mental health | The Smart Set

Out of Hiding

Camille DiBenedetto — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

This piece contains detailed discussions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), including descriptions of intrusive thoughts, compulsions, and rituals that may be distressing to some readers. If you are sensitive to content about mental health conditions, particularly OCD, or if you find such topics triggering, please proceed with caution. When I first came across Emma Noyes promoting […]

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The Lost Art of Showing Up

Maria Hewett — Thu, 11 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Humans are social animals, and our brains are wired accordingly. When a brain is socially isolated, it will crave social interaction in the same way that a hungry person’s brain will crave food. And yet, we live life in defiance of these facts. While our brains want to be fed social-connection broccoli, we feed them Skittles […]

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Clearing Out the Brain Fog

Anna Gordover — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 13:10:12 +0000

(a special thank you to my friends for providing their quotes) The giant mixed-media sketchbook sitting on my desk is nowhere near half full. In May of 2020, when it was still taking up space in my childhood bedroom as my family waited for New Jersey stay-at-home orders to lift, I told myself I would […]

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Golden State

Christa Laib — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 11:30:40 +0000

Norman Rockwell must have inspired the designers of the Massachusetts VA (Veterans Affairs) Hospital I worked at during grad school, as the campus they created reproduced many of the trappings of the tidy American suburb. Clusters of small, house-like buildings sat scattered amongst acres of once lush lawn. A network of concrete footpaths connected the clusters, cutting a series of tree-lined curves that would be carpeted in a leafy shag by fall. But there […]

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Something Is Rotten in the United States of America

Jeffrey R. Wilson — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:22:24 +0000

Politicians, stop saying mass shootings are tragedies unless you’re going to do what literary critics do with tragedies: actually interpret them. “This was a horrible tragedy:” perhaps the most common thing we hear after each new incident that adds to the alarming trend of mass shootings in the United States. Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Umpqua, Las […]

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Pearls of Wisdom & Fear

Natasha Burge — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:36:11 +0000

I’m sitting next to a wall covered in photos of Umm Kulthoum. From behind her omnipresent sunglasses, she looks down sternly on the crowded teashop, sharing wall space with dozens of other notable personalities from the Middle East. Along the ceiling hang WWI-era rifles, dusty phonographs, and lank flags discolored by years of cigarette smoke. […]

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A Year in Psychoanalysis

Brian Birnbaum — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 12:30:19 +0000

As a writer, I’m only anything if observant. And yet I have frightening blind spots. Despite the low square footage of my Harlem apartment, too often I can’t find things in it. Clothes, shoes, the remote. Even the can opener, which has only one place of keeping, the utensils drawer, which I search through and […]

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Sick and Tired

Jessa Crispin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:12:43 +0000

I returned to Cork in the west of Ireland seven years after I moved away. I hadn’t lived there long the first time around: six months, the longest I could stay on a paltry visa given to a 19-year-old girl with no skills, no money, and no connections in the country. And it was not […]

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Greetings from Here

Stefany Anne Golberg — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:12:43 +0000

Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter. This may not surprise fans of the writer — author of The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb, and Job, among others — who may know Joseph Roth as a vagabond and misanthrope whose occupation as a journalist had […]

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Made to Disorder

Jessa Crispin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:12:43 +0000

Your therapist is probably giving you multiple personality disorder. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt. 372 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95. Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan. 320 pages. Free Press. $26. Oh sure, he’s going to deny it. He will say you […]

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