Saving Normal -- The Diagnosis Game

For readers unencumbered by the facts of the matter or any understanding of them, Allen Frances' book Saving Normal is an entertaining romp through the world of psychiatric diagnosis which will support your deepest held suspicions: that there are a few seriously wacko people out there who are very different from the rest of us, but for the most part, mental illness is a sham and you need to just snap out it.

Not to tip my hand, or anything.

The claims made without benefit of facts will take some time to sort through. And a later post will support part of Frances' agenda. In fact, support it enthusiastically. But not this one.

The APA's Cocktail Party, 2009

Raccoons Respect My Piss

I don't know that for a fact.  Actually, the piss in question is John McManamy's piss.  And he has the experience to back his claim.


Nor do I have any recollection of how I discovered McManamy's blog, Knowledge is Necessity, and from there, his enormous set of resources at McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web.  But as it happens, my entry into McMan World was Skunk -- the blog piece from August, 2009 that inspired his new book's title, Raccoons Respect My Piss, available in kindle format and now in paperback.


Since I asked John's permission to steal Skunk, which I guess means I didn't steal it, we have become what I call blogmates.  He most graciously gave me a leg up in this business, plugging Prozac Monologues in its infancy on his own blog.  Since then, we often find we are captured by the same curiosities at the same time -- as he puts it, God, neurons and everything between.

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.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer, Consumer, Blogger, Whatever

As in the days of Amos, John of Patmos, John of the Cross, it's the poets who will save us, those of us who have ears to hear.  For the rest, it's the poets who will preserve the evidence, in hope that there will yet be ears to hear.

So today, Wendell Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

First, one liner note: Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a drawer.  In the early days of computers, data was recorded by punching holes into cards, literally, card stock, roughly 3"x7".  This was before web crawlers could find the word bread in a Facebook comment and then put up ads for kitchenware on your page.  The line in the poem, first published in 1970, is truer than ever.  The technology has simply got more efficient.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay.  Want more
of everything ready-made.  Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more.  Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you.  When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

 

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute.  Love the Lord.
Love the world.  Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love somebody who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag.  Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand.  Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.  Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.  Prophesy such returns.

 

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.  Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.  Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade.  Rest your head
in her lap.  Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it.  Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.  Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

And your homework for this week, gentle reader --

What does it mean to Practice resurrection?  What tuition will you pay?

Johannes der Evangelist in Patmos from a triptych by Hans Memling, 1479

photo of punched computer card by Litrefs used under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

photo of Immortal Tree, Humboldt Redwood State Park by Jan Kronsell, public domain

photo of fox from US Department of Interior, public domain
book cover from amazon.com

Summer Reading Picks from Prozac Monologues -- Repeat

The following is a repeat.  I tweaked it a bit and added book jackets.  If you click on a book jacket, you will go to a fuller description of the book at Amazon.com.  Ditto if you click on the title in the text.

Summer Reading Picks from Prozac Monologues -- June 17, 2010

Last winter I did the blog piece on movies for surviving the family holiday scene.  With or without family issues, here come my picks for summer reading.  This is an all purpose list, for normals and the mentally interesting alike, and just for fun.   Books to take to the beach -- or the backyard, should the beach be out of reach.

The following is my opinion.  Strongly-held, but my opinion.  Feel free to have your own.  That's what comments are for.

I asked friends for their input in two categories: lovable loonies and alternate worlds -- fiction, unless they could make a very compelling case otherwise.  Now I have a new reading list, too.

Lovable Loonies

We begin with lovable loonies.  My all-time number one favorite book, perfect for beach, book club, hospital bed, you name it, is Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.  You know, there were other gospels that didn't make the original cut.  I don't think this one would have, either.  Nevertheless, it had me at this sentence: The first time I saw the man who would save the world, he was sitting near the central well in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth.  It seems Joshua (Jesus) was entertaining his little brother, who kept smashing the lizard's head with a rock, whereupon the future savior of the world would put it in his mouth, bring it back to life, and hand it back to his little brother.  Practice for later.  This gospel fills in the missing years of Jesus' life and explains the invention of cappuccino, judo and grace.  A loonier evangelist you could not find.  So that's number one.

Another Christopher Moore pick, though out of season, is The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror.  It reintroduces a character from Lamb.  And boy, is he stupid.  The lovable loony is the sheriff's wife, a former actress who played a Xena-type warrior and never quite got out of character.  In a sub-plot and nod to O'Henry, she quits her meds to save up for her husband's Christmas present, a bong, while the sheriff/husband/recovering druggie plants an acre of pot to buy her a sword.

Actually, the whole purpose of this blog piece is to get more people to read my second favorite book, Lucky Dog by Mark Barrowcliffe -- a talking dog named Reg who helps a helpless loser win at poker -- the helpless loser being the only one who can understand what Reg is saying, of course.  After first meeting him, Dave goes on meds.  So Reg gives Dave the silent treatment, because his feelings are hurt .  Notice the running theme, meds.  This is a Prozac Monologues list, after all.  Eventually Dave misses Reg's conversation, quits his meds and figures out that Reg gives him an advantage at the gaming table.  It's all about smell.  You've got the mob, a rich old lady, a love interest, the world from a dog's point of smell and redemption.  What more could you want for summer reading?

A friend reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut -- whom I already started rereading a few months ago.  Vonnegut makes reference to his lovable loony, Eliot Rosewater in a couple of books.  Rosewater gets his own book in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.  Maybe he has a touch of psychosis.  Maybe he is a hopeless idealist.  Maybe he just needs to say no.  But he is indeed lovable and a volunteer fireman.  Bonus loony: Kilgore Trout.

Crossover Category -- Lovable Loonies in Alternate Worlds

Also in the lovable loony category is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams.  Couldn't we all use a book with the words Don't Panic on the cover?  Hitchhiker's Guide is the first of a triology with five books.  I think the second volume, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is where I learned that every planet in the universe has a drink called gin and tonic.  You make it differently on every planet.  But there you are.  You can get the perfect beverage to accompany your summer reading, assuming the ingredients don't mess with your meds, on any planet in the universe.

I just started The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.  Yes, I spelled his name correctly.  Another friend, a bookophile who knows loony recommends it.  It is the first of Fforde's loony alternate reality series, starring Special Operative Thursday Next, a literary detective who is chasing down the evil Acheron Hades who has stolen... It's a Lost in Austen/Inkheart kind of alternate reality, blurring the boundaries between the world of normals and the many worlds of books.  But today I am going back to the library to check out the original Jane Eyre.  Okay, okay -- I've never gotten around to it, just seen the movie version.  What with Fforde bending time and plot, I can tell I will miss stuff if I don't know the original.

Alternate Worlds

Hitchhiker's Guide and The Eyre Affair are my segue into alternate worlds.  I was heartbroken when we got to the end of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and lost that annual Hogwarts fix with its witches and wizards, port keys, Marauder's Map and all the rest.  According to a Face Book quiz, if I were a Hogwarts teacher, I would be Remus Lupin.  I agree -- the mostly depressed but occasionally dangerous one.  We never saw him do any real damage.  Sounds like BPII to me.  Last year I reread all seven books in preparation for the seventh movie.  This year, I am rewatching the movies to prepare for the eighth.  Bring on the popcorn!

Another friend fave and mine, too, is The Wrinkle in Time series by Madeline L'Engle.  These are cross-over youth/adult sci-fi, but you don't have to be a sci-fi fan to appreciate them.  One summer vacation/road trip, my six-year-old listened to Wrinkle on tape.  Every time we stopped for lunch, he wanted to discuss it.  Every time he got to the end, he started again at the beginning, and I was happy to listen with him.  I wonder if this was the root of his vocation as a philosopher.  The misfits are the heroes who save the planet from IT, the force that wants to eliminate unhappiness by eliminating deviance in the universe.  (I suspect that IT really just wants to get rid of deviance.  The unhappiness thing is just part of the sales pitch.)  In the first volume Meg figures out, same and equal are NOT the same thing.  Mitochondria play a major role in the second volume.  I'll write about mitochondria later this year.  Bonus: it turns out that It was a dark and stormy night is a great way to start a book, after all.

Michael Chabon rewrites history in The Yiddish Policemen's Union.  Imagine that at the end of World War II, Jewish people went to Alaska instead of Israel.  Fifty years later, Alaska is about to revert to the United States.  Enter your basic hapless detective.  Combine a murder mystery, political intrigue, orthodox Jewish mobsters, chess and a red calf.  Shake vigorously.  Serve on the rocks.

Chabon provides another alternate world in a tale of two Jewish adventurerers, Gentlemen of the Road.  Set in 10th century Khazaria, two con men/bodyguards/swashbucklers star in a dime store novel with elegant prose, inadvertently fighting for justice and the rightful heir to the Khazarian throne.

Not all alternate worlds are fantastical.  Like Gentlemen of the Road, books set in real times and places can sweep you up so that you leave your own world and enter the author's.  The day my mother left her third husband, the good stepfather, separating hers and theirs from his, I postponed going crazy by moving to China via Pearl Buck's The Good Earth.  Seventy years after it won a Pulitzer Prize, Oprah made it a Book Club pick.

Lately I have been living in nineteenth century England.  Jane Austen's biggest hit is Pride and Prejudice.  I haven't tried the graphic novel nor the sequels it inspired, including one with zombies.  You're on your own there.  Currently I am doing the Bronte sisters.  Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights.  That link takes to you the edition that is easy to read in bed -- whatever that means.  I mentioned Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte above.  It has inspired the same kind of take-offs as Pride and Prejudice.  All of them have been made into multiple movies and mini-series, if you want to extend your reading experience into other media.

Rounding out our alternate world category, Ellis Peters takes us to a Benedictine monastery in twelfth century England, in the midst of a civil war.  Cadfael is a second career monk, a crusader turned herbalist and forensic scientist detective. The series starts with A Morbid Taste for Bones and goes on for nineteen more volumes -- God bless Ellis Peters.  This series has also been filmed, with Derek Jacobi as Cadfael.

Nonfiction Anyway

Douglas Adams and Hebrew poetry have both inspired me through the years.  If they tell you three, then they add a fourth.  I told you I had two categories.  So here is a third -- compelling nonfiction.  These two are on my own to read list:

The first is friend-recommended The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It is a tragic story of the clash between two cultures, that of the Hmong and that of Western medicine. The parents say Baby Lia Lee's soul is outside her body, captured by an evil spirit.  She needs a shaman.  The doctors say she has epilepsy.  She needs medication.  The doctors win.  The results are not good.  I haven't been reading biographies of people who live with mental illness lately.  But I might make an exception for this one.

The second and last is Invictus: Nelson Mandela and The Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin.  This edition has pictures from the movie.  The original edition is titled Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation.  Combine the typical sports narrative structure: loser team triumphs, with that incredible, grace-filled moment in human history: oppressed people triumph and don't wreck vengeance on the oppressors.

Memoirs, Anyone?

So there are more than enough books to fill out my local library's summer reading club requirements.  I'm thinking of an autumn post with a list of mental illness memoirs: Kay Jamison, Elizabeth Wurtzel, etc.  Recommendations?

What are you reading this summer?  Enjoy.

photo of umbrella by Molku, who placed it in the public domain
book jackets by amazon.com
illustration of popcorn by digitalart used by permission 

OMG!!! That's What They Said!

First, how did I ever start reading so much about depression, medication and the brain, the topics of Prozac Monologues?  Well, it was after I took two antidepressants that made me crazy and one that made me sad.  Then I was back in a psychiatrist's office, and she said, You have to weigh the costs and benefits.  And I took her seriously. 

But the information she gave me and that I found on the prescription information sheet wasn't very much information at all, not the kind that would have helped me when I was taking the antidepressants that made me crazy.  I knew this because I had read them, and they didn't help me.  I will write more about this some other time. 

The Language Of Doctors And Scientists 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy -- aka Cake or Death

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a... treatment that focuses on patterns of thinking that are maladaptive and the beliefs that underlie such thinking... In CBT, the individual is encouraged to view such beliefs as hypotheses rather than facts and to test out such beliefs by running experiments. Furthermore, those in distress are encouraged to monitor and log thoughts that pop into their minds (called "automatic thoughts") in order to enable them to determine what patterns of biases in thinking may exist and to develop more adaptive alternatives to their thoughts. -- NAMI.org 

Books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy