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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Posts tagged mental illness.

Drunk, Crazy, Fat, Stupid

Kia Matthews posted an excellent mock apology on behalf of the overweight after discussing the universal scorn to which they are subject. One might write one for the mentally ill, too. There are similarities, particularly with regard to the points of contention that make such discussions so fraught: (1) the relationship between genetics and behavior, nature and nurture, determinism and will; and (2) questions of personal responsibility and social responsibility, particular as they relate to costs to society.

(Indeed, I wonder how long until “being out of socially-desirable shape” will be a named disorder in an edition of the DSM, but I digress).

As with standards of physical health, standards of mental health blend objective science with subjective assumptions about what a person ought to be, and like obesity mental illness reflects both genetic factors beyond the determination of the individual afflicted and volitional decisions made over time.

Thus they are both problematized by existing between culpability and blamelessness. Is the schizophrenic who doesn’t take his medicine at fault for obeying the commands of his voices? Is there anything “wrong” with schizophrenia, or is it the normative social standards of our time that condemn it to illness when it was once deemed mystical? Is the overweight man eating unhealthy food at fault for his condition, or is his metabolism? Or is it merely the contemporary obsession with body image that raises any of these issues? Is there indeed nothing “wrong” at all with being overweight? Or are both matters of degree?

In addition to being mentally ill, I’m also an alcoholic. Does that fall into the same category? I put it to you. Are the following dissimilar? Specifically, should our judgments about the culpability of the individuals involved be dissimilar?

  • an obese person eating unhealthily
  • a beautiful person neglecting his intellect
  • a mentally ill person resisting treatment
  • a successful person who lacks empathy
  • a drug addict using or an alcoholic drinking
  • an ignorant person failing to educate himself (holding a stupid placard at a rally which reflects his ignorance)
  • a neurotic who does not seek therapy

The conditions noted above all mix genetic predisposition and social circumstances with volitional choices made over time; all can in theory be overcome via decisive willpower, and indeed there exist tools to assist individuals who wish to overcome all of them through straightforward, logical, intelligible steps. All are also considered, to varying degrees, morally wrong by significant numbers of people (although which are wrong, how wrong, and why are subjects of contention). All, it has been argued, deleteriously affect society in addition to the individuals in question.

We seem to expect different levels of self-determination and self-overcoming from different sorts of people. Do we believe that human will is sufficient to defeat genetic predisposition, and if so is it always? Or do we think that will is itself part of our nature? Do we find mental and physical “faults,” if they are indeed faults, to be equivalent?

Is there any moral fault which we cannot contextualize as something pitiable, rather than contemptible? Are there any which we cannot say are simply different rather than pitiable?

We are socially inclined to apply different standards of culpability to human behaviors without examining how we derive those standards or what it would mean to apply them with logical consistency.

It interests me, for example, that people are casual with their derision of the overweight and the mentally ill and the stupid (“That fat moron is crazy!”), but less with the poor or the addicted. Is the allotment of poverty less fair than the allotment of insanity, obesity, or stupidity? Is poverty or addiction harder to overcome? Is fairness what permits mockery, or do we just mock whatever we can get away with?

I tend to think that in almost all these cases -even for ignorance, which is widely mocked in this milieu- judgment is shallow, uncompassionate, and intellectually mistaken; too many of the categories are lazily constructed and too many of the values are distorted. But perhaps I’m wrong. Would anyone care to disentangle this controversial mess?

Tags: mental illness philosophy
“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
“As for the natural faculties within me, of which my writing is proof, I feel them bending under the burden. My ideas and my judgment merely grope their way forward, faltering, tripping, and stumbling; and when I have advanced as far as I can…I can see more country ahead, but with so disturbed and clouded a vision that I can distinguish nothing. Then I realize how weak and poor, how heavy and lifeless I am, in comparison with [real authors], and feel pity and contempt for myself.”

Montaigne, uncontested genius and inventor of the essay, in a typical passage critiquing his stupidity and ignorance. I do not compare myself to him when I note that his complaint struck me as familiar, despite the esteem in which he was held. It reminded me of Nudawn’s description of me, which Sydney and others (and I) found amusing.

This thought has occupied me for some time: why is it that I am certain of my detestability, incompetence, fraudulence, and stupidity even when others generously compliment me? I feel ashamed of this arrogance: why should I ignore their kindness? Were they to recommend a writer to me, I’d be ecstatic; but if they recommend me to myself, I think merely that they are inexplicably mistaken.

Of course there are basic psychological reasons for insecurity, which are universal enough to be uninteresting; beyond those, a few points occur to me:

  1. Consider the ubiquity of quotes concerning ignorance: we hear often that the intelligence to which we aspire consists of knowing that you know little. I know I know very little, less even than I appear to, and much of that knowledge is debatable, wrong, predicated on what I want to believe.
  2. To whom do we compare ourselves? I do not look at my middling photography and think, “Well, this is better than what I did five years ago.” Perhaps I should. Instead, I think: this is not as good as what Riaz makes; this is inferior to nearly everything I like to see; this is not what I wanted it to be. It is the same with my writing, my conversation, my appearance, my habits. How could it be otherwise? Compared to our idols or our ideated paradigms, don’t we all seem rather silly?
  3. I fear I know what drives my creativity: the desire for affection, for reassurance, for the externalization of an imagined beauty I can conjure but not exemplify, dream but not embody. How satisfied can one be with what one makes when it is merely a screen for what one wants? A personality is an assembly of coping mechanisms, and creativity is an expression of their deformation, it sometimes seems.

Lately, I have been interested in how impermeable our senses of self are, how resistant they are to praise. When people compliment me, I enjoy perhaps a few moments of elevated glee and then a sense of gratitude and happiness: happiness that we should labor to find nice things in one another, happiness that we search our peers for things to praise. In other words: my sense of self remains the same, but my impression of others improves.

That’s its own sort of gift, of course, one I think more valuable than a change in one’s conception of oneself, which, in the end, matters less than I used to think.

Tags: insecurity psychology mental illness philosophy literature
“Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what ‘health’ is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment –anything but that, as he has taken excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a ‘normal cultural man’ is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick –whether one knows it or not: ‘There is such a thing as fictitious health.’ Nietzsche later put the same thought: ‘Are there perhaps…neuroses of health?’”

Earnest Becker, in one of my favorite books. The answer to Nietzsche’s question is clear: yes, there are neuroses of health. The acquisitive and organizational urge run amok that defines consumerism, for example; or the preoccupation with a plastic aesthetic over the corporeal, with its attendant concealment of pores, sweat, hair, anything organic and unruly; or the obsession with cheeriness that makes self-esteem, a low sort of self-satisfaction, into a virtue without which one might as well be naked.

There are as many neuroses of health as there are neuroses of illness. What we must use, then, to define real mental illness, as opposed to simply characteristics that are socially undesirable, is this question: does the quality or behavior interfere with the individual’s ability to freely self-determine, to create himself as he wishes?

Tags: philosophy psychology soren kierkegaard earnest becker mental illness
Things Fall Apart / Things Pile Up: Junkyard House (Photophobia / Via / Larger). Among the various low-grade forms of insanity that constitute normative behavior  -those tics and quirks that are common enough to statistically override their seeming aberration- we can distinguish whole worlds of unclassified dysfunction. One area of lunacy that resonates: the panic one feels over the accrual of things, the anxiety one experiences when one realizes how much stuff one has, how it hems one in, how it can never be organized, cleaned, sorted, arranged, used, perfected, or discarded. Maybe there ought to be a name for the dementia of object-anxiety; maybe there is. In the absence of a name, a disorder is just a description, and no matter how bizarre it is it disappears into the private sphere of individual idiosyncrasy: one retreats into one’s junkyard house and nervously wonders what to do with all these wrecked machines.

Things Fall Apart / Things Pile Up: Junkyard House (Photophobia / Via / Larger).

Among the various low-grade forms of insanity that constitute normative behavior  -those tics and quirks that are common enough to statistically override their seeming aberration- we can distinguish whole worlds of unclassified dysfunction. One area of lunacy that resonates: the panic one feels over the accrual of things, the anxiety one experiences when one realizes how much stuff one has, how it hems one in, how it can never be organized, cleaned, sorted, arranged, used, perfected, or discarded.

Maybe there ought to be a name for the dementia of object-anxiety; maybe there is. In the absence of a name, a disorder is just a description, and no matter how bizarre it is it disappears into the private sphere of individual idiosyncrasy: one retreats into one’s junkyard house and nervously wonders what to do with all these wrecked machines.

Tags: mental illness

'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
“The teeth of the smile evidenced the clinical depressive’s classic inattention to oral hygiene.”

David Foster Wallace, describing the teeth of a patient in a mental ward in Infinite Jest. I took this sentence as a probable sign that Wallace had been depressed, because the indifference to matters of personal hygiene that characteristically attaches to mental illness is not the sort of thing bragged about by the fashionably despairing, let alone the seriously suffering. Our soppy society may lionize the “mad,” transforming our pitiful emotional dysfunctions into sublime, romantic, quasi-artistic poetry, but it never accepts bad breath.

There is nothing new in observing that we tend to inflate the severity of our problems, reclassifying ordinary human phenomena as medical conditions to lend them an air of unimpeachable seriousness. We no longer respect the sorrow or the joy of common life; we must experience depression or mania. We are not neat or fastidious; we are “OCD about things [sic].” In a world which worships science, it is natural that we appropriate scientific language to describe the most minor proclivities. Allan Bloom noted this with his usual precision: I said in quoting it:

As soon as medicine bestows a title on something -pain, despair, obesity, abusiveness- it is instantly removed from the realm of judgment… and [it] becomes a sacred experience beyond interrogation, worthy of infinite deference. Hence (1) the competition among the hysterical and the young to legitimize their sorrows and sufferings by getting them ‘named,’ and (2) the increasing incidence of hard-to-test problems, like mental illness.

Everybody Cares posts dozens of excellent quotes about mental illness each week on Psychotherapy. Not surprisingly, it is not from contemporary clinicians that one sees many resonant quotes; rather, it is from the founders of psychology, who were as much philosophers of mind as scientists, and from artists, poets, novelists, and the like. It is these groups who have succeeded in telling us about depression because they do so in honest, human terms.

In reading their reckoning of madness, one feels mostly horror, and this is as it should be. I am not ashamed to be mentally ill, and on the very few occasions I’ve been treated unfairly because of bias I’m comfortable defending myself. At the same time, nothing irritates me more than “mad pride” and the sentimentalization of mental illness. I loathe the handsome actor with the solitary tear rolling down his barely-schizophrenic face in the Oscar-seeking biopic whose moral is that “insanity is just a beautifully different way of looking at the world,” as I resent the crusading activist who tells us that drug companies are enforcing cultural conformity to make money, unconcerned that when the sick go off their medicines they risk dislocation, damage, and death.

The confluence of these phenomena, (1) artistic romanticization of mental illness, (2) the misguided work of amateur philosophers to undermine categories of mental illness, and (3) the universal tendency to exaggerate our pain as we relate it to others, must make the practice of psychology and psychiatry incredibly difficult.

Sometimes, I’ve doubted whether I’m really ill, whether I haven’t just excused my moral weakness with complex and persuasive representations of a disorder I might not have, whether perhaps I’m not ill at all but just unique. But all I have to do when concerned is recall the shockingly repulsive state of affairs before I was in treatment, and for that indicator I can thank Wallace.

Tags: mental illness psychology

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

Love Sickness: Dissect and Discuss

Orwell famously lampooned academic verbiage in Politics and the English Language, a theme of which was that linguistic complexity is an act of obfuscation that has moral and political meanings. In America, we have the habit of validating experiences through the spurious application of medical language; we consider legitimate what can be studied and treated.

So perhaps this Wikipedia article on “love sickness” is an expression of our desire to subordinate pain to reason, although it’s worth noting that Ibn Sena, a Muslim physician in the tenth century, felt that love sickness was a medical problem.

And before I dismiss the whole idea of a dry discourse on the “medical” problems of love, I should also admit that much of the article is quite accurate:

  • “People who find the feeling of love too intense may experience “love sickness” with feelings of anxiety, and can have symptoms of mania, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), inflatedself esteem and depression.”
  • “According to the author of [a] study, Frank Tallis, “Many people are referred for help who cannot cope with the intensity of love, have been destabilised by falling in love, or suffer on account of their love being unrequited.”“
  • “Some of the symptom clusters shared with love sickness include
    • mania – abnormally elevated mood, inflated self esteem, extravagant gift giving
    • depression – tearfulness, insomnia, loss of concentration
    • OCD – preoccupation, constantly checking (e.g. text messages/emails, etc.), and hoarding valueless but superstitiously resonant items
    • psychologically created physical symptoms, such as upset stomach, change in appetite, insomnia, dizziness, and confusion.”

So I’ll not mock the champions of a more scientific concept of love sickness; I’m tired of poetry and love songs, anyway. Cheers to the new schema, the new diagrams and models, which indicate I suffer regularly from a disease, one which needs to be respected by my workplace, paid for by my insurer, and hopefully medicated by my friendly pharmaceutical company.

Tags: love mental illness

A Lesson from DFW's Depression

Thumb Wrestling in Baltimore and Fek and Shorter Excerpts noted a Salon article on David Foster Wallace’s final months, which is indeed quite sad, particularly in the resemblance of the desperate efforts he and doctors made at restoring his mind after he plunged into depression to certain passages from his works.

I wanted to note something, though: it has now been mentioned several times that Wallace was able to write and live for two decades due to his medication, and that only going off of it (due to increasing side-effects)* led to his despair’s return.

I cannot count how many sensitive or artistic young people have resisted diagnosis of mental illness or a prescribed psychopharmacological regimen out of concern for the authenticity of their “identity” and the health of their creativity. It is a persistent concern for many that taking pills will kill their inner-artist or amputate their personality from their mind.

I hope that Wallace’s tremendous success as an author and thinker is an antidote to that fear, and that anyone struggling with the decision to take medicine recognizes that, very simply, doing so can make livable a life otherwise doomed. The right medicines don’t partialize you; they allow you to be whole.

*This sudden cessation of a medicine’s efficacy, or the arrival of previously nonexistent side-effects, is a phenomenon that terrifies me; imagine struggling and fighting and then stabilizing for decades, only to have the ground suddenly give way without warning.

Tags: mental illness psychology literature
My younger sister is marrying in less than a month and I’ve been asked to make a slideshow of photographs for the reception (a project which, because it requires that I access the traditional aesthetic and emotional sensibilities of others and not inject my own, is more challenging than I would have thought). Seeing photographs of my sister through the years is affecting in a way I hadn’t expected. Aside from being moved by how delightful she has always been, I am confronted with documentary evidence of how absent I was as an older sibling, how little of her life I involved myself in, how self-centered I was. (Superheros with the coolest birdcage in history). In photos like these three, we are visibly close and I can even detect support for my father’s often-repeated claim that she looked up to me, a prospect I find hard to imagine as it’s always been clear to me that one of us is a disaster and the other a healthy, whole human. But there are no such photos as these from my adolescence, as I was simply too cold, too angry, too stupid, too deranged to be anything but a source of difficulties for her. She’s never held it against me, and we’re closer now than we’ve been, but I recognize that I was not a very good brother to her. (Commandos; note pinko hat). Nothing is more complex than the dynamics of a family, and nothing is harder to clearly contemplate. But why waste time on the past? I suppose all there is to be done is a better job in the future.

My younger sister is marrying in less than a month and I’ve been asked to make a slideshow of photographs for the reception (a project which, because it requires that I access the traditional aesthetic and emotional sensibilities of others and not inject my own, is more challenging than I would have thought).

Seeing photographs of my sister through the years is affecting in a way I hadn’t expected. Aside from being moved by how delightful she has always been, I am confronted with documentary evidence of how absent I was as an older sibling, how little of her life I involved myself in, how self-centered I was.

(Superheros with the coolest birdcage in history).

In photos like these three, we are visibly close and I can even detect support for my father’s often-repeated claim that she looked up to me, a prospect I find hard to imagine as it’s always been clear to me that one of us is a disaster and the other a healthy, whole human.

But there are no such photos as these from my adolescence, as I was simply too cold, too angry, too stupid, too deranged to be anything but a source of difficulties for her. She’s never held it against me, and we’re closer now than we’ve been, but I recognize that I was not a very good brother to her.

(Commandos; note pinko hat).

Nothing is more complex than the dynamics of a family, and nothing is harder to clearly contemplate. But why waste time on the past? I suppose all there is to be done is a better job in the future.

Tags: mental illness

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