Depression
Posted on March 24, 2016 in Depression Poems
A white waste fades to gray,
gray sky, gray thought sinking,
stinking of the morass’s
scent of oily smoke.
I live here sometimes
listening to the voices of the white noise
screaming at the nonsense of my past,
shouting the nonsense of my past
ad nauseum
until the dead raven sings.
I am not yet happy with this poem — I am looking for a better end of the first line.
Why Did Ted Hughes Burn Sylvia Plath’s Last Diary?
Posted on March 10, 2016 in Literature Psycho-bunk Suicide
You know what? I don’t know the answer. But neither do the authors who have made a cash business out of saying that Hughes drove Plath to suicide.
As I have said elsewhere, suicide is the product of mental illness. When a person self-eliminates, a collection of “authorities” like Job’s friends gather to dispense their theories about why it happened. The loss of Plath’s last diary does leave us without answers. But that has not stopped people from giving them anyways.
The anti-Hughes brigade tells us that Ted was trying to hide a Svengali-like murder. They weakly cite Plath’s earlier diaries. But can we take these as final proof of Hughes’s intentions? I think not.
We know that Hughes did edit the earlier diaries. He excised some portions which he felt might upset his children according to his daughter Frieda. The diaries themselves were left unharmed, waiting for a day when scholars might examine them. This raises the question: if Hughes’s intentions were good (let’s just try this as a thought exercise), what could have moved him to edit the earlier diaries and then destroy the last one? I look to Plath’s illness for an explanation. Some women experience psychoses regarding their children. Their offspring become evil in their eyes or they feel that they have to save them. This is not normal maternal behavior. Suppose Plath had voiced such emotions regarding her children. Suppose she had considered killing them? Or suppose she had considered herself an unfit mother, a sentiment not unknown among those suffering from bipolar disorder. Would you want your children reading that their mother hated them or would you let them preserve more positive images? This is my personal theory regarding the destruction of the last journal, chronicling a period when Plath was severely disturbed. I think it is at least as reasonable — if not more so — than the Hughes killed Plath by betraying her theory. He didn’t cut out sections where she disparaged him after all.
I think it is time to leave Hughes and his family alone. Plath’s son killed himself at age 47, strong evidence that he inherited the Plath Family genetic defect. Perhaps she negatively inspired him. I don’t think Hughes was an evil mastermind or mere brute. But I wonder about those ideologues who bore Plath’s bier and committed an act of suttee by immolating Hughes with their suspicions.
Excuse me, Senator Sanders?
Posted on March 8, 2016 in Campaign 2016 Mental Illness Stigma
I am not going to declare who I am supporting for president (there are reasons as a Democrat for keeping my silence no matter who I am supporting) but I must speak up to the matter of Bernie Sanders and his use of mental illness as a pejorative against the Republican field. For the record, I have also written a letter to the White House after Obama made a comment about the Republican Congress being crazy — and I like Obama. A necessary quality for presidential candidates is the demonstration of humaneness. No leader should make any group an object of derision directly or indirectly. Bernie slipped up in the middle of the last debate and he slipped up big time:
The zinger tied Sanders’s support for mental health funding to the Republican field: “We are, if [I’m] elected president, going to invest a lot of money into mental health,” Sanders said. “And when you watch these Republican debates, you know why we need to invest in mental health.”
Excuse me, Senator Sanders? I live with bipolar disorder. I am a lifelong Democrat. And I resent being linked in any way to the Republicans. Donald Trump and his pals are crazy as a fox. The Tea Party/Randenoid ideology that drives them calls for total noncooperation with the president. While I appreciate your call to invest in mental illness care, I am suspicious of your reasons why. Do I detect the old lie that those who commit mass murder are sick in the head, a lie that the NRA has found useful in deflecting comment on gun violence in this country?
What are the real reasons for investing in mental health care? First, many people living with mental illness find themselves in poverty. This makes it difficult for them to become stabilized and remain that way. Improving their standard of living is key to returning them to the workforce. Second, Congress is considering whether to allow insurance companies to set up formularies which can keep patients from obtaining the medications that work best for them and force them to rely on inferior substitutes. Third, we can always rely on more education about what mental illness is all about so that people don’t have a knee-jerk reaction every time they see some bizarre behavior in the news. Fourth, there is a need for better medications with fewer, less loathsome side effects. Fifth, we need to continue to research ways to bypass the blood-brain barrier so that we can deliver medications at lower doses — reducing side effects — and, possibly, implement gene therapy.
These are the reasons why we need to focus on mental health — because mental illness makes the lives of those of us who have it and our families miserable, not because we pose a threat to the rest of society.
Hijacked by the Peanut Crunching Crowd
Posted on March 4, 2016 in Bipolar Disorder Literature Movies Psycho-bunk Suicide
Suicide attracts speculation and prurience like flies to rotting food.
— Hadley Freeman in The Guardian
While I was traveling in Britain, I watched a BBC program about Ted Hughes. Hughes had, by the end of his life, attracted quite a following of detractors who blamed him for driving Sylvia Plath mad. The film Sylvia showed him slapping the American poet and yelling at her. Some of the material was drawn from Plath’s fulminations in her diaries and some from the imaginations of the script writers. Hughes’ critics act like Plath had never been mentally ill before she met him, that she was a happy-go-lucky girl who had the misfortune to marry a monster of a man. Of course, this is to completely ignore the history recounted in The Bell Jar and Hughes’ own side of the story.
One person who was interviewed was Sylvia Plath’s daughter, Frieda. When Frieda finally broke her silence on her mother and father’s relationship, she was angry:
I was appalled that something that happened in 1963 could be carried forward.
‘What an easy way out for somebody to think, yes, we’re right, we have got the real story, we know what really happened, and we are going to punish this complete stranger (referring to Ted) for something we weren’t around to witness, we know nothing about, but we’re the ones with the answer.
The paper reported that she said: ‘For outsiders – because that’s what they are, outsiders – to make judgements that affect somebody in their life, for all of their life, is a sort of horrible form of theft. It’s an abuse.’
It’s an old story that gets told about the mentally ill time and time again: people with a mission — like blaming us for mass murders to divert attention from gun violence or invoking the works of anti-psychiatrists knowingly or unknowingly yolked to the Church of Scientology or some feminists out to blame Ted Hughes for Plath’s insanity — hijack our lives. They rewrite our stories to suit themselves. I have often tried to reason with them, to persuade them to let us tell our stories, but the bottom line is that they do not want the families and victims having a say about their own lives. When ideology trumps understanding, it is not good for any of us.
Dream
Posted on February 2, 2016 in Dreams
A prisoner works inside the long, glassine tail of a research submarine. The sub is sinking, so he goes to the escape pod where there is only room for two people and there are three. One of them, a guard, leaves the pod and commits suicide. The second is a woman who shuts the door. The pod lurches and the prisoner hits his head. He realizes that the woman is his wife and that he has had his mind erased. The pod arrives in a city where the wife goes to a meeting and sends the prisoner off to a hospital to look for answers. The prisoner searches the entire hospital, but finds no one who can help him. He organizes a press conference and tells people what happened to him. A human rights group brings him to Amnesty International.
In a later dream, my companions tell me that they have heard the plot of the dream before in a TV movie.
Are Terrorists Mentally Ill?
Posted on December 4, 2015 in Stigma Terrorism
There’s a bit of a bandwagon effect trying to tie the Planned Parenthood shootings and the massacre in San Bernardino to mental illness. The first case seems to be a clear case of terrorism egged on by Republican presidential candidate Carley Fiorna who characterizes the shooter as a “protester”. We don’t have enough information on the San Bernardino shootings to characterize it, but it seems that the impetus was going postal rather than terrorism. Nonetheless, the kneejerk is to claim that terrorists are mentally ill.
I have several, disjointed observations to make:
- Nothing I am saying condones terrorism. I merely describe what is and isn’t true of it.
- Terrorism is a complicated network of interrelationships. There are the captains who decide what is to be done and where. There are the soldiers who carry out their orders. And there are the ideologues who lay out the ideas guiding the movement. Sometimes roles cross and combine.
- It has been shown that stress can cause a young person to decide to join a terrorist effort. Stress is not the same thing as mental illness. It can precipitate mental illness, but it can also lead to other decisions such as the decision to join the military or the clergy. What we do know about stress is that people in it are vulnerable to outside influence which is why young people in their late teens and early twenties provide excellent fodder for both military and terrorist recruiters.
- Terrorists see themselves as soldiers fighting for their country or ethnic group. They see themselves as freedom fighters in a war against Western powers who terrorize their countries with bombings, invasions, and other means. Is this a delusion? One does not have to think far (the operant word being think) to realize that maybe there is some truth in this perception.
- There are no studies showing that terrorists have no sense of right and wrong (which would make them psychopaths or sociopaths).
- Studies do show that people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression are less likely to be violent than people who are not. Given our disorganized thoughts and lack of motivation, we make incredibly bad terrorists or soldiers.
So, no. I do not believe that terrorists are mentally ill anymore than soldiers are mentally ill. The parallels between these two groups is stronger than either has with those of us who live with mental illness.
Madness in Senegal
Posted on October 24, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Hospitals and Prisons Vacation 2015
I wasn’t able to arrange any interviews. The doctors in the Senegalese mental hospitals were defensive, fearful that I would paint a bad picture of conditions, or busy. The assurances of the State Department staff who were helping me didn’t sooth this naive patriotism or persuade them to give me half an hour, but I learned a little. There’s no social security in Senegal, so the mentally ill either rely on the care of their family or begging. I didn’t see many people who struck me as being afflicted on the streets (unlike London and Paris), so I assumed that they had been assimilated into the crowd and received care of sorts from other dwellers of Dakar’s streets.
The luckier among the mentally ill receive support from their families who send them to mental institutions where they receive treatment in the form of psychotropics. These help as long as the money holds out — a familiar story to those of us who remember the dark days before Obamacare. I can’t tell you about the conditions in the hospitals; so, I don’t know if they followed the best standards of care or if they were dank prisons where patients were chained or locked into padded cells.
Mental illness is recognized even in the more remote and traditional areas, which refutes the myth that people in Africa regard people living with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as holy. Instead, they are ostracized and feared — as they have always been, even when they have found a niche as shamans.
Most of the mentally ill disappear into the mass of people walking the streets of this city. They are ignored and forgotten, their symptoms shrugged off which is not the reverence of the myth makers. There’s rumor of an American in one of the suburbs who is in episode; there is no retrieving him and taking him home, however, because he will not come into the embassy for evaluation.
If I stayed around, I might see more; time is running out, however.
Second Wife
Posted on October 24, 2015 in Class Vacation 2015
When you are wandering around the city of Dakar, you are faced by people who make less in a month than you spend in a day. Street vendors assail you at the tourist places, handicapped beggars sit in the street. You tip the beggars and fend off the salesmen as best you can, but unless you are the Koch Brothers, you feel that overwhelmed by the poverty and impressed by the resolve of the people to make as good a living for themselves as possible. They probably never taste meat or enjoy soft drinks (that cost twice as much as they earn in a day). If anyone thinks they are lazy, they should follow one of these for a few hours. Begging is hard work and so is selling.
A woman in brightly colored native clothes started talking to us on the boat to Ile de Goree the other day. She was very friendly and, of course, she had an ulterior motive: to get Lynn and I to visit her shop and buy a few things. The boat was filled with Africans of all nations (including a few from the United States) and a few Europeans and white Americans. I do not know how she reached the conclusion that I was Muslim, but she wanted to know which of the women sitting next to me — Lynn and an Australian woman living in Geneva — was my first wife and which was my second wife.
I told her that I thought one wife was enough for me, that I didn’t want the trouble of arbitrating disputes between two or more women.
“I am the second wife,” she told us and smiled broadly.
I could not help but admire her spirit, so when we met her a few hours later, we bought a few things for our niece after fierce bargaining.
Senegal and other places
Posted on October 23, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Depression Encounters Mania Vacation 2015
I’ve been in three time zones this trip, mere hours apart. Seven hours separate me now from my normal time zone; the heat and the humidity have been more of a problem that disruption of my circadian rhythms here in Senegal. When I feel a little drowsy in the morning, I have tea or Coca Cola. This augments my Vyvance without pushing me into mania.
A tomato on a sandwich proved to be more of a problem. This morning I had nausea so bad that it broke through my Zofran. The technicolor yawn spilled out of my mouth like the larva came out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien. I handed my shirt and pants for processing over by Mami the maid, took a nuclear grade antibiotic that the tropical medicine specialist gave me, and took a long nap.
The plot that my psychiatrist and I hatched is working. I take two Tegretol first thing in the morning and two more later in the day. There are no visits from Tigger or Eeyore, no wild scenes with strangers. i keep calm under pressure from street vendors; “de-de” is very much a part of my vocabulary. (I have yet to say “Jok fe” which is “Go away”.) They are only trying to make a living.
London is an hour ahead of Dakar and Paris is two hours. We’ve already been to the city on the Thames; we’ve been through Paris twice, but our real visit there begins Sunday morning. I am proud of the fact that I have not lost my temper and raged against the cities. Even when I was pickpocketed (I got the wallet back) I accepted what happened and went on with my life. The trip is a success.
Dream
Posted on October 22, 2015 in Dreams
I’ve gotten two jobs in London — or it is the same job? The first one seems to be in some kind of gym where speaking French is part of the job. The other is at a clinic or — is it the same place — where I lead a support group for people with bipolar disorder. About a quarter of the patients speak French. I acknowledge them in the few words of French that I know, hoping that no one will find out that I am faking and cause me to lose my job. Everyone lines up. They are all wearing white.
The Trip
Posted on October 1, 2015 in Agitation Bipolar Disorder Photography Vacation 2015
In a few days, we will leave our home and our pets in the hands of a housesitter; then, board a plane for Paris by way of Salt Lake City. The next day, we will take the Chunnel to London where we will spend a week before going to Africa. On our way back, we will stop again in Paris, then return via the same route to our home in Orange County.
I have been feeling the strain of this trip for several weeks. I’ve trained the house sitter in the management of our pets, introduced her to the housekeeper, made sure she was authorized to call for repairmen and get the animals treated if they get sick. We’ve gotten the proper shots and picked up prescriptions for antimalarials and antibiotics. I felt slight fevers after the vaccinations. This means I am done with typhoid, influenza, and yellow fever. We have mosquito repellent and netting to cover our faces. Loc at my pharmacy negotiated with the insurance companies so that I would not run out of medication. My psychiatrist wrote a prescription with an extra dose of mood stabilizers to get me through the disruption of my inner clock. I am bringing Benadryl to help knock me out. Now I am shifting my sleeping and waking times by a few hours each day until I arrive in the same time zone as Paris.
The Basis of My Mental Health/Mental Illness Advocacy
Posted on September 29, 2015 in Advocacy Stigma
I have developed this perspective over the course of many years. Denial was part of my life for many years. I made my wife’s life hell and I was a thrall to those who knew how to trigger me. It has not been easy. Now that I am on medication, I feel much better and in control of my emotions. Nevertheless, I respect the decision not to take medication by some, but often find that they do not respect mine. This article stakes out my position and makes a stand for what I believe.
- I believe in Mental Illness because I have it and I have no delusions about its harms. Nonetheless, I know that sometimes medications don’t work for people and that in these cases the side effects may be too much to handle, so I am against blindly forcing people to take meds.
- I believe in Science over tradition, “common sense”, or belief.
- I am a civil libertarian and a believer in health care as a civil right; I am not an anti-psychiatrist.
- I believe that no right should be deprived a person without due process and due safeguards to be sure that those intervening on the patient’s behalf are not using it as a tool for abuse, that they be under a psychologist’s care, and that they are not overworked.
- I believe in the sanctity of medical records and this should not be violated except in a genuine medical emergency. I see no reason to change HIPAA laws as they now stand.
- People like me are best off living in the community. I am distrustful of those who want to revive long term mental institutions as the primary care vehicle for the homeless. I support Community Mental Health Clinics, more short-term hospital beds, and genuine, quality housing for the homeless where they are not having to share living space with many others because these are shown to have positive outcomes for patients.
- I believe in evidence-based medicine. Given the softness of the data supporting “assisted outpatient therapy” aka “forced outpatient therapy” or “Kendra’s Law” — ask a statistician about what this means — I do not think we have the evidence (yet?) to justify it. I am likewise dubious about alternative therapies.
- I do not believe that stigma is not caused by diagnoses or identity: this is to blame it on myself and others like myself. The true responsibility lies with those who hold the prejudices.
- I believe that nonprofessionals as well as professionals should have the right to contribute to the discussion about the nature of diagnosis and the best way to care for those like me. Psychiatry serves the patient. Its practitioners had best learn to listen to us if they are to help us.
- I call on others to join me in insisting on continuing scientific research into better ways to treat mental illness.
- I do not believe that the loudest voices represent the majority of those of us who live with mental illness. I distrust argument by assertion.
- I am certain that trauma including abuse is a risk factor for mental illness. I feel the same about genetics.
- I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I believe in confederacies — of dunces — which exist on both ends of the continuum of discussion about mental illness and sometimes in the middle. Extremes of experience, I feel, have given rise to extremes of outlook. I do not discount others’ pain and experience, but I am concerned that these others discount mine.
- I feel stigmatized for my choice to take medication and to identify myself as mentally ill, not only by the sane but by some of my peers who believe that ideologically denying illness will lift stigma from our shoulder.
- I believe that having a mental illness or having a mentally ill family member does not absolve one from responsibility for one’s actions.
- I do not believe we should be striving for a “perfect” system where we do not have any “incidents” that disturb the comfort of the same, but for a just one and compassionate one which helps those wanting care get it without surrendering their personhood.
- For these beliefs I am willing and have been subjected to bear stigma and hostility from the extremes. I do not believe in appeasement. If necessary, I will stand on my own until convinced by logic and solid scientific evidence, but I do not believe that I am alone in these concerns.
- I do not suffer fools or trolls gladly.
I wrote this in June and set it aside to season.
