Like Buttons
Posted on July 18, 2015 in Site News
I’ve added a like button to each of my posts. If you decide that you enjoy something that I wrote, you can just click on one of the buttons and let the world know. Your identity remains private. Use this new feature wisely so that I can better write for you.
You can start by letting me know if you like this feature or not.
Minority Mental Health and Murphy’s Law
Posted on July 18, 2015 in Advocacy Hospitals and Prisons Psych Wards
Just a note of peripheral interest here: This is National Minority Mental Health Month. (Does that mean white people here in California?) Seriously, access to mental health resources for minorities, particularly African Americans, is limited. Many end up getting their treatment in jails instead of hospitals and through private psychiatrists like white people do.
I have opposed a bill by Representative Tim Murphy because it starts us down the road to forced treatment, which eventually, I believe, will create privatized “public” mental hospitals. (Even F. Fuller Torrey opposes these, but I think he is dreaming when he calls for government run mental hospitals. The private prisons movement will not hesitate to seize the opportunity to grab this new sector of the incarceration system.) These, I think, will turn out to be another place to warehouse African Americans and other minorities while white people will be able to stay out thanks to their access to outpatient mental health care. Rest assured that privatized mental hospitals will keep patients on the sick rolls as long as they can, indefinitely if it is allowed.
African Americans and other unprivileged Americans deserve access to decent community health care centers, an idea which the likes of Torrey and his lap dog D.J. Jaffe have written off as a failure — even though these have never been properly funded since the 1963 Community Mental Health Services Act. Murphy’s Law does call for grants to start 10 pilot programs for community mental health, but there is no guarantee of follow-through after the period of experimentation is over. Murphy’s Law also puts the burden of care on overstressed families, meaning that those patients whose families don’t have the resources will continue to lack decent care. (Meaning African Americans versus European Americans.)
Any future mental health legislation needs to ensure that programs help everyone. Compelling states to fully fund community mental health clinics where the staff are not overburdened and patients can get the medication they need is essential. Then we can apply evidence-based practices.
The Abuse of Psychology: An Ignominious Start for Reform
Posted on July 14, 2015 in Abuse Authoritarianism Terrorism Therapy
The American Psychological Association underwent a shake-up when its three top leaders resigned following revelations that they had condoned working with the military in developing interrogation and torture techniques. The three were present at meetings where ethical policies of the APA were rewritten to allow this kind of interaction.
There is no mention of this in the letter announcing their retirement from the APA. Instead, the three are effusively praised. What I can conclude from this is that the APA only half got the message.
Our relationships with our therapists and with research psychologists depends on our trust in our providers. No one wants to be used as a test subject by her therapist or participate in unsettling experiments meant to improve techniques used for torture and mind control. That the APA gave into pressure from without to change its ethical principles is disturbing in the extreme. It compromised the safety of the patient-therapist relationship and eroded trust for many.
I have a good relationship with my therapist and doubt that she would use her expertise for these nefarious purposes. But I have known of others in the profession and in psychiatry who I do not doubt would cooperate.
Back in 1917, Franz Boas fought the American Anthropological Association when it attempted to change its ethics so that it could support for the American side in World War I. Conservative members of the Association wanted to be able to use their work to unsettle the enemy. Boas — who was only incidentally a German-American — had been trained in physics. He felt that anthropological research would be compromised by the bias that such cooperation would entail. For his principled stand, Boas was kicked out of the AAA*.
What happened in the APA this week is a reversal of those fortunes. We have yet to see if the APA restores the old ethical guidelines protecting patients and test subjects from the abuse of psychological warfare. Much needs to be changed and reformulated so that this cannot happen again. Those that wreaked the changes must be held entirely accountable for the manipulation of the ethical rules. That the three were released with such glowing reports, however, is an ignominious start for reform.
*One of Boas’s students — Ruth Benedict — wrote a special study for intelligence services and the military on the Japanese during World War II. Evidently, his neutrality principle did not take with her. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is available today for students to consider.
Dream
Posted on July 14, 2015 in Dreams
The curious thing about this dream is that I am both the main participant and an onlooker. I ride a bicycle quickly through a strip mall, passing many stores — at least one of which is empty. I ride fast, dodging people as I come to them. A series of landscaped pits open up in front of me. Both ramps and stairs lead down onto concrete floors. The challenge is to find the ramps. I swerve about, looking for the ramps. At the last pit, the one ramp is very far away, so I have to ride half way around the pit to get to it. When I get to the top, a couple of guys sword-fighting at the bottom of the stairs block my path. I yell at them to get out of the way as I speed between them. One of the fellows gets on his bike and starts to follow me. A voice tells me that I have finally met my match. I lose him, but I come to a place where a pudgy cyclops blocks a ramp up. I steer around him. He starts to chase me, clenching his pale fists. I find myself on a city street, pedaling as fast as I can. A block away, the light is green. I find myself muttering “Stay green. Stay green” as I wake up.
Dream
Posted on July 9, 2015 in Dreams
A zoo that I volunteer at has a huge salt water pond. Huge. They’ve decided to remodel it, so they removed all the rocks that allowed visitors to hop about and look into the deeper parts of the poll that you can’t see from the edges. I notice that the larger fish in the pool have died from the heat and are lying on the bottom. Several of us point this out to the zookeeper who seems unconcerned. He thinks he has a bigger problem — there are new houses going up on the hills looking down into the zoo and he wants to plant trees so they can’t see the animals. I go around the pool and find an area where there are lots of fish. Singing “Good Vibrations” I go back to find the zookeeper to tell him about it, showing him with my hands the size of the fish that I saw. He fishes out a sand dab — which he calls a rough carp — and shows it to everyone.
Murphy’s Law and the Nirvana Fallacy
Posted on July 2, 2015 in Advocacy Stigma
I just learned about the Nirvana Fallacy. It’s a logical prestidigitation where you compare a situation or proposal with an unrealistic and/or idealized alternative. A cousin of my wife’s likes to use it when attacking health care. He points to the woefully underfunded VA and declares that because this government-run system is so ineffective, we must resort to unregulated private industry (which was so good at providing health care before. Right.) Wikipedia describes it in more detail:
The nirvana fallacy is a name given to the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives.[1] It can also refer to the tendency to assume that there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the perfect solution fallacy.
By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous—while at the same time being completely implausible—a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect. Under this fallacy, the choice is not between real world solutions; it is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be “better”.
Why I Still Fear My Illness
Posted on June 30, 2015 in Depression Mania
I have been mostly stable since 2008. There have been a few interludes where I slipped either into mania or depression, but I managed these so that they did not spiral out of control. So I have nothing to worry about, do I?
There’s plenty to dread. Last week, as regular readers of this blog know, I had what is known as a breakthrough episode. In this case, it was a mild case of mania that I rode out with the help of sedatives and extra sleep, literally dreaming myself into a depression. I am not like many people with bipolar in that I do not fear depression. When I am depressed, I don’t have the energy to arrange a suicide. So it is not like a mixed state where I can pull the implements together and actually begin the death-by-my-own-hand. Still it debilitates me: I remain silent for long periods of time, talking to no one, writing nothing. Even now, I struggle to find the words for what I want to say. This is the nature of The Beast and there is nothing flamboyant about it now, just a gray, blubbery monster which lies on top of me and smothers me.
Breakthrough Episode
Posted on June 28, 2015 in Exuberance Mania Psychotropics Rage & Annoyance
Mania scored my consciousness in steep peaks and troughs that never descended into depression the last two weeks. I got into arguments and I loved them too well. It was easy to laugh and the laughter fed itself. I quoted scripture at my opponents, both religious and secular. The color red seemed especially intense. Once I thought I saw someone run across the hall when I was alone in the house.
I thought I had an easy answer that I also feared: my Vyvanse had pushed me up beyond my normal humor. But when I went to take the little yellow capsules out of my lineup for the week, I discovered that I had not been taking them! So the psycho-stimulant was not guilty.
What was causing me to erupt? I didn’t know for sure, but I knew what I had to do. I took an extra Xanax to force myself into several extra hours of sleep, avoided sites that pricked my optical nerves with shimmering and pulsing light, and meditated.
Genotypes and Phenotypes: Why We Have Bipolar Disorder
Posted on June 25, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Genes
There’s a mystery in the genetics report that I received from 23 and me and ran though the Promethease analysis engine: I have multiple genes that predispose me to lupus. I don’t have lupus but an uncle of mine did. It also says that I could develop multiple sclerosis and that I am at risk for childhood leukemia (I dodged that bullet.) My risk for bipolar disorder is only average. It also says that I am tall (true — I am 6′ 6 1/2″), probably have brown eyes, that risperidone works well for me, and have a tendency towards diabetes and obesity — right on all counts, though I am working to reduce my weight. All these things are in my genes. How is it that I show some of the predicted traits and not others?
Some might jump to the conclusion that genetics just gets these things wrong. No, the genes are there for certain. I am prone to lupus and MS. I could have had childhood leukemia. So why didn’t I if genes are the code that determines what I am? Why do I have bipolar disorder?
Of Racist Symbols and Stigma
Posted on June 24, 2015 in Advocacy Authoritarianism Hatred Psycho-bunk Stigma
I’ve been seasoning the idea that we should be calling for the removal of the Confederate flag and its scions from Southern states. While I support the idea, I also have some reservations about the effectiveness of this action.
Some are calling it a logical action after last week’s shootings. Others are bringing up the fact that it is the flag of treason.
I don’t think that it is the matter of treason that is at issue here for me, but the fact that they fought to preserve slavery and that the flag is used as a racist emblem even today, 150 years after the end of the Civil War. I believe in freedom of speech, but I don’t think public institutions should be endorsing a white supremacist symbol.
Still, I worry that taking the flag down will only make white liberals feel that they have done something significant about racism in this country when they have only scratched the surface. I am more concerned, for example, about police shootings. These affect not only people of color, but also people like me who live with mental illness. Mass shooters have yet to catch up with the number of victims who have been killed by police so far this year. This is the violence to which we should give the most energy in combating.
Why Some Patients Like Murphy’s Law
Posted on June 23, 2015 in Advocacy Mental Illness
Now and then, you run into some parent who slaps you with what they think is a winning argument for Murphy’s Law: “my son/daughter with schizophrenia/bipolar disorder thinks Assisted Outpatient Treatment”. If patients are flocking to support this controversial forced treatment, how can people like me oppose Murphy’s Law?
When I look a little deeper, I discover something: many of these proponents are actually soft supporters. What they like about AOT is that it is just about the only way for them to get treatment. So what they really support is community outpatient clinics — the ones that have been denied us all along since the states emptied out the mental hospitals and delivered several of us to the streets.
Liking AOT does not mean that they necessarily like other parts of Murphy’s Law such as the partial dismantling of HIPAA benefits, the lack of protection for Advanced Directives, the hogtying of support groups, the lack of safeguards against abusive caretakers, dismantling of support for patient rights organizations, etc. Murphy’s Law casts a wide net driven by stigma. It fails to fund community mental health centers except as a weak pilot program in ten states. We need a better vehicle that really helps the mentally ill.
13 Years
Posted on June 22, 2015 in Activity Site News
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Thirteen years ago, today, I launched this dangerous experiment. It ended a long silence. I had a place to write once more.
My wife gave me the idea. Keeping a diary that others could read and comment upon appealed to me. The abUSENET — the only other place where one could publish long articles without having to go through an editor — tended to punish those who spoke about themselves, their opinions, and their struggles. A blog let you do all these things and you could quietly control comments so that you could keep things civilized even though this discouraged many people from leaving them.
Many subjects have passed these pages: the war in Iraq, elections, daily life, my travels, the weather, my dreams, and my struggles with depression and, after my diagnosis, bipolar disorder. I lost more than half of my regular visitors because of my pacifist views during the War and most of the rest when I started writing about bipolar disorder. My effort to bring them back or find new ones has been difficult and disappointing. Every day I ask if I stopped writing, would people notice? I soldier on, sometimes in despair, sometimes in the confidence that what I have to say will mean something to someone.
13 years is a long time. I am still here.
