mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for bipolar returned 20 posts.
“Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county. That was two years ago. Donald’s confinement has been repeatedly extended because of his violent outbursts. This year he assaulted a guard here at the prison, the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility, and was charged anew, with assault. His fists and forearms are striped with scars where he gouged himself with pencils and the bones of a bird he caught and dismembered.”

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System - NYT. Because I am white and my family well-off, that I am bipolar has been a mostly personal struggle; had I been poor or a minority youth, I would be dead, in jail, or slowly winding towards the wretched conclusion of serious addictions.

My class has meant that my regularly insane behavior was excused, even romanticized: “Bright and disturbed, sadly; he’ll need our patience! An artistic sort!” A bright, disturbed black male will not receive the forbearance of the police, his teachers, his neighbors.

When I imagine what it would have been like to be as I was at sixteen, often quite deranged, locked in prison without the means to get treatment, without a support system to contextualize my infractions as “medical” rather than “moral,” without the tolerance of a society which looks to excuse what I do wrong, which wants to forgive me, I feel real despair.

I do not consider anything I’ve written above to reflect any political affiliation; I cannot imagine how it could be thought ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ Is it not a matter which ought to stir concern in anyone?

Tags: mental illness politics justice prison

'Mad Pride'

The excellent Psychotherapy tumblelog linked to an article on so-called ‘Mad Pride,’ a movement which argues through the liberal use of romanticism and lyricism that mental illnesses are less crippling organic diseases which lead to ruin or death if untreated than marvelous alternative configurations of the psyche which a less conformist society would celebrate.

I’ve written about this subject twice before, but at the risk of being redundant: there is without question a tremendous problem with over-diagnosis of mental illness (as there is of under-diagnosis, incidentally). This is less a function of facile collusion between evil companies and greedy doctors than a reflection of America’s predilection for technocracy and medicalization, which we might paraphrase Hamlet in describing: if nothing is but thinking makes it so, in an objective and post-industrial world nothing is without technocratic thinking saying so, preferably in jargon.

Sadness is meaningless; only depression suffices to communicate how severely I mourn my deceased cat. Or perhaps I am bored in class and daydream of ultraviolence and fast cars; three decades ago I might have made a fine mechanic, but in the 21st century parents feel everyone must be a white-collar professional, so Adderall is needed stat.

Etcetera. The desire to have a lexically-inviolable, sacred excuse from a priest of our new church is powerful, and doctors err, and companies attempt to make money. Excessive diagnosis and faddish disorders come and go, and while it is no light matter it does not justify the literary leap Mad Pride activists make, which reflects a terrible poverty of understanding.

Taking as a departure point the fallibility of diagnostic processes, Mad Pride advocates sentimentalize mental illness as a poetic, associative, richly experiential mode of human existence that is under attack from reactive, repressive forces of social control; they cite their skimmed copies of Brave New World and deploy the alluring language of the academic to condemn “the codification of psychical norms and the enforcement of society’s expectations through psychopharmacological punishments.” They imagine that in a free enough world, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and depression would be accommodated and accepted and even desired: after all, think of how many artists have been insane!

To call this bullshit is almost charitable; it is something much worse: it is the exploitation of the diseased by the lyrical, the erection of platforms and podiums on the backs of the homeless alcoholics and the hallucinating mental cripples and the stricken and fearful among us all. That some of us with mental illness cheer along makes this not better but worse: it is like preaching to alcoholics that perhaps total abstention isn’t really needed. This intellectual crusade against “mainstream society” comes at the expense of people for whom medication means life and lack of treatment means despair and death.

As I have said before, I hope they save some of their wise words and soaring emotions for the eulogies they’ll need to deliver, unless they can find it in their hearts to leave us alone and protest an injustice that is actually occurring. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of them, and meanwhile in the world of consequences doctors and nurses and families do not need further difficulty in persuading those like me to accept that the brain -like any other organ- can be dysfunctional enough to require treatment, and that mental illness isn’t an identity but in fact an obstacle. It bars one from formulating the identity one feels within oneself, hemmed in by the ‘spectacular’ topography of aberration and damage, buried underneath witless moods and unfriendly delusions.

Note: the author of Psychotherapy was not advocating ‘Mad Pride,’ just noting it; none of this is in opposition to him or his work.

Tags: mental illness
This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on. It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness. I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it. Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid. In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.” Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target. To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state. I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life. But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me: Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them. I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.

This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on.

It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness.

I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it.

Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid.

In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.”

Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target.

To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state.

I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life.

But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me:

Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them.

I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.

Tags: crash plane memory dreams

In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition

This NYT article on a new theory of mental illness as a possible repercussion of prenatal battles between maternal and paternal genes is one of the more extraordinary and disturbing things I’ve read in a while, not least because it seems to exonerate my father for my bipolar disorder, and he’s already way too cocky (kidding, dad!).

It’s also an excellent example of how disinterested and apolitical science occasionally generates, however provisionally, theories which are striking controversial; what might gender theorists make of assertions like this:

Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.

Even if dad is off the hook for my hypersensitive and erratic personality (and I’m not sure his various pranks and jokes didn’t play a role), at least I can now classify him as exemplary of the “autistic spectrum.” He does have a savant’s gift with abstract origami, and he certainly isn’t as fond of parties as my mother and I are.

Note this dramatic illustration of the application of natural selection to prenatal development processes:

It was Dr. Haig who argued in the 1990s that pregnancy was in part a biological struggle for resources between the mother and unborn child. On one side, natural selection should favor mothers who limit the nutritional costs of pregnancy and have more offspring; on the other, it should also favor fathers whose offspring maximize the nutrients they receive during gestation, setting up a direct conflict.

The article hedges its bets, noting that while the theory is generating much excitement it is also likely wrong in most particulars. I personally have no idea at all whether it’s worth a damn, but it’s certainly interesting and should make for excellent jokes when I’m visiting my parents.

Tags: mental illness

Subjectivity and International Law

squashed:

If we’re going to surrender bits of our sovereignty to an international body, I would want a few guarantees.  First, I would want that body to apply its law neutrally and consistently.  Secondly, I would want that body to protect civil liberties at least as well as we do.  We have some room for improvement on that front—but compared with other countries, we’re not so badly off.  Thirdly, I would want clearly defined, static expectations.  Fourthly, I want the body to be independent and isolated from international politics.

The ICC fulfills these requirements easily, and the principle objection in academic and political circles to US participation in such bodies is not that they’re inconsistent, biased, undefined, or insufficiently protective of rights. They’re not. They offer due process, accepted legal definitions of responsibility, normative evidentiary rules, and the like.

Rather, the objection tends to invoke “power politics” and an admission that international affairs are the province of partially amoral calculations of interest; while international law is a variable in any such calculation, it is dwarfed -in this line of argument- by the self-interest of the state, in economic, militaristic, or other senses.

This view has intellectually serious adherents, although I am not one of them. It concludes that a state, and its leaders, are responsible to its own citizens above the citizens of the world, and that when sufficiently desirable any course of policy is appropriate, whatever its relation to treaties, laws, and so on.

This is the operating philosophy of the US, whether we’re discussing our stockpiles of VX gas, our nuclear arsenal, our military activities, our economic policies, anything. What is best for us is what we do; when it behooves us to do so, we use international law. When it behooves us to violate said law, that’s acceptable.

Now, and I stress here that John Brissenden more or less disabused me of any comfort I had with this philosophy, proponents of this view claim that an international community of states pursuing their own interests is a balancing and stabilizing system, that some use of international law is beneficial, and that -like a free market- over time this yields the fairest and best results.

Balance is a component of this moral justification, and in the formerly bipolar era of the Cold War, it was often suggested that we had a “mature” global system, with minimal flashes of instability and violence (small consolation for those situated in them). Now, with fewer “checks and balances” (so to speak), the international order is more unstable.

The plain counter-argument: humanity should aspire to maximum lawful order, the largest scale of participatory contractual law as possible (i.e., global), and consistent justice for all states and their leaders. You may find this desirable or persuasive, or the previous “realist” argument, but those are the terms of the debate.

There is no question that the US violates international law; the question is whether international law trumps the interests of the state. Do we want leaders willing to engage in lawless international exploits for a perpetually-expanding economy and internal security? Or does violating international law always reduce security and prosperity for states over time? To what extent are we to be global citizens, as opposed to citizens of our states?

That is the real issue we discuss when the applicability of international law is debated.

[Brief note: Bunnynico and Squashed are awesome, aren’t they?].

Was ADHD an evolutionary asset?

musicbrain:

I haven’t read the original article, but this is one of the most substantial studies about how certain mental health diagnoses, namely ADHD, can be evolutionarily advantageous. To summarize, this study explored a Kenyan tribe which has separated into a nomadic community and an agricultural community. The scientists looked at the DRD4 7R gene variant which is associated with novelty-seeking and other ADHD symptoms. Because it’s the same tribe, there is a similar frequency of this gene in both types of lifestyles. However, the DRD4 7R gene variant correlated with better nutrition in the nomadic portion of the tribe and worse nutrition in the more settled, agricultural lifestyle.

So, the nomads seem to benefit from ADHD-like symptoms. A conclusion from this is that while society promotes natural selection, it shouldn’t dictate what types of genes are beneficial or what types of behaviors everyone should display. It’s also about helping people find their niches since we all have certain environments in which we flourish. With this in mind, perhaps settings for those with ADHD can be tailored to make certain symptoms more advantageous than what they are in standard settings.

This is really fascinating, and something that I’d wondered about bipolar disorder in the past. How did it persist in human evolution, or was it not manifest in earlier times (in which case, why is it so prevalent now)?

My psychiatrist, as always, had an answer.

Drugs and Mental Illness

butterflyeffect:

sunluvr:

Researchers are again using mind-bending drugs as a means of treating mental disorders.

I can see quite clearly how this could be beneficial. In my misspent youth I experimented quite extensively with hallucinogenics and I wouldn’t be the person I am now [in a good way] if it wasn’t for that experience. However, I did have more than one bad trip, although that was usually triggered by not feeling completely safe in my surroundings and with the company I was keeping - rather than tapping into any underlying psychological issues. I’ll be interested to read more about this as time goes on.

My personal experiences with drugs are, of course, statistically irrelevant, but I thought I’d mention that I feel that the many times I took LSD had a cumulatively catastrophic effect on my mind. I recommend against the drug if you’re bipolar, whatever its ameliorative effects on OCD.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the few experiences I had with MDMA quite a lot, even being presently surprised that I didn’t find myself wanting to use it more after a particular experience was complete. I’ve often told people, imprecisely I suppose, that I was shattered after my  LSD phrase and MDMA helped me rediscover how to terminate the branching, associative internal monologue whose chatter can be paralyzing if too persistent.

This associative monologue, incidentally, is what is largely uncontained during a psychotic episode; the inability to stop correlating sensations and thoughts, building implausible structures of dubious meaning for every small detail in your world, is as good an approximation of psychosis as you can get, I think, and LSD always provided that for me.

Thanks, Elle Belle!

Tags: mental illness
tumblrfail: Mills has like a million flickr photos, and many are very accessible to this project.  He is tumblrWIN. Let me tell you what’s really funny about this photo: Driving around uptown New Orleans with Eric, who is a master of the purposeless sort of rambling that characterizes both the enlightened, laissez-faire dilettante and the homeless wanderer, I saw this sign fixed to a decrepit building on Louisiana Avenue. We hopped out to take photos because, giddy and ebullient from coffee, I thought the sign hilarious.  I assumed that NAMI was an acronym for some sort of sexual enthusiasts’ club, perhaps like NAMBLA but not so sinister. I was further struck by the idea of an advertised club for friendship, as I’ve grown to feel that friendship is as crucial to life, as challenging and essential, as love, and perhaps as risky.  Real friendship, furthermore, is probably as rare as real love (and has as little to do with its common iterations as love does with lust), and to see a club for its practice amused me.  Imagine an “Uptown Existential Fulfillment Club.” What I didn’t realize until tonight, and what makes my smile and the entire enterprise both more ironic and less amusing, is that NAMI stands for National Alliance for Mental Illness, and this was a place for the lost and ill and deranged and damaged -people like me, after all is said and done- to find friendship and help. In other words, and quite unintentionally, Kevin and I have created a semi-ironic but not at all inaccurate advertisement of sorts: a real-live bipolar person asking for friends in Internet-speak while standing at a place that exists to serve that purpose. I have to find humor in it, because the state of affairs for the mentally ill in New Orleans is so desperately dire that if I think about it more I won’t be able to smilingly represent NAMI /UFC in their new online marketing campaign.

tumblrfail:

Mills has like a million flickr photos, and many are very accessible to this project.  He is tumblrWIN.

Let me tell you what’s really funny about this photo:

Driving around uptown New Orleans with Eric, who is a master of the purposeless sort of rambling that characterizes both the enlightened, laissez-faire dilettante and the homeless wanderer, I saw this sign fixed to a decrepit building on Louisiana Avenue.

We hopped out to take photos because, giddy and ebullient from coffee, I thought the sign hilarious.  I assumed that NAMI was an acronym for some sort of sexual enthusiasts’ club, perhaps like NAMBLA but not so sinister.

I was further struck by the idea of an advertised club for friendship, as I’ve grown to feel that friendship is as crucial to life, as challenging and essential, as love, and perhaps as risky.  Real friendship, furthermore, is probably as rare as real love (and has as little to do with its common iterations as love does with lust), and to see a club for its practice amused me.  Imagine an “Uptown Existential Fulfillment Club.”

What I didn’t realize until tonight, and what makes my smile and the entire enterprise both more ironic and less amusing, is that NAMI stands for National Alliance for Mental Illness, and this was a place for the lost and ill and deranged and damaged -people like me, after all is said and done- to find friendship and help.

In other words, and quite unintentionally, Kevin and I have created a semi-ironic but not at all inaccurate advertisement of sorts: a real-live bipolar person asking for friends in Internet-speak while standing at a place that exists to serve that purpose.

I have to find humor in it, because the state of affairs for the mentally ill in New Orleans is so desperately dire that if I think about it more I won’t be able to smilingly represent NAMI /UFC in their new online marketing campaign.

Tags: mental illness

Madness

Geekerella and Doree are having an interesting conversation about mental illness in the workplace, a subject on which I’ve reflected often. I’m very open about being bipolar, and I manage around 45 people in a corporate environment; so far, although there’s no question the disorder has had a profound impact on me and on those who care for me, I am comfortable asserting that it’s had none on those who work for me; I think they’d agree. (You can ask Syd, if you want).

[As a note, most of the mentally ill people in my company are ‘closeted,’ so to speak, which is of course their right; as such, I am kind of the poster-boy for successful psychiatry and treatment, and field a lot of interesting and occasionally amusing questions about the subject. I’m not shy about it is because I’m stable and happy and not really concerned with what people who have an issue with mental illness think].

However, Doree notes something that bothers me limitlessly: the concept of ‘mad pride,’ a notion that arises out of the academic supposition that all forms of categorization and classification are in fact mechanisms of control and suppression.

Most of the ‘mad pride’ people I know aren’t themselves particularly ‘mad,’ so it’s quite easy for them to say things like, ‘What corporations and the US government call “mental illness” is really just a construct, a way of denying legitimacy to perfectly natural modes of expression. They say it’s not “normal” so they can pump you full of drugs like this is Brave New World and keep you in conformity with some flat, economically productive type of automaton.”

This, and I hope I hurt no one’s feelings, is attractively-phrased bullshit of the most invidious order. In repackaging sentiments sloppily culled from progressive movements and laying rhetorical claim to the mantle of ‘rebellion against suppression and conformity,’ the movement encourages people to abandon whatever reason they might normally exercise in considering what mental illness is.

Being afflicted with mental illness means you cannot be who you want to be, not that others don’t want you to be who you are. While I dislike the increasingly aggressive marketing of drugs for mental illness, which is accompanied by increasing rates of false diagnosis and false self-diagnosis, that problem has no bearing on the existence of mental illness. 

‘Mad pride’ people love to speak in the flowery, impassioned style of poetic revolutionaries, and when I hear them talk about the ‘beauty of madness,’ the ‘transcendent passions of the skewed mind and its art,’ and so on, I always think: I hope they’re saving some of these words for the eulogies we’ll need them to deliver.

Here’s a less-attractive but factual counterclaim: untreated mental illness means suffering and death. Reading about Doree’s boss, I can’t help but wonder what will become of her; the statistics for untreated bipolar disorder aren’t good.

Having known people who’ve killed themselves, I don’t find the movement to be as ideologically amusing as I otherwise might; a bunch of kids running around hoping to redefine categories of human expression and behavior in accordance with a emotionally charged semi-utopian view of life sounds like college, and I remember all that fondly.

But getting mentally ill people off of their medicines, away from their doctors, and into some state of self-aggrandizing acceptance of their (of our) lunacy, is like taking IVs out of arms at your local hospital. 

[Note: there are all sorts of interesting categorial and philosophical problems with ‘mental illness’ as such, and with the manifestation of it in different socioeconomic groups, and so on. I am not suggesting the issue isn’t problematic; only that ‘mad pride’ is largely garbage]. 

Tags: mental illness

When I worked for a time at a veterinary hospital, I became acquainted with a strange habit the mind has of determining that some events are too unpleasant to react to; it’s not a deliberative choice: you just witness or participate in something so unfortunate that your reactive self and memorial apparatus refuse to behave normally.

The result: a kind of surprised indifference to something which would ordinarily upset you grievously (a tortured dog, a kitten dead from maltreatment, etc.).

Today, at the office, I had to discipline, then terminate, someone with bipolar disorder. Not only do I have bipolar disorder, but from my position of stability and success (after nearly a decade of work) I’ve attempted to help this individual in the brutal early phases of her treatment.

If you know anything about the disorder (not as it’s overdiagnosed, but as it is), you know that without medication and therapy it is catastrophic; those with it are insane, with all that entails. Beyond the mania, with its paranoia and wrath and saccharine euphoria and irresponsibility, and beyond the depression, with its suicidal ideation and physical dysfunction and misery, there are the delusions, the instability, the hyper-reactivity.

Working with her to choose a doctor, discuss medicines, enact self-analysis, read up on the disorder, and so on, was not always easy; she was at times resistant to the diagnosis and to the facts of treatment, the sacrifices required. Worse, her family was unsupportive, she had a son who required a lot of attention, and she had limited resources.

In recent weeks, she got off of her medicine and began the predictable oscillations, today finally becoming too hostile, unstable, and dangerous; the parting wasn’t particularly smooth, and although in the end it was her decision to leave I know that I rather forced it to happen; that is, I knew she’d react a certain way and I allowed her to.

I suppose it might have been worse, but it was far from a good day. 

Tags: mental illness

Darwinian Lunacy

I asked my psychiatrist not long ago what possible excuse there could be for the persistence of bipolar disorder in our species. If you’ve ever read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, you might be familiar with some of the ways in which schizophrenia might have been advantageous in ancient human life (for shamans, seers, and so on), but I struggled to imagine what Darwinian selecting pressures would let bipolar disorder survive evolution.

My doctor, who’s really quite clever, had an immediate answer: in pre-civilized societies of humans, where the lifespan was rather short and social strata were fluid and based on dominance, bipolar disorder would confer a number of obvious advantages:

  1. Mania brings with it exaggerated confidence, astounding physical and mental energy, emotional projection, hypersexuality, an ability to forgo sleep and eating, recklessness, and -in the ugly final stages- violent paranoia, hostility, and a capacity for cruelty. These would all have been good in ‘the state of nature,’ useful and correct as responses to that environment.
  2. Depression reduces your capacities in a way that is deeply problematic in a structured society like ours and can prompt suicide in self-aware creature with 80-year lifespans, but would not interfere terribly in a tribal setting and wouldn’t be catastrophic for someone who’d likely pass in their twenties. So you don’t leave the cave for six months; so you won’t contribute to anything. Big deal. You’d be like a sloth.

If nothing else, the manic hypersexuality and personal expansiveness, with its concomitant charm and appeal (although how that would manifest itself pre-linguistically is hard to fathom), would be enough to perpetuate the genes required.

Beyond that, though, the behavioral volatility, emotional energy, paranoia, and the unpredictable but definite capacities for ambitious leadership that are associated with bipolar disorder would have been highly useful in early human groups.

Here’s the funny part: hearing how this mental configuration would once have been totally fucking awesome made me feel kind of proud, as though I had a once-essential but now vestigial organ which, although totally inappropriate (and indeed horribly burdensome) in the present world, had once made me the coolest guy in the tribe. 

Tags: mental illness

Shrinking Tumblr

It’s not a secret that I’m bipolar; I’ve been seeing the same psychiatrist for eight years now, although since I’ve left New York we now have our sessions over the phone. Working with her has transformed my existence, although she’s often critical of the sorts of things I enjoy; I had to quit drinking, smoking, eating raw oysters (which I haven’t, yet), and dating lunatics (which I’ll probably never stop).

In our session today, I asked her about a dream I had last night in which I fucking axe-murdered my best friend John, before putting his body into plastic bags and attempting to bury the pieces of him in my family’s backyard in New Orleans. I had also killed some others, and was burying them in the rain-drenched mud, when John (resurrected!) and Lee began chasing me, attempting to stop the violence and have me arrested. Meanwhile, a game-show host in a tan jacket was attempting to see what havoc I’d wrought and I attempted to convince him, while fleeing, that it was all a gag. I woke terrified.

Someone here recently noted that the dreams of others aren’t interesting, so I apologize, but here’s the facet I wanted to note: this was a Tumblr dream.

Violent dreams scare me, so I was anxious to learn what it meant. I also told my psychiatrist of how Tumblr had become an unhealthy obsession for me: I think about it far too much, worry about whether what I contribute is worth a damn, fret if I offend or argue with people, get jealous when others enjoy fabulous praise and attention, and so on. In sum, I behave like a stupid child, and it fills me with shame. I wonder if I’ll ever grow up, and I doubt it.

My doctor’s take on the dream, in the context of my recently unacceptable arguments with others who just want to express their views: I feel guilty and upset over my anger, which has (in typical fashion) led me to rhetorical violence against people I ought not attack, and John (who sometimes personifies my conscience) represents my sense that self-censure is justified and greater control is needed.

(There’s a sub-plot here about John, New Orleans, and my family that I won’t get into at the moment).

Funniest detail: the game-show host in the tan jacket was nevver.

Conclusion: Tumblr interfaces dangerously with my insecurity, my contrarian vanity, and my pitiful aspirations to be liked; combining a social-network with the creative impulse creates weird pressures and expectations, not unlike being creative in the real world: one wants success, but one wants not to pander; one is jealous, but one knows it’s ridiculous; one wants to be oneself and one wants to be liked.

Tags: mental illness
“The idea of psychiatric disturbance resulting from odd names goes back at least to Kraepelin (1909), but has also been investigated with Harvard undergraduates, who are more likely to flunk out with rare names (Savage & Wells, 1948), and with psychiatric samples, where those with rare names show more severe emotional disturbance (Ellis & Beechley, 1954).”

Ministry of Truth: Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: ”How your name influences your decisions and preferences. The Psychologist has a fascinating article on ‘nominative determinism’.”

A few things: (1) Ministry of Truth’s links are awesome, and you should take a look at them; (2) this article on ‘nominative determinism’ is fascinating, and speaks to a subject I’ve been speculating about for years (without any data).

There’s little doubt in my mind that, as the article discusses, my identity was affected strongly by having two very strange names and a common last name high in alphabetical order (my full name is Dillard Mills Baker). I can still remember the self-regard I felt in 1st grade when we were assembled by name and I was first (or near first), and a lifetime of correcting mispronunciations and misspellings of my first and middle name I think made me feel perhaps autonomous and maybe superior to bureaucrats who called me Miles.

The article talks about gender naming conventions, alphabetical order, and much more. Most strangely, to me, it refers above to a study by Kraepelin in 1909; in addition to his work on “odd names,” which I didn’t know about, Emil Kraepelin was the first to describe, classify, and treat bipolar disorder, then called manic depression..

In other words, he really had my number. 

Tags: mental illness
Ashleystar noted that Philadelphia is short on Tumblrs, but Baton Rouge is (predictably) a ghost town. The most surprising thing about the BR Tumblr scene as revealed through the map: there is someone here named Chad who is also bipolar and has the same computer I do (and I really like his blog, and Lacey’s). I suppose that’s not doppelganger-level yet, but it was surprising. His response: “Well I guess we’re best friends now.” Finally! [I know at least five other Tumblrs in BR who don’t appear on the map, probably for reasons of privacy]. 

Ashleystar noted that Philadelphia is short on Tumblrs, but Baton Rouge is (predictably) a ghost town. The most surprising thing about the BR Tumblr scene as revealed through the map: there is someone here named Chad who is also bipolar and has the same computer I do (and I really like his blog, and Lacey’s). I suppose that’s not doppelganger-level yet, but it was surprising.

His response: “Well I guess we’re best friends now.” Finally!

[I know at least five other Tumblrs in BR who don’t appear on the map, probably for reasons of privacy]. 

The Medicated Americans: Antidepressant Prescriptions on the Rise

dailymeh:

Charlie Barber writes for Scientific American about depression, and the conflation of depression (feeling down, a little sad, not quite yourself) and Depression (major depressive disorder, rendering a person constantly sad yet to apathetic that they often can’t even muster the energy to kill themselves). 

Just a few days ago, ashleystar linked to a new study that suggests anti-depressants are even less effective than some had feared, faring poorly against placebos. While I think that this study is likely to be rebutted by others, I wonder how much it reflects the radical increase in false diagnosis we’ve seen in the past few decades.

I believe this quote (one of my favorites) best explains this profoundly persistent problem. It is no longer meaningful to tell someone that you’re sad; only the legitimizing lexicon of medical science can confer significance on your feelings, so you’re “depressed.” The same existential inflation has occurred with headaches, devaluing them to the point that everyone I know now has “migraines.”

There is a fundamentally competitive nature to the social expression of suffering in the modern, materialist West, the perpetual one-upsmanship of people who want sympathy for their pains causing everyone to escalate their descriptions until we are a nation of depressed, migraine-suffering quasi-hypochondriacs.

It’s especially problematic for me, as my disorder (which nearly killed me and ruined many parts of my life and will plague my days until I die) is currently exploding in popularity among lazy diagnosticians, GPs who don’t give a damn about interrogating whether someone trapped in a functionally false marriage of yuppie convenience is “sad” or “depressed” for good reason, etc.  Each week I encounter some flighty, irresponsible person who, rather than say “I don’t check my own emotions and prefer to just do whatever the hell I please and then throw a tantrum when things get difficult,” just says: “I’m bipolar.”

This problem will get worse before it gets better; in America, we no longer respect simple, non-validated human experience. Only what’s wrapped in the cloak of science is taken seriously; and we’re all looking for ways to reduce our responsibility and deny our own agency for our actions: “I couldn’t be a good person; I was too depressed.”

Tags: mental illness