Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Writer's Almanac: "Self-Knowledge" by C.K. Williams


Self-knowledge
by
C. K. Williams
Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the one
who knew no cunning,
who, if "innocent" didn't quite apply, still merited some similar connota-
tion of naïveté, simplicity,
the sense that an essential awareness of the coarseness of other people's
motives was lacking
so that he was constantly blundering upon situations in which he would
take on good faith
what the other rapaciously, ruthlessly, duplicitously and nearly always
successfully offered as truth. . .
All of that he understood about himself but he was also aware that he
couldn't alter at all
his basic affable faith in the benevolence of everyone's intentions and that
because of this the world
would not as in romance annihilate him but would toy unmercifully with
him until he was mad.

"Self-knowledge" by C.K. Williams, from Flesh and Blood. © Farrar/Straus/Giroux, New York, 1998.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Psychminded.co.uk: 'Mental illness is petrifying'

From Psychminded.co.uk"
EXCLUSIVE
by Adam James

.....
Day-to-day life as an inpatient on a psychiatric unit is being documented on an internet blog by a woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Mandy Lawrence, aged 45, was admitted into a six-bed NHS psychiatric unit in Bedfordshire on Friday last week and is writing about her experience.

The blog is believed to be the first by a patient while an inpatient on a mental health unit.

In the candid blog Ms Lawrence describes her crisis in the days leading up to her admission and concerns over who will care for her daughter.

On admission she writes of her worries of being prescribed a new anti-psychotic, its side effects, ward conditions, staff, other patients and her struggle with anxiety. Anecdotes range from consultations with her psychiatrist to watching European Championship football with other patients.

To post on the blog Ms Lawrence has been using the laptop of another patient.

The blog, called mandylifeboatsahoy, receives postings from co-bloggers with an interest in mental health.

Ms Lawrence says she has had mental health problems since a teenager. "Throughout that time I have had episodes of mania or depression which would floor me,” she writes.

To read more of her blog, click here ...

Wall Street Journal: Wrong Prescription: How America's Failure to Treat The Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens'

WSJ: How the emptying of state-run mental hospitals produced a social disaster
By PAUL MCHUGH


The Insanity Offense By E. Fuller Torrey Norton, 265 pages, $24.95

There are times and situations that call for prophets. Not fortunetellers or soothsayers, but biblical prophets like Amos or Jeremiah who furiously proclaim the old truths, puncture our pretensions and predict from current tribulations worse to come if what lies deeper than sin -- idolatrous worship of false gods -- continues. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist who cares for patients with schizophrenia and manic-depression, is to my mind the doctor nearest in character to an ancient Hebrew prophet.

In "The Insanity Offense," he describes the grim consequences -- in death, violence and suffering -- of laws that, beginning in the late 1960s, released the seriously mentally ill from the oversight of state mental-health services and permitted them to wander away from the treatment and protection they desperately needed. Dr. Torrey identifies an unholy alliance of rash conservatives seeking to save public money by abandoning a traditional state obligation and self-righteous liberals defining the neglect of these patients as "defending their civil rights." We need prophets to confront such alliances -- anything less will fail -- and in this splendid book we hear one.

"The Insanity Offense" is "about one of the great social disasters of recent American history," Dr. Torrey writes. "It began within the lifetime of many of us, is continuing, and today affects approximately 400,000 individuals and their families. In the annals of twentieth-century American history, it should be included among the greatest calamities."

Some of the background should be familiar. From the mid-19th century right up until the 1960s, state governments accepted responsibility for the care and treatment of the seriously mentally ill. This arrangement came about because in the 1840s such civic crusaders as Dorothea Dix (in what may be the first piece of social research ever conducted in America) revealed the special ordeal of delusional and distressed mental patients: They tended to lose their way in life and, because of their unpredictable and occasionally violent propensities, filled the country's jails, workhouses and shelters, where they often suffered ugly mistreatment. Dix reported to the Massachusetts legislature in 1843 on "the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!"

The state mental-hospital system was founded to care for these patients. Though psychiatrists before the mid-20th century could offer them little more than shelter and protection, even that modest level of care was far from inconsequential: It kept the patients and the community from harm. State mental hospitals stood as beacons of a public obligation.

By the 1950s, though, these hospitals had become overcrowded and were themselves prompting calls for reform. It was a missed opportunity: Much could have been accomplished if psychiatric leaders at the time had moved quickly to repair a failing system and to educate the public about serious mental illness. The discovery of "anti-psychotic" phenothiazines and "anti-depressants" meant that the symptoms of these patients could be greatly relieved and their dangerous behavior much reduced if such medications were used properly. Steps could have been taken to address the concerns of the growing civil-rights movement and ensure that long-confined patients were not victims of neglect. And the increasing zeal for fiscal restraint and tax reform in state government should have been met head-on with a frank discussion about the costs and benefits of shouldering responsibility for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

Instead, psychiatric leaders at the time offered little or no defense. Worst of all, they failed to explain why state responsibility should continue, no matter what changed in the settings for patient services, so that the mentally ill would be monitored and not slip from sight. Patients with schizophrenia and manic-depression, it should have been explained, often lack any sense of their own mental disorders and so need regular supervision to sustain their treatment.

Why the psychiatric establishment failed to meet these challenges is not obvious. Many doctors wilted before criticism of state-hospital services and mustered weak arguments to defend them. Many others at the time were absorbed in the psychotherapy of patients with milder mental disorders and had little interest in the seriously mentally ill, whose care they were happy to leave to the state and others. As a result, laws were passed in the late 1960s with the direct intent of emptying state hospitals, releasing the patients and saving money -- consequences be damned.

The new laws deprived psychiatrists of the authority to hold patients under surveillance. In the past, psychiatrists could keep patients in a hospital if they were "of such mental condition . . . [as being] in need of supervision, treatment, care, or restraint." Now patients could not be held unless "immediately" or "imminently" dangerous to themselves or others.

The harrowing effects were evident almost immediately, and Dr. Torrey recounts them in vivid detail in "The Insanity Offense." First he offers plenty of statistics to indicate the state of the problem as it exists today -- citing, for instance, the number of seriously mentally ill who are in prison (218,000) or homeless (175,000) at any given time. But just as "numbers are too abstract" to convey the magnitude of a large-scale tragedy such as an earthquake or flood, he says, the true horror that resulted from the "deinstitutionalization" of the seriously mentally ill is best conveyed by individual stories.

Dr. Torrey recounts murder after murder by mentally ill patients, each of whom was actively avoiding treatment. We learn about William Bruce, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized but refused to take his medication. His mother "tried to get help everywhere," a friend related, but "at each phase she was turned away because he never hurt anyone." Bruce bludgeoned his mother to death in 2006 and slit her throat.

The most awful example was the murder last year of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old student who had been court-identified as in need of treatment but allowed by the college to attend classes because the school would not treat mentally ill students -- even those suffering from schizophrenia -- unless the students requested it. Mr. Cho could not be involuntarily committed because he was not an "imminent danger" to himself or others and was not "substantially unable to care for himself." As Dr. Torrey writes: "This is one of the most stringent state commitment statutes in the United States and another example of how changes in mental illness laws in the 1970s and 1980s continue to have real consequences."

Given the difficulty of committing the seriously mentally ill for involuntary treatment, our jails and prisons have become de facto mental institutions. Dr. Torrey's data indicate that more than 30% of inmates are mentally ill. He also describes the abuse they suffer in these brutal environments and the increase in suicides by mentally ill prisoners. The hellish scenes described by Dorothea Dix in 1843 have returned -- with a vengeance, given the huge increase in the American population since the mid-19th century.

What is to be done? "The Insanity Offense" calls for a restoring of some central state responsibility for these patients in ways that would permit monitoring them regularly, keeping them on their medications and insisting on a protected-care setting if they relapse. It is not necessary to reopen all the old state hospitals: The programs that are needed could be carried out in clinic offices with backup, shorter-stay hospital beds.

Dr. Torrey points to successes in a few states. He particularly endorses a program in Wisconsin that provides outpatient tracking and regular medication treatment along with resources for ready involuntary commitments when either treatment fails or the patient becomes unable to control behavioral outbursts.

The issue is whether the public can be rallied to support these reforms. One obstacle: Legions of lawyers are opposed to such changes, claiming that they are infringements on "civil liberty." More than a few such lawyers are heard to proclaim that the violence and murder committed by mentally ill people are "the price we must pay for democracy." Here is idolatry of the most blatant kind -- with human sacrifice, no less -- and hence our need for the fury of a prophet.

Read an excerpt from "The Insanity Offense" here ...

Dr. McHugh is a University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. His book "Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Memory, Meaning, and Mind" will be published in October.

Your own brand of unhappiness ...

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness." - Robertson Davies

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Old Scout: Summer's Here: Everybody in the Pool

The Old Scout:

June 3, 2008


School is winding down and small children are staring out the windows at freedom and counting the days until the heavy hand of grammar and spelling will be lifted from their backs. My sandy-haired daughter dove into the pool on Memorial Day and has been amphibious ever since. She loves swimming and has to be extracted after four or five hours, before she turns prunish, and since the pool is a public pool, not our own — sensible people in Minnesota don't own swimming pools, any more than people in Tucson build backyard hockey rinks — this requires an adult to spend those hours sitting under an umbrella, reading a book and trying not to look at a clock.Garrison Keillor

I don't do pool duty because the sorts of books I read aren't suitable for poolside. You want a novel in which slim young women rising in the world meet over margaritas to discuss the various men who have pitched themselves at the women's feet, and that is not my cup of tea. I am reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is so dense you can only read a few sentences at a time and then you must get up and take a walk, which doesn't make for good supervision.

Emerson would get a kick out of watching my kid swim. He was always recommending boldness and passion — he said, "Give all to love, obey thy heart" and he said, "Always do what you are afraid to do" — and there she is, doing it, practicing the butterfly, green goggles up and down, arms flashing, cleaving the water, back and forth.

This is what a child does for us — shows us joy in action — and watching her in the water, I have to ask myself, what do I love as much? Well (ahem), there is that, of course. And there is our new screened porch with a view of the Mississippi valley. And there are the galley proofs of a new book spread out on the dining room table — the cake is baked and now I get to put on the frosting. When it's done, I have in mind to get in a car and drive west and have three weeks, unscheduled, an enormous luxury mostly reserved for playboys and hoboes but briefly available to you and me.

A couple weeks ago I watched a tenor in a gondolier's outfit stride out on a stage and sing to an immense outdoor crowd "O Sole Mio" and "Torna a Sorrento" and "Finiculi-Finicula," three old cheeseballs that no serious singer does nowadays, and when he hit the big money note at the end of "O Sole Mio," that crowd jumped up as if bitten by badgers and yelled and whooped and whistled. I loved that. Serious artists seek to create challenging work that leaves the audience stunned, thoughtful, even angry, but what we the audience want is the pure joy of a man aiming at a very high note and hitting it squarely and us jumping up and yelling. A simple reflex, same as when the opposition hits into a double play in the ninth inning with one out and the winning run on third.

And a few days ago I saw a skinny mandolinist named Chris Thile get up and sing Marty Robbins's "El Paso" as if his life depended on it and slide up into his falsetto on "Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel/A deep burning pain in my side —" and that very evening I was in El Paso and drove past Rosa's Cantina, where the cowboy in the song fell in love with Felina, a woman of a flirtatious nature. Jealousy turned out to be the downfall of the cowboy, which all of us who have loved and lost can well understand. We too have felt that burning pain in the side.

The joyful child in the pool has been scorched too and has cried hard over playground slights and betrayals, but joy has the power to sweep misery away. This is true. Nobody "gets over" anything, there is no closure, hearts stay broken for a long time. Love is a tumult and it's a wonder anyone survives it. But you look out the window and imagine joy is waiting for you somewhere. A long cathedral fairway between tall trees and a sweet shot with a 3-iron. The Pacific Coast Highway up through Mendocino. You and your beloved naked in Sorrento, making some finiculi-finicula. I hope you find it.

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

Business Week: The Analysis: Revelation Is Still a Risk

From Business Week:

Assess the situation before discussing depression with your supervisor and peers

In the 10 years since Diane Coutu came out to her current employer about her clinical depression, the only negative result she has experienced is her own occasional fear that her colleagues will react badly. So far, not one has.

Quite the opposite, Coutu, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, has found supervisors and peers alike to be sympathetic and understanding. They make no big deal about her illness. And letting go of the secret has lifted a tremendous burden from her emotionally, making her job easier. Still, she concedes that the decision to go public doesn't necessarily make sense for everyone with depression.

Experts agree.

"It depends enormously on your employer's character and personality," says Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner), a personal account of his own struggle with the illness and a study of depression in general. "Lots of people have their own madness, and that makes them uncomfortable with other people's illnesses."

Misunderstanding of the illness itself contributes to the risk of disclosing it. In her book Medical Myths That Can Kill You (Crown Publishers, 2008), Dr. Nancy Snyderman writes that many people still think of the need for antidepressants as a weakness. "We talk a good game about recognizing depression as a real illness, yet we still think people who suffer from it should be able to just 'buck up,'" Snyderman says. "You the employee really need to think this thing through before you tell your employer."

"If you feel your workplace in general is savage and backstabbing, you may not want to tell people about your depression," says Gabriela Cora, a psychiatrist and MBA who practices at the Florida Neuroscience Center in Fort Lauderdale.

Those who seek and receive successful treatment for a bout of depression aren't necessarily safe from workplace doubt afterward. "If you're up for promotion, there could be the legacy of people wondering, 'Is she going to have another episode?'" Solomon says.

Read more ...

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Gazette.net: Peer support offered to those suffering from mental illness

from Gazette.net:
by Kristi Tousignant

When JoAnn Anderson feels like laughing, she buys DVDs of comedians’ stand-up routines for $5 at Wal-Mart, finding a release in the comedic punch lines and witty jokes.

For Anderson, however, it is not just about entertainment. Anderson has bipolar disorder, and the videos allow her to feel good as a way to deal with her mental illness.

‘‘If you can laugh at something, maybe it’s not that bad,” Anderson said.

Anderson, 49, of New Carrollton and friend Regina Prophet, 47, of Temple Hills, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, have reached out to those suffering just like them. The two lead a mental illness support group as a part of the county’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, based in Greenbelt. New to the county, the group started in March with the goal of offering a safe place for participants to discuss their illness.

Read more ...

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

National Post: Mental illness alone can’t explain murder-suicides

From the National Post:

Linda Nguyen, Canwest News Service Published: Friday, May 30, 2008

OTTAWA -- Mental illness alone seldom explains why some people kill their spouses and children, according to Canadian experts in psychology and family homicide.

Sources told the Calgary Herald that Joshua Lall -- who killed five people, including himself, inside an upscale Calgary home earlier this week -- recently reported hearing voices and thought he was possessed by the devil.

Calgary police confirmed late Friday that Lall stabbed his family to death, along with a tenant in his home, on Wednesday morning.

But Martin Daly, a professor in neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster University in Hamilton, said mental illness is seldom enough to drive someone to kill his whole family.

"People with major psychiatric disorders are scarcely more violent than the rest of the population," Mr. Daly said Friday. "They are commanded by the voices to do things like jump in front of a train [or] leap out of a window because they think they can fly - or go to the top of a mountain because they believe they will be taken away by a flying saucer.

"Guys who off their whole family are typically not mentally ill. They've decided to do this over some period of brooding and made a plan."

Read more ....

Globeandmail.com: Celebrity breakdowns: 'Is crazy the new black?'

from Globeandmail.com:

Whether it's a bid for publicity or a desire for sympathy, more stars are pitching their inner demons to the media - prompting some to wonder if mental illness has finally come out of the closet. Hayley Mick reports.


In a world where Lindsay Lohan gets million-dollar offers to come out as gay, and pregnant 17-year-old Disney star Jamie Lynn Spears spikes magazine sales, the latest taboo to hit publicist gold is mental illness.

Kirsten Dunst is one of a string of celebs to put their inner struggles in the spotlight, saying last week that she had been in rehab - not for the drug habit expected of stars such as singer Amy Winehouse - but for depression.

"Depression," the actress says, "is pretty serious and should not be gossiped about."

Gossip is unavoidable, though, with bloggers such as Perez Hilton following celebrities' every move. "Is crazy the new black?" he quipped recently.

The statement from Ms. Dunst followed similar confessions from Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz, who plugged the band's new album by disclosing his depression; from Grey's Anatomy star Justin Chambers, who opened up about his sleep disorder in People magazine after checking into the same Los Angeles psychiatric ward as Britney Spears; and Jackass's Steve-O, who blogged about being bipolar.

Whether it's a bid for publicity or a genuine desire to raise awareness, more celebrities are airing their psychological struggles in the media - prompting some mental health advocates to wonder if mental illness is finally coming out of the closet.

Read more ...

Monday, June 9, 2008

Beyond Blue: Five Humor Strategies? Make That Ten ...

Therese Borchard recently posted this item on her blog, "Beyond Blue."

I love Therese and her blog, but I realize first of all, she's a nicer person than I am, and secondly, that the mentally ill mind works in strange and mysterious ways.

So with that in mind, here is my AMENDED list of five humor strategies to help you find laughter every day ...
In the "America Fitness" article I quoted yesterday, I found a list of humor strategies by Joyce Saltman, a Gestalt therapist from Southern Connecticut State University, who believes laughter is a prescription for survival. Here are some of her recommendations on how to find laughter everyday.

1. Have a place devoted to humor. Designate a section at work as a place for a new joke of the day, everyday.

I have whole areas of my house that make me laugh. The kitchen. The laundry area. The spare room stacked floor to ceiling that's just "one good afternoon" away from being transformed into a beautiful den.

2. Surround yourself with positive people. Avoid people who are constantly negative. They can diminish positive energy.


Or people you can laugh at. They are usually easier to find, too.

3. Buy clothes that make you
smile.Wear the brightest clothes you can find to brighten your day and others around you.

Clothes that make you laugh work. Twenty years later, my mother and I are still cracking up about the time I brought her this beautiful sweater to try on but it had this weird ... bulge in the front. Our hilarity knew no bounds when I discovered I'd grabbed it from Maternity by mistake!

Clothes that make other people laugh work, too. So does laughing at other people's clothes. See #2.

4. Have a VCR readily available. Make tapes of the funniest TV shows you can find. When you or a friend need a pick-me-up, play them.

Watch the recordings of all the soap operas you made in the '80s. Laugh at everyone's clothes and hair. See #2.

5. Make a list of 20 things to do in a day that make you happy. Every couple of months, update this list and make an effort to do at least 10 of these items each day.

Make a list of 20 things in a day that make you laugh. Look in out-of-the-way places. Count the number of times the local news anchors stumble over words. Watch their graphics, note all misspellings, and email the station with your edits. Turn on your set's closed captioning and watch the voice-recognition software struggle with proper names. Read along -- out loud.

More suggestions as they occur to me ... this could be good.

Daily Mail: How the wrong drugs could be causing your depression

From The Daily Mail:
By Lucy Elkins

Feeling worn out? Having trouble getting out of bed each day? Finding it hard deciding what to do with your time? Turn up at your GP's surgery with these symptoms and the chances are you will be diagnosed with depression.

Two million people in Britain are taking antidepressants, yet according to a new book, many of these people aren't mentally ill at all but have been misdiagnosed.

In Beating Stress, Anxiety And Depression, Professor Jane Plant, a leading scientist from University College Hospital in London, and Janet Stephenson, a psychologist at a London hospital, claim the medical profession's approach to mental illness and depression in particular is wrong - with medics often mistaking symptoms of a physical condition for depression.

'A study by an American psychiatrist found that more than 10 per cent of patients diagnosed with mental illness are actually suffering from an underlying physical condition, such as a heart murmur or a mineral deficiency such as calcium or magnesium that causes depression-like symptoms,' says Professor Plant.

Thyroid problems can also cause depression.

Another study found that more than 40 per cent of patients diagnosed as depressed at one medical practice were found to have been taking medication that causes depression as a side effect.

Read more ...

FINALLY figured out where I have been going wrong!

In retrospect, it seems so obvious.

Match.com? Nope? Yahoo personals? Uh-uh. E-Harmony -- puhleeze.

All this time, as Johnny Lee sang, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Here they all are, ripe for the picking, emotionally available, willing to relocate, tall, dark (or light) and handsome.

And gelded.

One of the best sites for true love you will ever find:

McSweeney's: A Word to the Graduates

BY DAVID HOLUB
- - - -
Friends and family, faculty, and, of course, the graduates: I am honored that you have invited me to be your commencement speaker.

If you would have told me five years ago that I'd be where I am now, I would have said, "Why don't you back up and give me some personal space?" Why? Because I didn't know you then and what was it your business where I'd be in five years? It still sort of makes me mad. And, knowing you, you would have persisted, and I would have said, "Why are you so infatuated with what I'll be doing in five years?"

Honestly, when I was asked to be a commencement speaker, I thought, "What's the use?"
No one remembers their graduation speaker. Ask your parents. Graduation speeches are usually some old man pontificating about following your dreams and setting your sights high and roads less traveled. Bull roar.

For one thing, dreams can be tricky, because there are dreams where you start a revolutionary computer business, or where you're at your parents' house but it's not really your parents' house and they're having a garage sale and you're sitting in a bathtub full of cupcakes. So just forget the dreams thing.

My point is that commencement speeches tend to be dry and forgettable. I feel like it's my obligation to make this commencement speech something you won't ever forget, and doing that with mere words and wisdom and funny stories is, frankly, impossible.

And that's why I've decided to release a family of lions into the audience. Granted, some of you will lose your lives and some will be mauled to that icky point where you'd rather be dead. Some will lose limbs but go on to secure respectable employment with reasonable wages, assuming you've retained the use of at least one arm. Others will mark great achievement in the artificial-limb industry—if not for yourself, then as a tribute to a fellow graduate. For the rest of you: Congratulations, you've made it. Welcome to the real world.

This isn't some world where you can goof off for four years guzzling beer and stuffing your face with pizza. Because when you order pizza in the real world, you'll find that the deliveryman has rigged a shotgun to fire when the pizza box is opened. And, as you bleed from the abdomen, you'll hear the deliveryman say, "Welcome to the real world."

The real world is a place where you go on a mountain retreat and stay at a charming cabin with a gurgling stream and a herd of deer grazing on the mountain grass out front. You'll spot one that is tamer than the others, so you approach him, and he lets you scratch behind his ears and pat him on the head. After you've patted him three times, you find that the reason he's so tame is because he's plastic, and on the fourth pat his head explodes. And, as you wait in vain for your hearing to return, the cabin manager, standing nearby, says, "Welcome to the real world."

Today, your world is a world of books and study, but tomorrow those books won't mean a damn thing. Indecipherable. You'll stare, trying to make sense of the pages, and, just as you feel your knowledge returning, slowly, painfully, there will be a knock at the door and a man in a hobo costume.

"Remember me?" he says. "We went to college together."

"I was in college just yesterday," you say. "I think I'd remember you."

"Yesterday?" he says. "We graduated 27 years ago."

And, looking around, you realize he's right. You wonder where it's all gone and realize you've been asleep, dreaming. Of what, you're too embarrassed to say. Cupcakes, perhaps. As you begin to sob into your hands, you say to your college buddy, "I'm so sorry, Franklin."

"Actually, no."

"Hayes, is that you?"

"No."

"Salazar?"

"No."

You go back to weeping into your hands and he embraces you. From the smell, you determine the hobo costume is no costume at all. But just as you begin to feel comforted—poof—he's gone, and he took your watch. On your wrist is a blue plastic replacement watch from a cereal box. The time reads, "Welcome to the real world."

There's a lesson in that. Unfortunately, we've run short on time.

If I could give one piece of advice, it's this: Don't throw your hats up into the air, because eventually they'll fall back to the earth and likely hurt somebody. And if you've been maimed or killed during my speech, then I apologize. It turns out I probably could have made my point without lions.

NYT: Clinic Treats Mental Illness by Enlisting the Family

From the New York Times:
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

It was hard to tell just who was the patient, as the Cunanan siblings — Jennifer, Adrian and Anthony — sat in a row on three chairs in a sparsely decorated therapist’s office at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

It was Jennifer Cunanan, 27, who did most of the talking, describing life with Adrian, 30, a computer consultant who has bipolar disorder and who went through a severe manic episode in March. He would go two days without sleeping, she said, then become so frazzled that he depended on his family to carry out life’s daily chores, like shopping and cleaning.

“All of us would like someone to sweep up after us,” Ms. Cunanan said, half understanding, half resentful, as her brother listened, his eyelids drooping from exhaustion.

Adrian’s brother and sister, as well as the woman he is dating, are critical components of his therapy at Beth Israel, where a fledgling clinic aggressively treats people with bipolar disorder by involving their family members. The clinic, the Family Center for Bipolar Disorder, was set to be formally dedicated on Wednesday, though it has evaluated some 60 families since 2006, in a program that doctors say is unique in the city and based on a model developed at the University of Colorado.

Family-focused therapy, as it is called, breaks the image of the psychiatrist sitting in his chair, alone in a room with the patient, as well as the traditional wisdom that patient confidentiality is sacrosanct. In family therapy, the family might be treated as part of the problem; in contrast, in family-focused therapy the point is not to treat relatives, but to enlist their help in managing the patient’s illness.

Read more ...

New Book Brings Mental Illness to the Forefront

(PRWEB) June 7, 2008 -- Outskirts Press author Two Lenz gives readers a first-hand look at the American mental health care system in Walking Through Walls: Overcoming the Barriers of Serious Mental Illness. In 39 years of hospitalizations, Lenz finds the inner strength to make it through, and shares her hope--and insights into the country's treatment system--in this remarkable book.

May 12, Denver, CO and Las Vegas, NV Research shows mental illness troubles an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans--6 percent severely--and is blamed as the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada among those ages 15-44. But those staggering numbers don't make it any less lonely for people who travel the poorly understood roads of the American mental health system.

Now, one woman is seeking to increase awareness of mental health suffering and give hope to those affected by telling the remarkable story of her 39-year journey through a slew of hospitalizations, diagnoses and medications.

Walking Through Walls: Overcoming the Barriers of Serious Mental Illness (Outskirts Press), by writer Two Lenz, weaves autobiographical narrative with a historical look at our understanding of mental health and problems in modern treatment. Two Lenz (not a pseudonym) was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1970s, after suffering from symptoms of mental illness since childhood. Over the years, she would be hospitalized 25 times, undergo a host of treatments and be diagnosed incorrectly until doctors finally found her to be suffering from schizoaffective disorder.

read more ...

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Strib: Love's Dark Journey

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

By Kim Ode, Star Tribune
June 7, 2008

Lynda Cannova came through the door of the coffee shop, her face strained and drawn. She looked like one of those marathon runners in their final miles, their eyes betraying a fear that they've spent their last reserves, that there's no more left. If they can only reach the finish line.
If only there were a finish line. For the past seven years, Cannova's life has seemed an unending pursuit of doctors, money, appointments, time, beds and peace of mind for her 26-year-old son Tony, who has a form of schizophrenia. "It's like I can't catch up to anything, even to him," she said.

She was in the midst of an especially bad stretch of whipsaw emotions. A weekend earlier, she'd driven from the Twin Cities to Duluth, where Tony has lived in a group home since November. They'd spent a glorious afternoon on the North Shore, at Gooseberry Falls State Park. Tony was all over the rocks, always just out of reach. "It doesn't matter what age a boy is, he's going to pick up sticks," she'd said, laughing as she watched her son striding 20 yards ahead, whacking weeds along the trail.

Now she took a fortifying swallow of iced coffee and blurted the news. Tony had been in the hospital after cutting his wrists on Memorial Day.

She has "wish list" destinations for him, therapeutic working farms for people with mental health issues. "But he needs to go a year without hurting himself before he could even be considered," she said.

Now it's Month One, once again.

Read more ...

Strib: Boys Still Face Emotional Challenges

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

By JEANNE JACKSON DeVOE, Newhouse News Service
June 6, 2008

By fifth grade, boys know that there are certain rules on the playground. They know that they're not supposed to cry, especially in front of other boys, or show they are scared.

"If a boy doesn't do something he normally would do -- he's scared to play tackle football -- some people would yell at him, 'sissy' or 'baby' or 'wimp,' " said 11-year-old Thomas (not his real name).

Thomas said he burst into tears recently because other kids were teasing him and he got into an argument with one of his friends.

"I totally burst out crying after lunch, but normally boys try to keep that in or hold it until they're alone," Thomas said.

Even in this new millennium, boys struggle with the unwritten, unspoken rule that it's not acceptable for them to express sadness and other emotions, said psychologist Dr. Dan Kindlon, co-author with Dr. Michael Thompson of the 1999 bestseller "Raising Cain."

"Emotions become this foreign territory for boys," Kindlon said in a recent lecture.

Feminists helped broaden the definition of what it is to be feminine in the 1960s and '70s, Kindlon said. As a result, everyone accepts that girls should be able to play sports and do math and that they can have careers and be wives and mothers, he said. That has given girls the flexibility to know they can be leaders and still be emotional and nurturing.

But the definition of masculinity has not evolved as much, Kindlon said. Boys don't learn that they can be strong and nurturing and they still view displays of emotions as weak. So they are less flexible.

"We've got to expand that if we want our boys to be more mentally healthy," Kindlon said.

Read more ...

The Writer's Almanac: Religious Consolation

Religious Consolation
by
John Updike

One size fits all. The shape or coloration
of the god or high heaven matters less
than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing
the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite
the widow brings to the temple. A child
alone with horrid verities cries out
for there to be a limit, a warm wall
whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

"Religious Consolation" by John Updike
from Americana and Other Poems.
© Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Psychology Today: Self-esteem vs. Self-respect

from Psychology Today:

By: Ellen J. Langer
Our culture is concerned with matters of self-esteem. Self-respect, on the other hand, may hold the key to achieving the peace of mind we seek. The two concepts seem very similar but the differences between them are crucial.

To esteem anything is to evaluate it positively and hold it in high regard, but evaluation gets us into trouble because while we sometimes win, we also sometimes lose. To respect something, on the other hand, is to accept it.

The person with self-respect simply likes her- or himself. This self-respect is not contingent on success because there are always failures to contend with. Neither is it a result of comparing ourselves with others because there is always someone better. These are tactics usually employed to increase self-esteem. Self-respect, however, is a given. We simply like ourselves or we don't. With self-respect, we like ourselves because of who we are and not because of what we can or cannot do.

Read more ....

Psychology Today: The Buddha Goes to Therapy

How psychotherapy and meditation can help manage powerful emotions. A therapy session under the method of Zen Buddhism; Buddhist views on love.
By: Mark Epstein

A Buddhist psychiatrist who has been meditating for decades elegantly describes how psychotherapy and meditation can help us manage our most powerful emotions--and make us feel more alive and whole in the process.

"Stop trying to understand what you are feeling and just feel," my first meditation instructor told me. This instruction seemed insanely simple: the ability to just feel should come as naturally as the ability to breathe. Yet, in twenty-five years as a psychotherapist and practicing Buddhist, I have found that most of us have not learned how to be with our feelings without rushing to analyze them, change them, or escape them.

If we really want to live a full life, both the ancient tradition of Buddhism and the modern one of psychotherapy tell us that we must recover the capacity to feel. Avoiding emotions will only wall us off from our true selves--in fact, there can be no wholeness without an integration of feelings. Both traditions have discovered that the way to plumb the full depths of our emotional being is by letting ourselves go, by surrendering to who we really are. And both traditions understand that we need a state of reverie in order to know our emotions. Whether that reverie comes through meditation or the quiet holding space of therapy, it is always necessary.

Read more...

Psychology Today: Bookshelf

From Psychology Today:

by Paul Chance

One of the oldest ideas in cognitive psychology is that people use a set ofexpectations, called a schema, to interpret their experiences. We have, for example, a schema for restaurants: When we dine out, we expect to be seated at a table and offered a menu. Some psychotherapists now apply the schema concept to destructive patterns of behavior. According to psychotherapist Tara Bennett-Goleman, M. A., author of Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart (Harmony, $24), most of these schemas involve fear--of abandonment, betrayal, rejection, and so on. Unrealistic expectations distort our perceptions of ourselves and our environments so that we deal with illusion rather than reality, leading to unhappiness. One of Bennett-Goleman's clients, for example, had such unrealistically high standards that she saw only her failures and consistently overlooked any successes she had. Bennett-Goleman discusses how such inappropriate schemas work against people, and how adopting a more realistic schema is helpful. She also argues that destructive schemas can be brought "into the light" through mindfulness, cognitive therapy and Buddhist teachings. While her unique brand of New Age therapy is as yet unproven, she provides entertaining anecdotes from her personal and clinical experience to illustrate her point.

If your fears are more like spider phobias or generalized anxiety, you might want to try more traditional, well-documented psychological remedies. In Facing Fears: The Sourcebook for Phobias, Fears, and Anxieties (Checkmark, $16.95), psychologists Ada Kahn, Ph.D., and Ronald Doctor, Ph.D., offer general information on fears and their treatment as well as an alphabetically arranged compendium that tells you everything you want to know about specific phobias, and then some.

By all accounts, schizophrenia is a horror worse than anything Steven King's imagination could conjure up. Now, writer Greg Bottoms has provided a biographical novel about his brother, Michael, a paranoid schizophrenic, that may be as close as most of us will ever get to knowing what it is to be truly mad. Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness (Crown, $22) is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it describes.

Research shows that slow-witted people generally have more children than those with better brains. If this is true, why isn't the world's IQ falling like the fellow who tipped a vending machine toward himself to get a free treat? Wendy Northcutt, author of The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action (Dutton, $16.95) implies that it's because stupid people remove their genes from the pool sooner. Northcutt, an Internet consultant, gives the awards to those who show a remarkable talent for shortening their lives in creative ways. There is, for instance, the couple who made love in their garaged car and left the motor running to stay warm--sure proof that evolution is still at work.

In A Quiet Worm (Yale, $18.50), David Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Michigan's Hope College, wittily discusses the trials of a person sinking into deafness. He tells us, for example, of the hearing impaired woman who writes to an advice columnist: She thinks her boyfriend proposed marriage, but she's not sure she heard him correctly. What should she do? Myers uses humor deftly, much of it self-directed. Still, he recognizes that hearing loss is a serious problem, and helps his reader appreciate how the inability to hear becomes the inability to connect.

Psychology Today: Domestic Drama: On-Again, Off-Again

Psychology Today:

What drives couples to repeatedly break up and then make up?
By: Elizabeth Svoboda

It's often the fleeting high points of a fundamentally rocky relationship that convince embattled partners to keep coming back for more, spurring a tortuous dynamic with no end in sight. "Often there is something that works very well for you about this person," says Gail Saltz, a Manhattan-based psychiatrist and author of Becoming Real. But when your mate's dreamy qualities are accompanied by deal-breaker ones like dishonesty or irresponsibility, it can be difficult to make a clear-headed assessment of whether to stay or leave.

While problem behaviors may prompt a periodic hiatus, on-again, off-again couples continue to reunite out of a persistent hope that the moments of happiness and fulfillment they've known will someday constitute the entire relationship. "People say, 'I can fix this other part of my partner,' " Saltz says, even though efforts at "remodeling" a mate are typically useless. The self-deprecating internal monologues serial on-off artists conduct after a breakup—"What was I thinking? I'll never meet someone as funny, smart, and attractive ever again!"—can also lead to repeated reconciliations.

Read more ...

In The Name Of Love: Romantic Regrets--Who Needs Them?

By Aaron Ben-Zeév, Ph.D. in In the Name of Love:

You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. Michael Jordan
To err is human-but it feels divine. Mae West

Regret is basically a sorrow over a past alternative that was available to us, but that we missed. Regret is an emotion that, by use of our vivid imagination, bridges the past and present with an eye to the future. Two types of regret may be distinguished: short- and long-term regret . As a short-term emotion, regret is concerned with a loss caused by a specific, recent action; the long-term sentiment of regret is concerned with loss in the past, which has repercussions on the general course of life. In the short term, people regret their actions more than their inactions, but when people look back on their lives, those things that they have not done are the ones that produce the most regret. Short-term regret is concerned more with lost of actual gains, whereas long-term regret with lost opportunities. Accordingly, the fear of short-term regret encourages inaction, whereas the fear of long-term regret encourages actions.

Read more ...

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More

 
Design by Free WordPress Themes | Bloggerized by Lasantha - Premium Blogger Themes | cna certification