Essays

I just read Peggy Orenstein’s essay in this Sunday’s, The Way We Live Now section of The New York Times magazine called, “Stress Test, Why Americans want to believe that our mental states can control our physical maladies.” In the essay, she talks specifically about infertility and breast cancer as illnesses that are falsely managed though the “Mind-Body Connection.”  Orenstein says, “I suspect women today may be particularly vulnerable to placing the locus of illness in their heads rather than their bodies. In part that’s because the causes of the ailments we’re prone to-reproductive cancers, arthritis, fibromyalgia-are often mysterious in origin. But it may also be an artifact of our rapid and and successful social progress.”