PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS
It’s officially summer in the northern hemisphere, the season for summer vacation travel.
My wife and I are on vacation in Manhattan. In fact, we may have been on vacation since I retired from my formal psychiatric clinical and administrative work twelve years ago. Normally, non-professional trips are considered vacations in the sense of an escape from routine. Maybe it could be more than that. It can be part of psychiatry. Traveling can perhaps be therapeutic.
Travel may also be part of a new focus in psychiatry called lifestyle psychiatry.1 Lifestyle psychiatry is the theme of the 2025 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting. Wall Street Journal has long had a Lifestyle section in its daily newspaper, and Travel is one of the subsections.
Considering travel a therapeutic lifestyle connects the two threads. This type of focus has been developed in recent years by the School of Life, an organization started in England in 2016 and now global. Her goal has been to translate mental health principles into everyday life. I think they did it extraordinarily well and in a way that is quite easy for the public to understand and appreciate, but with some sophistication.
Therapeutic travel means consciously choosing a destination that can inspire and delight in a way that improves well-being, perhaps even is healing. In one of the Escola da Vida products, A Therapeutic AtlasImages of specific places, also accompanied by short essays, illustrate potential places that can free our minds in different ways.two This atlas can be read in conjunction with planned trips, afterwords, or, I suppose, even to review past trips with a new perspective. Although most of the places in the book may seem exotic, in fact, travel can also be a stay at home.
In the Holidays section of the atlas I found Nightclubs on pages 54-55. I was drawn to it because it’s in Manhattan – where we’re headed. The time of the book is 1978, with an image of the infamous Studio 54, with the statement:
“It may be very painful before we learn to dance with real silliness.”
I think I’ve learned over the years, or so I’ve been told, that I can dance pretty silly. My wife and I have never been to these clubs, but rather jazz clubs which don’t always include dancing. Just the music. Next door, you can dance and sway in your seat and be swept away by the healing power of music in a connected and collective multicultural audience.
We are planning to go to a special place and event, considered the biggest in New York, which I will probably cover in the next column. A hint: Maybe it has something to do with one of my favorite songs and photos of Rusti and I dancing, titled “Dancing to the End of Love,” named after the song of that name by Leonard Cohen.
A companion of sorts to the book is a set of travel therapy cards, designed to “deepen and transform the travel experience.” The first is “What is this destiny trying, in its own way, to teach you?” A later card is: “How could you change your life in some way because of what you saw here?” Rusti and I can also share some of our answers.
Perhaps you or your patients have been on some therapeutic trips. If so, please let us know.
Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now retired and retired as a pro bono private community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has written a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry and Society,” since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has been chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Social Psychiatric Association. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the unique designation of Hero of Public Psychiatry from the President of the APA Assembly in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Christianity, and Now Eastern religions and spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.
References
1. Noordsy D, ed. Lifestyle Psychiatry. Publication of the American Psychiatric Association; 2019.
two. A Therapeutic Atlas. The School of Life; 2023.
