TOUCH AND GO !

It's time for Dr. Sanity to practice a few touch and go's around the mental health blogsphere--or "psychosphere" if you prefer! What follows are some of the topics my fellow mental health professionals are blogging about.

In an extremely important post, ShrinkWrapped describes the pathology of the anti-semite:

Anti-Semitism is an ancient scourge that has destroyed all who have become infected with it throughout history. It is a deadly illness of the mind which contains the nidus of self-destruction within its genetic code.

Most of us in the West have long recognized the danger of anti-Semitism. Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that it is symptomatic of totalitarian societies which need to deflect the blame for their failures onto others:

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews — whether shadowy cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present — who alone stir up the trouble.

The beauty of anti-Semitism is that the Jews have a long tradition of being small in number yet relatively visible in the societies in which they lived. Thus, they serve as the perfect objects on which to project ambivalently held traits.

This is a great post that brings understanding of the self-induced plague of anti-semitism that runs rampant in the Islamic world. In a related and complementary essay, our three resident shrinks in one, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred have an excellent discussion at their site which delves into the myth of moderate Islam and has some sobering thoughts on the subject.

Dr. Helen and her hubby Instapundit host a podcast on the Avian Flu. Great stuff.

neo-neocon ponders the meaning of the released Saddam tapes-- are they a smoking gun, or a cap pistol?

GM Roper, having just gone through some life-saving surgery is able to find some humor in surgical jokes! What an amazing guy!

The Assistant Village Idiot presents a difficult clinical case that has some similarities to dealing with--or rather, not being able to deal with--difficult and threatening nations. Meanwhile, Shrinkette's post describes the difficulties presented in sometimes dealing with helpful patients!

Gagdad Bob asks, why does religion always come pouring back in, despite the best efforts of secularists to do away with it?

Our final stop in our touch and go before we return back home is at Psychpundit, who tackles the truly difficult problem of using antidepressants in the real world (as opposed to the unreal and artificial world of a research study).

As you can see, this brief tour of the psychbloggers' domain yields a wealth of fascinating expertise and excellent reading!