Mental Illness

"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.”

"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.”