Monday Mental Health Blogging

"Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute..." by Arthur Rothstein, 1942

Last weekend, I read Jim Knipfel’s Quitting the Nairobi Trio. It’s a memoir of his experiences in the psych wards of Hennepin County Medical Center back in the late 1980s. It was funny, intriguing, and entertaining–aside from the nonsensical hallucinations he’d often begin chapters with. They were confusing, often having little to do with anything else in the book, and served more of an insight into Jim’s haphazard subconscious.

And a quick link drop:

• “Meanwhile everything he does wrong has an external explanation: it was the alcohol, he’s under stress, etc. And she’s doing this rationalizing for herself, not for him, because it is vital to her own psychological survival that he actually be who he says he is, that he actually have a stable identity that things happen to, because her identity depends on his being a foundation.”
• “While few would imagine that people with heart disease could “fix” themselves, or that people with diabetes could regulate their blood sugar without out insulin, there is an assumption that somehow I should be able to fix my mood disorder ‘on my own.’” (via)
• “Calalini is on the border between this world and my other world.”