Psychiatry

• This number reflects a 92.3% match rate for the 8,033 DO seniors who participated, a 0.7% increase from last year.
• According to NRMP, the match rate for fourth-year osteopathic medical students has increased by 4.2 percentage points since 2019.
• In total, the 2024 NRMP match included 6,395 certified programs offering 41,503 PGY-1 and PGY-2 training positions, the largest number in the NRMP's 72-year history.
• The following breakdown shows the top 15 specialties matched into by fourth-year osteopathic medical students seeking PGY-1 placements:

• This increase in successful sessions is key to meeting the 60% increased demand for mental health services among college students.
• Growth in Partner Campuses: BetterMynd experienced a 66% growth in partnerships from February 2023 to February 2024, welcoming an additional 47 partners.
• In 2024 alone, the company welcomed five new partners, including University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Southern University and A&M College System.
• BetterMynd supplements and expands on-campus mental health resources by providing students access to 50-minute individual counseling sessions online from the company's diverse network of over 400 licensed and insured mental health clinicians.

• Brand unveils his gripping memoir, charting a course from being left back in high school to becoming a renowned psychiatrist, from the grooves of rock 'n' roll to the groves of academia.
• Born in the shadow of World War II and raised in the rebellious streets of Greenwich Village, Rick Brand's tumultuous early life included brushes with academic failure and the law.
• "This memoir isn't just my story; it's a roadmap for resilience and reinvention that I hope will resonate with anyone seeking to change their own narrative."
• For more on Dr. Rick "The RokDok" Brand's life and his impact on mental health and rock 'n' roll, or for interviews, contact (914) 517-0226, [email protected] .

• Psychoanalytic ideas were dominant in several academic fields, held in esteem by intellectuals, and well known, if notorious, among the general public.
• Boiled down to its essence, psychoanalysis is an approach to understanding the mind’s dynamics and treating its ailments.
• Review: On Giving Up – Adam Phillips (Penguin) But although its influence has shrunk, reports of the death of psychoanalysis are exaggerated.
• Almost all are in humanities fields: screen and cultural studies, gender studies, criminology, linguistics and history and philosophy of science.

A celebrated literary figure

• The prolific writings of Adam Phillips epitomise this modern day humanistic expression of psychoanalytic thinking.
• Phillips, who has worked for many years in England as a psychotherapist, is also a celebrated literary figure.
• He has received high praise as “the best living essayist writing in English”, “one of the finest prose stylists in the language” and “our greatest writer in psychology”.
• The hallmark of Phillips’s work is taking an idea or phenomenon, often ordinary or obscure, and patiently investigating its hidden complexities.

On Giving Up

• On Giving Up is not, in fact, about giving up in any systematic way.
• The lead essay inspects the many forms of giving up, from renouncing a vice to abandoning all hope.
• Giving up can be a form of “enlightening disillusionment”; failure at one task but success at something else.
• There are a few false notes: is suicide really the “only paradigm” for giving up and is it true “no one writes in praise of giving up”?

Hypnotic style

• Phillips’s style throughout the book is almost effortlessly fluent and erudite.
• The theoretical dimension of his work musters a variety of literary critics and French writers, but always circles back to Freud and his commentators.
• For psychoanalytic aficionados, he is especially drawn to the British and French mystics: Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan and D.W. Winnicott.
• After a while, despite the simple words and the smooth sentences, the experience becomes hypnotic.

Curiosity versus knowledge

Clues to why Phillips’s work is so clever and thoughtful in the reading but also so insubstantial in what it leaves behind can be found in two ideas he presents at each end of the book. In the prologue he cites with approval the psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s distinction between narrow and wide attention and near the conclusion he develops a distinction between curiosity and knowledge.

• A related issue arises when Phillips draws a distinction between curiosity and knowledge.
• A true psychoanalyst, after all, “is someone who is, above all, curious about curiosity.” It is hard to argue against the value of curiosity, but to place it in opposition to knowledge is odd.
• Normally, we might think curiosity drives us towards knowledge and knowledge rewards and reinforces curiosity rather than dulling it.
• It is not obvious why psychoanalysis or any other approach to studying the mind could not aspire to be both a form of (widening) curiosity and a form of (narrowing) knowledge.
• But in Phillips’s work we see a highly developed psychoanalytic curiosity that abstains from making clear knowledge claims.

Psychology versus psychoanalysis

• I’m sure he would agree what he is doing is not psychology in the usual senses.
• Psychoanalysis of Phillips’s variety doesn’t aspire to be any kind of science and it sets itself up as a radically different approach to the study of mind and behaviour.
• A psychology of giving up, for example, would be less astute in unravelling the inner complexities of self-sacrifice and renunciation than Phillips’s psychoanalytic account.
• Such an approach is not inherently preferable to Phillips’s form of psychoanalysis, but it is decidedly different, and not because it is deficient in curiosity.

Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.