’d like to pay tribute to one of the founders of the field in this brief excerpt from Pursuing the Good Life.

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A love of superheroes

By Suzanne Walker
The night I saw The Avengers for the first time, I took the train back to my apartment and immediately dashed off the following email to a friend of mine: “The Avengers was amazing, I can’t even describe it. Feeling strangely fearless about life, and my head is filled with too many intellectual thoughts about superheroes.”

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Superhero essay competition: tell us your favorite superpower

It’s the summer of the superhero here at Oxford University Press. We’re publishing two essay collections on the real powers superheroes hold — on our imagination and our understanding of the world. Our Superheroes, Ourselves, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, and What is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD and Peter Coogan, PhD, look at some of our greatest superheroes (and supervillains) and explore what exactly makes them “super”.

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Stories We Tell: How we reconstruct the past

By Arthur P. Shimamura
Our memories, in many ways, define who we are as an individual or at least who we think we are. In the recent documentary, Stories We Tell, filmmaker Sarah Polley presents her own tale of the search for her biological father. Through interviews with relative and friends, snapshots, and re-enactments of pertinent events that look like old home movies, the documentary moves like a real-life Rashomon, wherein bits of the “truth” are revealed from various points of views.

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X-rays and science: from molecules to galaxies

By Richard B. Gunderman
We often think of x-rays strictly in terms of medical diagnosis, but in fact they have played a huge role in scientific discovery beyond medicine. Though they are part of the same electromagnetic spectrum that includes visible light, their different properties enable them to reveal phenomena that the naked eye cannot perceive.

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Dangerous assumptions in neuroscience

By Robert G. Shulman
I’ve spent decades in magnetic resonance research and since 1980 my colleagues and I have been studying the human brain. Like many fields of science, it is astounding to reflect on the progress made in the uses of magnetic resonance which has gone from being a physicist’s means of studying the nucleus to an omnipresent tool for clinical medicine and biological research, especially in neuroscience.

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Mindful exercise and mental health

By Helen Lavretsky, M.D., M.S.
There is currently extensive use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) — also known as integrative or mind-body medicine — in the United States to sustain well-being in both aging baby boomers and in children and adolescents.

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Clinician’s guide to DSM-5

By Joel Paris, MD
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a classification of all diagnoses given to patients by mental health professionals. Since the publication of the third edition in 1980, each edition has been a subject of intense interest to the general public. The current manual, DSM-5, is the first major revision since 1994.

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American psychiatry is morally challenged

By Michael A. Taylor
The fundamental problem with American psychiatry is American psychiatrists. It seems every few months there’s fresh news about some well-known academic psychiatrist paid boatloads to endorse a new treatment that doesn’t work—or worse—causes harm. Among the 394 US physicians in 2010 who received over $100,000 from the pharmaceutical industry, 116 were psychiatrists, well out of proportion of the percentage of psychiatrists in medical practice.

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Personality disorders in DSM-5

By Donald W. Black, M.D.
Those of us in the mental health professions anxiously await the release of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Others may wonder what the fuss is about, and may even wonder what the DSM-5 is. In short, it is psychiatry’s diagnostic Bible.

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The classification of mental illness

By Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman
According to the UK Centre for Economic Performance, mental illness accounts for nearly half of all ill health in the under 65s. But this begs the question: what is mental illness? How can we judge whether our thoughts and feelings are healthy or harmful? What criteria should we use?

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DSM-5 will be the last

By Edward Shorter
In assessing DSM-5, the fog of battle has covered the field. To go by media coverage, everything is wrong with the new DSM, from the way it classifies children with autism to its unremitting expansion of psychiatry into the reach of “normal.” What aspects should we really be concerned about?

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100 years of psychopathology

By Paolo Fusar-Poli and Giovanni Stanghellini
In 1913, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology) was published. A guide for young students, doctors and psychologists, it had been completed two years earlier by a 28-year-old German psychiatrist: Karl Jaspers. He aimed to overcome scientific reductionism and establish psychopathology as a new comprehensive science during a period of significant advances in neuroscience.

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