Psychology plays an important role in winning football matches and ultimately football titles. “If I could go back in time I’d go to the 2006 World Cup and bring along a mental coach to work with the players on taking penalties. England did have a mental problem with that” – former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson (Little, 2012). Continue reading
In spite of over a hundred years of research and many billions of dollars spent, we still have no clear evidence that schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders are the result of a diseased brain. Continue reading
As football fans around the world prepare for the start of Euro 2012 this Friday, we cannot help but reflect on the contrasting circumstances of two of the tournament’s most talked about teams. As summer is to winter, as joy is to sorrow, as hope is to despair – so is the mighty Spain to lowly England. Continue reading
This is the first of a series of blog postings related to my own series of research studies (my doctoral research at Saybrook University; Williams, 2011) of people who have made full and lasting medication-free recoveries after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. This is very exciting research because it is one of the few areas within psychological research that remains almost entirely wide open. One reason it is so wide open is that most Westerners don’t believe that such recovery is possible, in spite of significant evidence to the contrary. Since there are some very hopeful findings that have emerged within this research, I want to begin this series of postings by summing up one particularly hopeful aspect of my own research, which is a group of five factors that emerged which are considered to have been the most important factors in my participants’ recovery process. But before looking more closely at these factors, we should back up for a minute… Continue reading
A study compiled by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has found that adults who have experienced mental illness in the previous year were more likely to suffer from certain physical illnesses than those who maintained good mental health. Conditions such as heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and diabetes had increased rates of occurrence in individuals who experienced mental disorders or major depressive episodes in the past year.
Of those who reported any kind of mental illness, 21.9% had high blood pressure compared to 18.3% of persons who reported no mental health problems. Asthma also increased significantly from 10.6% (with good mental health) to 15.7% (with poor mental health). Continue reading
It has been revealed that being able to speak a second language could have a significant impact on your future mental health. A recent study has indicated that bilingualism not only has the capacity to boost cognitive abilities in your youth but might also improve brain functionality in later life and could even help protect against diseases such as dementia (Bates, 2012). Continue reading
