Komen ingrained themselves deeply into the breast cancer world. They are synonymous with the pink ribbon and breast cancer itself. They surely realized that when a loved one is affected, you will do anything if you think it will help stop their pain. And when it just wasn’t meant to be, you will do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. All they needed to do was create a community, make it uplifting and valuable to participants, sell them pink trinkets… and profit.

Throw in capitalism and business savvy, some massive profits, and it was only a matter of time before they hooked up with the GOP and lobbied for atrocious bills that favored the HMO over the consumer. In return, the Komen founder was made an ambassador by George W. Bush in 2001.

One day in early October, I walked through the Mall of America and was barraged by pink. It was impossible to escape. Nearly every store was selling something specifically for breast cancer awareness. Later that same day, I stopped at a Walgreens location and discovered that there was even a pink Snuggie.

Every time I encountered something pink, I was reminded that my mother was dead. My mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 38 in 1996–I was eight and my sister was five. Over 13 years later, my family is still experiencing the aftershocks of losing the person who glued us all together.

There is nothing that stops a company from slapping a pink ribbon onto a package and toting it as “breast cancer awareness,” when there is no donation to anything but the company. The pink ribbon is not regulated, and is easy to abuse.

Often, a portion of the proceeds are supposedly going towards research, and other times the product (in one case, General Mills’ Cheerios) mentioned that the company was going to donate money regardless of product purchases. In Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” drive, you mail in lids from yogurt cups. A single lid fetches 10 cents for breast cancer research. If you sent three lids a day for four months, your total donation would be only $36.

I find it hard to swallow the sincerity of commercial interests. If marketing things for breast cancer awareness weren’t a guaranteed way to make money from consumers with a conscious, companies would not be doing so.

Swimming in fountain across from Union Station; Washington, D.C.; by Marion Post Wolcott 1938

• Anxiety, depression and alcohol and drug dependency cases might be more than twice as high as researchers currently believe.
• An immigrant from China with mental illness has finally gotten out of detention in America
• The “M” word in health care: mental illness and health care reform

An award-winning duck of some sort at the MN State Fair.

• Adults who were mildly depressed as teenagers are more likely to have major depression, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. However, researchers could not say if mild depression contributed to the development of major depression, or if the mild depression as a teen was an early phase of major depressive disorder.
• They have the thinnest skin, the shortest fuses and take the hardest knocks.
• “Despite all this help, there are days when I can’t get out of bed because I’m in a deep depression or didn’t sleep at all the night before. Sometimes I’m unable to do anything other than get my kids fed.”
• “I recognize that I’m hallucinating. I know this isn’t real, but maybe there’s some lessons I can gain.”

"Cavern carved by the sea in an ice wall," by Frank Hurley, circa 1911-1914

• Depression’s evolutionary roots: an adaptation, not a malfunction.
• The 2008 American College Health Association Survey found that 30% of college students said they had suffered from depression in the last 12 months
• In Florida, the State argues that gay people have higher rates of “domestic violence, psychiatric disorders and breakups” (none of which is true), and thus should not have the right to adopt a child.
• Ted Kennedy was instrumental to the passage of the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which he called “a major breakthrough for those with mental health needs.”
• Connection found between heart disease in women with no previous warning signs (such as high blood pressure) and hopelessness:
  “What we found is, those women who reported feeling hopeless about the future or their personal goals had more thickening in the neck arteries — more atherosclerosis — which is a predictor of stroke and subsequent heart attack,” Everson-Rose said in a telephone interview.

• A video from The Onion: White House Reveals Obama Is Bipolar, Has Entered Depressive Phase.
• “Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline used a sophisticated ghostwriting program to promote its antidepressant Paxil, allowing doctors to take credit for medical journal articles mainly written by company consultants.“
• An L.A. County program helps female inmates handle their mental illness and regain custody of their children.
• The Virginia Tech shooter’s medical records were released on Wednesday.
• “A study published last year suggested that bipolar disorder may be over diagnosed in people seeking mental health care. Now new findings shed light on which disorders many of these patients actually have.”
• Woman who claimed to be expecting 12 babies at once (“next to impossible,” said health experts) turns out to just have a freaky phantom pregnancy. It happens when you spend too much time in opera houses.
• “Faded numbers stamped into small cement blocks marked the graves of more than 3,200 mentally ill patients buried here at Western State Hospital between the 1870s and 1953.”

A vintage electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) unit at the HCMC History Museum in Minneapolis, MN.

An excerpt from a book I’ve been reading lately, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain. No one can do anything but beg for help (if he can do even that) at the lowest depths of a major depression, but once the help is provided, it must also be accepted. We would all like Prozac to do it for us, but in my experience, Prozac doesn’t do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason. These fortune-cookie admonitions sound pat, but the surest way out of depression is to dislike it and not to let yourself grow accustomed to it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind.

"U155 at Tower Bridge, London," 1919

• “About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.”
• “It’s shocking to me that we’re still afraid to say ‘bipolar’ out loud, so I do often, clearly and without shame.”
• Some people are calling it preschool depression–the symptoms of depression present in children as young as 3 years old. As a former depressed child, let’s just straight-up call it “depression” because that’s what it is.
• “Why is it that I am seeing double for the first time? Is my failed vision an indication of my psychosis? Or is it simply difficult to shoot a gun while wearing glasses, as several soldiers tell me?”
• “The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments.”
• “The It’s On My Mind campaign is raising awareness of the warning signs of mental health problems and suicide so more people can help themselves or a friend.”

"Bands of sheep on the Gravelly Range" by Russell Lee, 1942.

Lately, I have had a longing to stay curled up, under the covers, in a comfortable coffin with my cat. I have a serious and persistent attraction to sleep. I have had a curiosity towards life that has partially receded and is presently replaced with numbness and flight as a response to most everything.

I have been trying so hard to be sane, and was enthusiastic about treatment just a few weeks ago. I was willing to let professionals take ice-picks to my numbness and try to chip it off me. Maybe it’s worked, but I am not interested in handling it. I walk the halls of outpatient psychiatry wishing I were on the inside–locked in, drugged up, and put out of my mind.

• In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable: “Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it. Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”
• Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet? There’s supposedly been a ton of drama over the inkblots since their copyright expired and all 10 were put up on Wikipedia. I didn’t even know the Rorschach was used anymore, since I’ve never encountered it in the wild. Anyway, some people consider the test to be Serious Business and are broken-up about the whole thing, as one therapist writes, “I feel like someone’s spat graffiti on the Mona Lisa, or crapped on the Museum steps.”
• After Combat, Victims of an Inner War: “Sometimes, in sleep, Ms. Plumley hears the sound of a single gunshot and startles awake. For a few moments, she is once again standing in the apartment doorway, turning away, looking back to see his blood everywhere.”
• Unfolding the mysteries of the brain: “Researchers have already discovered that the cerebral cortex – which controls higher-level functions, including thought, emotion, and perception – is folded abnormally in disorders ranging from autism to depression.”

"A new steel mill takes form" by Andreas Feininger, 1942.

• Farmer suicides spotlight lack of mental health care in rural America: “We have seen in Iowa the loss of psychiatrists and psychologists in rural areas. There just aren’t enough.”
• “Three professional baseball players have landed on the disabled list this season for a problem they can’t ice, bandage or have surgically repaired: anxiety.”
• The Biology of Psychotherapy: “…The results were essentially identical: both interventions decreased the rate of glucose metabolism to levels seen in healthy people without OCD, and the rate of the decrease seemed proportional to the degree of improvement in their OCD symptoms.”
• iPods may help Asperger’s kids navigate life: “The staffers at Fraser came up with the idea after they noticed how students with Asperger’s would use iPods as a calming device, to block out noise or other distractions. ” [featuring my cousin PJ!]
• Have psychiatric wards changed? “If you found yourself locked up against your will in a psychiatric ward, you would probably do your best to get out. But in 1969 a group of people did just the opposite — they tried to get in.”
• “Critics of the diagnosis of PTSD state that it is a twentieth century concept, related primarily to an American compensation culture. However historical examples of PTSD pre-date the World and Vietnam Wars and the twentieth century compensation culture. [...] Here we will consider the historical evidence for the diagnosis in the author, Charles Dickens.”
• “When she visited the university health service and talked about feeling depressed, a nurse practitioner saw another problem: a possible case of schizophrenia in the making.”
• “There is evidence to suggest that increasing the number of service dogs would reduce the alarming suicide rate among veterans, decrease the number of hospitalizations and lower the cost of medications and human care,” Franken said of his first piece of legislation.
• “The missing mental health records of Seung Hui Cho, who was responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, mysteriously resurfaced last week in the home of the former director of the university’s counseling center.”