Psychiatric Opinions in the Daily News
It's summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and summer vacation travel season is upon us.
My wife and I are vacationing in Manhattan. In fact, we may be on a kind of continuous vacation since I retired from formal psychiatric clinical and administrative work a dozen years ago. Usually, travel by non-professionals is considered vacation in the sense of escape from the everyday. Maybe it's more than that. It could be part of psychiatry. Travel could possibly be therapeutic.
Travel could also be part of a new focus in psychiatry called lifestyle psychiatry.1 Lifestyle psychiatry is the theme of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in 2025. The Wall Street Journal has long had a lifestyle section in its daily paper, and travel is one of its subsections.
Thinking about travel as a therapeutic lifestyle brings the two threads together. This kind of focus has been developed in recent years by the School of Life, an organization that started in the UK in 2016 and has now expanded globally. Its goal is to incorporate mental health principles into everyday life. I think they've done it incredibly well, in a way that's simple enough for the general public to understand and appreciate, but also with a certain level of sophistication.
Therapeutic travel means consciously choosing destinations that have the potential to inspire and fascinate in ways that promote health and maybe even heal. In A Therapeutic Atlas, one of the products of the School of Life, images of specific places and short essays point out places that may free our minds in different ways.2 The atlas can be read as an afterword to a planned trip, or to look back on past trips with a new perspective. Most of the places mentioned in the book may seem exotic, but in reality, the trip can also be a staycation at home.
In the atlas's holiday section, I spotted a nightclub on pages 54-55. It was in Manhattan, where we were headed, so I was intrigued. The book dates to 1978 and includes a photo of the infamous Studio 54 along with the following description:
“Learning to dance with true silliness can take some serious pain.”
Over the years, I think I've learned that I can dance pretty well. At least that's what I've been told. My wife and I have never been to those clubs, we went to jazz clubs instead, where there isn't much dancing going on; just the music. You can jive and sway in your seat and lose yourself in the healing power of music in a connected, collective, multicultural audience.
We'll be going to a special venue and event billed as the biggest in New York City, which I'll be writing about in my next column. Hint: It probably has something to do with one of my favorite songs and the photo of Rusty and I dancing. It's titled “Dancing to the End of Love,” a reference to the Leonard Cohen song of the same name.
This book comes with Travel Therapy Cards designed to deepen and transform your travel experience. The first card asks, “What is this destination trying to teach you in its way?” The next card asks, “How could what you see here change your life?” Rusty and I will be sharing some of the answers as well.
You or your patients may have traveled for medical reasons – if so, we'd love to hear about it.
Dr. Mofic is an award-winning psychiatrist specializing in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry, currently retired and practicing as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has written a weekday column titled “A Psychiatric Perspective on the Daily News” and a weekly video called “Psychiatry and Society” since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was selected as the 2024 recipient of the Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award by the American Society of Social Psychiatry. He has received the Administrative Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2016, the one-time Hero of Public Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association General 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 currently editing the final volume of a four-volume series on religion and psychiatry for Springer, “Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, Christianity, and ‘Eastern Religions and Spirituality’.” I serve on the editorial board of Psychiatric Times.
References
1. Noordsy D (ed.), Lifestyle Psychiatry, American Psychiatric Association Press, 2019.
2. Therapeutic Atlas. The School of Life; 2023.
