Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts

A Common Struggle - A Review

In A Common Struggle, Patrick Kennedy tells the story that only he can tell.

There are many memoirs of depression, bipolar, co-morbid substance abuse, families that keep secrets, and recovery. Lately there are memoirs that combine a personal story with a cause: get help, get the right diagnosis, find people who can support you, advocate for better treatment.

Kennedy's unique perspective is the insider's view on the long-term national political work of improving mental health care.

Demi Lovato -- Bipolar Warrior

The news story caught my ear.  I don't usually follow celebrity news.  But I had just read an article about Demi Lovato in a NAMI magazine.  I listened for some report of who she is and what she represents.  I wondered about a recent depression, a suicide attempt, perhaps.

Nope, not a word.  Celebrity drug overdose.  That's the story.  I swear they wrote this story thirty years ago, periodically pull up the file, change the name, and post.

She deserves better.  I'll just have to write my own post.

Lovato has long been open about her mental illnesses, bipolar, bulimia, self harm, drug abuse, and alcoholism.  Her celebrity as a pop star is significant to the story in one way.  It has given her a voice to advocate for those who have no voice.

Celebrity is not a risk factor for substance abuse.  But an alcoholic father is.  She has the genetic load to develop the condition.

Celebrity is not a risk factor for substance abuse.  But childhood trauma is.  She was bullied as a child, to the point of resorting to home schooling.

Celebrity is not a risk factor for bipolar, either.  But substance abuse and bipolar do often go together.  56% of people with bipolar struggle with addiction.  Why so many?  There are three potential explanations:

Preparation/Action - Reprogramming Your Brain for Healthy Eating

Some days Facebook just breaks my heart.

Last week a friend who is trying to change his eating habits because, well frankly, his life depends on it, posted a complaint about his breakfast smoothie.  He gave the recipe, and yes, it was nasty.  So one of his "friends" said she would bring over some donuts.


Another friend posted, I have the best husband! He brought me home an Oreo Blizzard.  Her life doesn't depend on it yet, because she is younger.  But it will.  She is on her way.  SAD, the Standard American Diet is an addiction and addictions are progressive.

God, Tebow and the Problem of Suffering

You know, they could be right.  Maybe God is responsible for Tim Tebow's astounding success.

First, the one take away from this article:  It's not magic-thinking.  It is pattern-seeking, hard-wired into our brains, one of the things our brains are built to do.

I Am A Professional -- Do Not Try This At Home

A whole world of football fans are suddenly theologians, explaining the ways of God.  And how silly for me to caution non-professionals from this endeavor.  Everybody with a frontal cortex is a theologian.  Our brains are built to ask Why?  Everybody with an anterior cingulate cortex looks for patterns that make sense of the events of the world.  That is what the anterior cingulate cortex does.

How is this for a pattern -- A new quarterback about whose talents many have doubts delivers a win.  Somebody sticks a microphone in his face.  He gives glory to God.  Next week, he wins again.  Again he gives glory to God.  Again he wins.  Again he gives glory to God...

And what is with that 316 yards thing?

If this were a baseball player on a streak, it would be the same socks he wears each game.  It's the God-thing that makes people twitchy.  More than that.  If it were basketball, he'd be crossing himself at the free-throw line, and nobody would miss a beat.  But it's the politics of the God-thing that have raised the stakes.

Suddenly people who should know better are doing bad theology.  And people who do know better let their chains get jerked.  I don't except myself here.  Twice a day I write something snarky on Facebook, and have to delete before I post.  (It's a thing I have about public discourse on Facebook.  I try to save my snarkiness for my blog.)

At Prozac Monologues my readers can expect more than snarkiness.  I have to bend the topic a bit.  So here we go.

God Improves Athletic Performance

Really, I'm serious.

Well, in a particular way.  Anybody else have a hometown team whose weekly police report is longer than its injury report?  And the results -- Hawkeyes went where this year?  The Earwax Bowl?

These days a little clean living gives an incredible advantage in the world of collegiate and professional sports.

Now this is not about Tim Tebow.  I don't know anything about his private life.  I do know a lot of athletes flame out on dissolute living, leaving behind only fumes of what had been promising careers.

I also know that some people find their way back.

The Twelve Steps

  • We admitted we were powerless over [our addiction] - that our lives had become unmanageable.
  • We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  • We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

There are more steps.  These are a start, the part that matters to a mental health blog.

However and why ever they do it, and how seriously they need to work on it, a lot of athletes and a lot of the rest of us could improve our lives by acknowledging a Higher Power.  It's a bottom line sanity issue.  People who think they are the center of the universe have their own DSM code.  It's 301.81.  But they aren't in therapy.  Those closest to them are.

No, you don't have to be a Christian, religious, not even spiritual but not religious to work the Steps.  I heard somebody used gravity for his Higher Power.  Like I said -- I am not the center of the universe is a bottom line sanity issue.

Tim Tebow's Higher Power

Again, I know nothing about the man's private life, and less than nothing about his heart.  But to the extent that his publicly professed Christianity conforms to orthodox Christianity, and by that I mean not making it up as we go along, I do believe the claim that his athletic prowess comes from God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth who delights in creation and said of it, It is good.  We have something in common here, Tim Tebow and me.  We each believe that God delights in us.  Well, I am willing to be a little less specific about the details.


If nothing else, think of this also as a comparative claim.  If he thought it was all about him, he would be at greater risk to flame out, and thereby not be able to complete as many passes as he does manage to complete.

Of course, there has to be somebody to catch those passes.  Writing now as a one-time Bronco fan, I wish I heard him say more about his receivers and his left guard.  He might make a better spokesperson for the Lord if it didn't seem like his personal miracle.

Alert: Rocky Shoals Of God-Talk Ahead

So far, I have been in the realm of orthodox theology, not making it up as I go along.

Everybody is a theologian.  The advantage of professional status is that you recognize the potential shipwreck before you get there.


Oops.  Too late.

A status update from a Facebook friend Sunday night: This is what happens when God is in charge!

Pastor Wayne Hanson, Summit Church, Castle Rock Colorado said, It's not luck.  Luck isn't winning 6 games in a row.  It's favor, God's favor... God has blessed his hard work.

So... how about 19 games in a row?  Was that luck?  What happens if the Broncos make it through this weekend and next, and Tim Tebow comes up against Aaron Rodgers, who also happens to be a stand-up kinda guy?  Not to mention one hell of a quarterback.  Will that be about God's favor?

The Problem of Suffering

I think what really drives people nuts, including a lot of Christians of the orthodox/not making it up as we go along variety, is this:

While God was blessing Tim Tebow's hard work on Sunday afternoon, 720 children around the world died of hunger.  270 people committed suicide.  Two of them, by the way, were veterans of the United States Armed Forces.

That was before overtime.  Good thing overtime was short, huh?

So on Monday morning, nearly 1000 mothers were asking, If God could help Tim complete that pass, couldn't he have paid some attention to my child?  Billions still listen for their answer.

This is not a question to be answered blithely.  We have to put football, even America to the side.

See, we have been here before, trying to find the pattern.  That is what our brains do, search for patterns, notice anomalies, then respond to new information.

There is one pattern we really, really want to find, that good is rewarded and evil is punished.  For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.

That's from Psalms.  And to some extent, we do find evidence to confirm the claim.  Usually people who treat their spouses right have happy marriages.  Or at least happier than their marriages would be if they were out running around at night, coming home drunk and violent.

This pattern gives us a way to arrange our own behavior to get outcomes we desire, which is a good thing, and the evolutionary purpose of the development of this capacity.

This is from Psalms, too: I have been young and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging for bread.

720 mothers whose children died of hunger while the Broncos pulled out that squeaker against the Steelers would beg to differ.  All you have to do is turn the channel to CNN to find that pattern disrupted.

The Bible Knows Better

Well, if you actually read the whole Book, and read it several times, over different times in your life, so you have a wider experience that helps you catch things you missed the first time round, you discover that the Bible says some other things about the ways of the righteous and the ways of the wicked.  Read Jeremiah.  Read Job.  Read the rest of the Book of Psalms.  Go do relief work in Haiti or Sudan and read them again.

The Bible records how a whole community of faith over centuries has struggled with this issue.  Sometimes the Psalm begins, O LORD, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.  And at the end, it still says, Darkness is my only companion.

The Psalms of Lament speak the truth of people who do love the LORD, who are faithful.  From Jeremiah thrown down a well to Paul shipwrecked on Malta to Mother Teresa struggling her whole life with severe depression a couple millennia later, faith does not turn out to be bankable.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Maybe the Psalms can give voice to your own experience.

Creativity and the Absurd

The ancient Israelites were sure of the pattern, that they held God's favor.  They lived in the Promised Land, after all.  Then something else happened, off pattern.  A new super power came on the scene, destroyed their temple and threw them into exile.  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion... How can we sing the Lord's song upon an alien soil?

When faced with the unpredicted, the absurd, the anterior cingulate cortex shifts into high gear.  Its job is to modulate emotional response, to manage the panic.  It does so by reasserting sense.

Sense can be found in two ways.

The first is to revert to the familiar.  When the brain is overwhelmed by stress, it becomes more efficient.  It shuts down brain-derived neurotrophic factor, stops learning and concentrates on what it already knows, or what it is habituated to trust.  It was the forces of evil (gays, the First Amendment...)  We are being tested, we have to believe harder...  People confronted by the absurd sometimes cling to habit, reject the unfamiliar (immigrants, head scarves).  After 9/11 there was a spike in sales of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.  That is the anterior cingulate cortex at work, modulating emotional response.

The second way is to ramp up the pattern seeking by noticing connections that had been overlooked.

The second way is the way of creativity.  For the Israelites, the Babylonian Exile resulted in an explosion of creativity, poetry, philosophy, history, new forms of worship, the legal code, and the development of a religion that was larger than their prior notions of land=success=God's favor.  They came up with a religion that could handle exile, handle loss.  It could travel and face the future.

Their brains found new patterns.  They recognized a kinship and developed compassion, even obligation toward others who were immigrants or poor or who had lost.

America At A Spiritual Crossroads

I was approached once to be a supply preacher at a Unitarian Universalist Church during an interim.  I realized I had no idea how to do that, how to preach, if not the Gospel.  So perhaps it is inevitable that I fail my nonChristian readers at this point.

But I will do my best.

The 20th century witnessed horrors when people responded to their suffering by pulling away, by blaming others and cutting off connections, dividing nations into smaller and smaller subgroups to despise.  The brain that does that eventually goes senile.

A lot of us have lost a lot since the start of the 21st century.  And the rules have been rewritten, so we can expect more of the same.  This would be a good time to seek deeper than the theological optimism that cheered us when there was still a frontier and we could always walk away from our failures.  This is not the time to place our hopes for spiritual vindication on the thin reed of an untried and immature quarterback and Christian.  Give the kid a break.  And, by the way, give the people who are rooting for him a break, as well.  They are having a hard time, too.

The good news is that there are other patterns to be found.

The brain that remains open to new experiences, that searches for common ground, grows, creates, delights, has fun!  Ditto the nation.  Ditto the world.

Imagine that.  We are hard-wired for compassion.  And for fun.

Go Cheeseheads!

photo of Tin Tebow from tempecarnivore.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-time-tebow-here-are-10-sports.html
Hawkeye and AA logos in public domain
Creation of Adam by Michelangelo,  1510 in public domain
The Shipwreck by Claude Joseph Vernet, 1772, in public domain
photo of Haiti earthquake victim by Lohan  Abassi, used under the Creative Commons Attribution License  
photo of UA 175 striking World Trade Center in public domain

Support the Troops - Stop Shopping

So I am back from getting my head examined, that three day intensive evaluation.  I had my doubts about this enterprise.  At my most anxious, my therapist reminded me I would get air miles.  That would be something, at least.  To my surprise, I also received some surprises.  And the experience was worth a couple of blogposts.  This one will be about PTSD, or make reference to it.  Next week we will play with the DSM.

I start at the Hilton.  Well, before that, my pension plan, which is how I ended up at the Hilton, not to mention how I ended up getting a three day psychiatric evaluation at the Gabbard Center, which does not usually happen for loonies in my tax bracket. 

Decent Benefits For People With Mental Illness? 

The Episcopal Church Pension Fund was established by one of the biggest robber barons of the 19th century, J.P. Morgan, doing penance for his sins.  Like how Charles and David Koch aren't.  Since then, clergy have put the equivalent of a whopping 15% of our salaries into the fund.

Unlike United Airlines or General Motors, this retirement fund is not run by people who have the option of stealing it by threatening to close up shop unless the pensioners just hand over their hard-earned savings to increase the compensation of the CEOs.  The shop being the Episcopal Church.  Plus for some reason, in defiance of the way managed mutual funds work in the real world, the Pension Fund beats its performance indexes year after year after decade after decade.  Maybe this has something to do with karma.  Maybe the angels.  Choose your metaphysical system.  Whichever, for me, this is good.

As a consequence, my disability pension comes from one of the last defined benefit plans in America.  And it regularly has to come up with ways to spend its excess revenues, like by providing good benefits for its disabled beneficiaries, even those whose disability is of the loony variety.

And since the people who manage that much money are used to staying in places like the Houston Hilton, then that is where they put up their loony beneficiaries when we are getting our heads examined.

Which is how I came to spend four days there, two blocks north of the Galleria. 

Galleria As A Tourist Attraction 

Malls called Galleria don't have stores with names like Old Navy.  They have stores with names like Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Saks, Baccarat, Tiffany's, Cartier, De Beers.  A whole store called De Beers, for God's sake.

Galleria is where the restaurants are, where we went when we were tired of sitting next to tables at the Hilton where we had to overhear earnest mentors training earnest mentees for their presentations to their big clients.  The oil companies were meeting at the Hilton.  Down the street, Bechtel was meeting at the Westin.  Bechtel is the construction company to the Saudi monarchy.  So it may be the timing was not a coincidence.

We walked to the Galleria.  The neighborhood isn't really designed for walking.  Houston is more of an internal combustion engine kind of place.  So as we picked our way through parking lots, we overheard a father and young son comparing their Beemer to the Beemer they parked next to.  We dodged  Maseratis and Mercedes while crossing streets.  Well, you get the idea.  There was a closer restaurant.  But the doorman appeared to be wearing Kevlar under his vest.  Well, you get the idea.

One of my docs, making small talk as we entered her office, asked if I was getting to look around Houston in the off hours when I wasn't getting my head examined.  I said, No I am too tired.  Except, we went to the Galleria.  She responded, Well, THAT's something! 

It was something alright. 

Galleria As A Mental Health Hazard 

One evening on our way toward sushi, a young man held out soap samples.  I said, No thanks, I don't do scents.  Then he grabbed my hand.  Okay, he asked permission.  I see your nails are clean.  You don't paint your nails?  No I don't.  Let me show you something.  So he explained about ridges and natural oils while he did his flirty little small talk and buffed one of my nails.  Now don't scream when you see the results.  Indeed, the nail was beautifully shined, and made the notion of painting nails seem cheap.  I agreed it was beautiful and said I was not going to buy the buffer anyway.  Why not?

Because I don't buy things. 

That took some explaining, both to him and to myself, since I had never said those words before.  He decided I had made a life style choice.  Well, okay.  That would be one way to look at it.

But it was more like a commitment than a choice, made then and there.  I would no longer buy things.

Don't get me wrong.  I am as fem as they come -- short of destroying my feet in those instruments of torture that women willingly put on their feet nowadays.  Evidently, all that work we did in the 1970s to get women to love ourselves was a waste.  In other cultures, women are forced to deform their feet.  Having stopped in the 70s, now we do it again.  In the US, we call that freedom.

Where was I?  Oh yes -- I found those beaded dresses in the Gucci windows quite lovely.  And I have some beaded things in the back of my closet from pre-loony days.  Maybe not pre-loony, maybe just not-yet-identified hypomanic days, who knows.

But tripping past them, dodging the Lexus SUVs, all of that, I felt this growing sense of doom about the American way of life.

What The American Way Of Life Costs 

I couldn't shake the images of three young men.  One is a friend of my son's, who came home from Iraq with a TBI and PTSD.  Another is a relative with a couple tours of duty in Afghanistan and a troubled marriage.  The third is a young man I counseled, who signed up, hoping to come home a hero in a box. 

Support the troops, people say.  Support the ones who are protecting our freedom.  Freedom to shop at Galleria.

There I was, surrounded by the way of life they were protecting at the cost of their brains and their families and their lives.

It is too high a cost.

It is too high a cost.

These thoughts, coming in the midst of getting my head examined, make me think we need to get America's head examined.

Money, Military and Mental Health

This isn't a political blog.  I do advocacy about mental health issues.  I am not here to plug political opinion.



This is not an opinion.  This is a photograph.


 




This is another photograph.




And here is another.





 
And now we return to the shoes.

As I look at one picture, then another, as I listen to those young men, and then to the people in that restaurant next to me, I do have an opinion.  Here it is.

These shoes cost too much.

They cost too much.

Actually, I don't think this is about mental health, after all.  It is a sickness of the soul. 

What Is The American Way Of Life? 

I did meet some very nice people at the Houston Hilton.  One man was from Ethiopia.  He drove the shuttle, and we got to know each other in twenty-minute conversations each day on the way to the Gabbard Center.  He came to this country because he wanted opportunity.  And he found it.  He drives a shuttle bus.  His eldest is a policeman.  His daughter is about to graduate from college, and his youngest about to enter.  He doesn't need a Maserati to have the American way of life.

The other shuttle driver came to the US during the war in El Salvador.  We talked about Archbishop Romero, and the strength we still get from his witness.  If I remember right, somebody gave Archbishop Romero a pair of shoes for his consecration.  People gave him lots of things, but his friend asked him what he wanted, and he said shoes.  This former refugee, now shuttle driver, also found the American way of life.  Emphasis on life.  He doesn't need a Lexus. 

Freedom And Addiction 

People say our young men and women are sacrificing their minds and their bodies to protect our freedom.

We need to protect our freedom ourselves.  We are not free.  We are addicted.  Addiction is a disease of the soul.  And it is progressive.  The more you feed it, the worse it gets.

Our freedom begins when we acknowledge our addiction for what it is. 

Step One -- We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable.

I don't want those shoes.  But I do want that beaded dress.  And having resisted it, having told that young man I don't buy things, the very next day I still almost bought an Eileen Fisher sweater at Nordstrom's across the street.  Because it was on sale.

Just in time I remembered those three young men.  That sweater cost too much. 

My Bit For The War Effort 

PTSD, Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder is bankrupting the defense budget.  Researchers are trying to figure out how to prevent it.  Does it take a neuro-scientist to figure out that you prevent Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by preventing the trauma?

I have decided to support the troops the way the troops do, by caring about what happens to their buddies and acting to prevent harm from coming to them.  I will not wrap a flag around my shoulders nor post one on my facebook page for Veterans' Day.  I will hold before me the faces of those three young men, and wrap myself in my love for them.

I will work the Steps, always remembering that I am just as addicted to things as any of you.

With God as my higher power, the next time I buy something, it will be a bicycle.  So I can leave my Civic in the garage.


photo of J.P. Morgan by Edward N. Jackson and in the public domain
photo of Bacarrat Chrystal Sculpture used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License 
photo of Maserati, Gran Turismo by Rudolf Stricker and usedunder the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
photo of Louis Vuitton shoes used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license
photos of medical evacuation and coffins in public domain 

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