Hollywood doesn’t have the best track record portraying mental illness. From the harmless, almost charmingly quirky weirdos of Benny and Joon to the axe-wielding maniacs haunting many a horror flick, mentally ill people are seemingly always either romanticized or villainized, with little middle ground. And hey, what about the ending of A Beautiful Mind, where brilliant economist John Nash manages to logic himself out of his schizophrenia-induced delusions? There’s some wild m

Could you have ADHD? If you’re not, say, a hyperactive schoolboy, it’s possible that nobody has ever suggested this to you. However, between four to five percent of the U.S. adult population has the condition—roughly one in twenty. And that means there’s about an 100% chance that ADHD affects your life in some way, whether it’s present in a best friend, a coworker, a boss, or yes, you. How could it go undetected in your life for so long? Because it’s probably not quite what y

Chronic stress: it’s not just bad for your stress ball budget. Left untreated, persistent stress can create a whole host of problems in the human body and brain. Beyond the muscle aches and migraines, there’s also anxiety, high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, and—of course—insomnia. Given the inherent dangers of not sleeping enough, it’s easy to see how unaddressed tension (even from past sources, as with PTSD) could become a vicious cycle. http://www.apa.org/helpce

StartFragment What makes the human brain so, well, human? It’s not purely a matter of size—from studying the cranial cavities of Neanderthals, we know that our bygone genetic cousins sported more gray matter than us. But seemingly that wasn’t enough to put them in the same ecological niche, or even just to keep them from extinction. After close examination and a lot of theorizing, researchers at Oxford have suggested that the main brain difference between them and us was more