During his decades as Massachusetts General Hospital’s Chief of Psychiatry, Jerry Rosenbaum observed that patients suffering from a range of mental illnesses would sometimes get stuck in a state of rumination, or unceasing cycles of unpleasant, self-deprecating thoughts. While they had what were thought to be discrete conditions—depression, anxiety, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder—Rosenbaum wondered if the differences among those pathologies might be less important than the one characteristic that connected them. Finding ways to break the endless loops of rumination might lead to real progress, saving patients and their physicians from the difficult and sometimes futile quest to sort out which of the existing indicated therapeutic approaches might be effective for them.
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