Letters to the Editor
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Ask a Skinhead
Only Dr. Keith Ablow, the product pitch man for the massive psychotropic drug industry could make sense of this mess. Dum Dr. Phil is all Texas country pastor who do counseling with his wife in attendance. Whoa dude Dr. Keith is psychedelic, man. He got more chem means of messing you up than Dugway.
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addendum
By which I mean to say, Dr. Keith Ablow is the Daddy Warbucks of Big Pharma if that sh*t I took can be scored as a musical.
Risperdal has been green lighted for use on minors (and why not), this will renew an expiring patent. Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson is asserting it's sole rights to the symbol of a Red Cross (a red plus sign). That'll leave the American Red Cross w/o a pot to p*ss on.
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P.P.S.
"Roofies" are prescription tranquilizers. Antipsychotics AKA neuroleptics are also named "major tranquilizers". Such powerful chem agents are being forced on both minors and adults. If someone tries to run you up on a psych charge, I suggest: say Freud is a fraud yet he stated God is a delusion. So, embrace Freud or release me from your religious tyranny!
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Some strange letters here
And not too many. I wonder why some topics draw so much response, and others so little. Could it be the deeply-entrenched stigma around mental illness?
My beloved brother Arthur, the hilarious and dazzlingly talented companion of my childhood and teens, drifted into schizophrenia in the 1970s. Any treatment they gave him caused him to shuffle around, his eyes glazed. It was heartbreaking. He disappeared (this must happen a lot: my Dad said, "He doesn't want us to see him like that", which may be true), and I didn't see him for four years. Then came horrible news from my mother: he had died in an old rooming house in Toronto that had caught fire, probably from a cigarette left burning. He was 31.
Some people said to me, "Perhaps he's better off". It almost sounded like they were talking about a beloved pet that had died. "At least now you know where he is," said my mother-in-law, and the irony did not escape me.
I have some comments about the way this piece was written. Every single article I have ever seen on mental illness refers to something called a "breakdown". A breakdown is something that happens to a piece of machinery. People can become ill on the crest of a wave of euphoria (see bipolar), which bears no relation to a "breakdown", but is no less dangerous. And it should go without saying that the term passes the kind of judgement which would not be tolerated in any other illness. ("She broke down" often refers to someone succumbing to tears, as if that shameful act automatically indicates a complete lapse in self-control. So how much worse is "breakdown", or, to use that oft-quoted and medically meaningless Victorian phrase, "nervous breakdown"?)
I also object to the term "madness", which also should have been done away with in the Victorian era ("oh, the old girl is quite mad"). Every book I ever see on this subject has a sub-heading which is a variation of, "A Memoir of Madness". Oh, how we love this word,as if it keeps the rest of us safely distanced. To be "mad" is to be in the same category with a "mad dog". Does anyone even think of this as they casually use totally damning language? I don't think so. These prejudices lie below the level of consciousness, so that people use them without a twinge of conscience.
As for the jumble in the sister's apartment, have you heard of hoarding syndrome? This can happen to people who are perfectly sane in all other respects. It's not necessarily a symptom of schizophrenia.
All right, one more beef. I am bipolar, and I strenuously object to the term "mental illness". Why? It seems innocuous enough (and is surely better than "mad"!). But how can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time? You can't. The very name of the condition is severely limiting, even damning. No other disease that I can think of is labelled in this way. We don't talk of "diabetic illness" (though it is surprising how many similarities there are between the two conditions). No "Parkinsonian illness", no "MS illness": yet all these are chronic conditions, like bipolar, which can be successfully managed.
A friend and I, both mangled by the system, talked about this one day. He said the condition should be called "cognitive dissonance". I offered "disequilibrium". But I know those terms won't catch on. We'd rather refer to "breakdowns" and "madness". And we wonder why it's so hard to get better.
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*applauds*
Extremely well said, scavok.
And what with the stigma associated with mental illness, I'll keep this anonymous.
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Mental vs. physical illness
Scavok, your points about stigmatization are very valuable. I think, though, that the corollary to "mental illness" isn't "diabetic illness" but rather "physical illness," which is used a lot less commonly. I wonder if that's because we are more comfortable identifying the specifics of physical problems, and any limitations they impose, whereas we see mental ones as somehow defining the whole person?
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me, too
The last time I saw my sister, she was throwing her laptop, carton of cigarettes and random bits of clothes into her car before screeching out of my mom's driveway. She'd finished screaming at me, my husband, my mom, my brother because I wouldn't let her spend unsupervised time with my two year old son. The doctors have said she's psychotic, schizophrenic ... now the diagnosis is 'bipolar'. But she doesn't have a giddy phase and a depressed phase - she has two phases, angry and angrier. She's forty-two, no steady job, no friends any more, no lovers, an alcoholic chain-smoking foul-mouthed woman, angry about what's on the news and things that happened a quarter of a century ago, who would be homeless if it weren't for my mother. And she's my sister.
Of course she refuses treatment, won't take the meds that are prescribed, won't acknowledge that she's ill. If you don't like the term mental illness, for Christ's sake give me a term that works better. Her mind is like a festering sore, getting worse as the years go by. And this is what the whole family is wrapped around - we're frightened to have her living with my mom for fear some day she'll lose it and hurt her, and we have no option to that to offer at all. If she were your sister, if she were your daughter, would you force her out into a world where she'd die under a bridge somewhere? And if not, would you take her into your home, live with the the screaming and the threats and the tears and the certain knowledge that this will all end very badly?
There are no good answers here at all. My heart goes out to this woman, who at least tried to understand what her sister had lived, the interior space behind the destruction that these sort of illnesses cause.