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About This Story
Debra uses art therapy, alongside medication and counseling, to cope with both severe depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.
For more information on depression, visit the National Institute of Mental Health.
About the Common Therapies List
The therapies listed in the orange sidebar are not necessarily meant to treat conditions directly. Often they are used to reduce stress, therefore increasing a person’s ability to cope and/or heal.
Discuss & Share Your Stories
Looking at the Whole Person
Dennis H. Novack, MD
Drexel University College of Medicine
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews
George Engel, perhaps, said it best that human beings are at once biological, psychological, and social beings. That’s how we’ve evolved, that’s who we are. And if there’s a disturbance in any one of those aspects of being, it affects every aspect of being.
What that means is that number one, we have to understand, not only the biology, but also the biology of the interactions of mind and body and psychology and the social environment...
If there’s upsetting things happening in our social environment, it affects our biology. Stress hormones start getting released. It can change our anatomy. Neurons in our brain are proliferating and changing in certain ways in response to what’s happening in the environment. It affects our behavior, so if we’re stressed we may say, "Oh I don’t have time to take all this medicine. " Or, "I don’t want to take all this medicine; I don’t want to see a doctor."