Mental Health Blogs

Archive for December, 2009

I’m leaving for Tucson early this morning so no new posts for today. I’ll do some catching up on Thursday. Comment approval will be non-existent between about 11 a.m. EST and 8 p.m. EST. I hope this year my flight doesn’t get scrubbed for maintenance issues because I couldn’t get another flight out and lost my Christmas trip to see my parents. Fingers are crossed.

Meanwhile, another $65 from three people came in yesterday bring the total raised to date to $3,695.26 from 81 people. Thanks to all who’ve contributed so far. There’s a mere $304.74 to go to hit the overall goal of $4,000 and it’d be swell if that remainder was wiped out very soon.

As usual, the PayPal button is on the right. If you prefer using snail mail, send me an email and I’ll send you my mailing address.

Thanks in advance for your support. And also thanks to all of you who’ve offered such kind thoughts about Stephany’s situation. I know she appreciates it and so do I.

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In the darkly funny film classic Harold and Maude, Harold is a 19-year-old who is obsessed with death and dying. He repeatedly fakes his own suicide, drives around in a hearse, and attends strangers’ funerals as a pastime. At one of these funerals he meets Maude, a 79-year-old with the same morbid hobby, and in one of the most unlikely romances on film, the melancholy young man and the vivacious concentration camp survivor fall in love. Maude’s life ends with her suicide on her 80th birthday, but it’s not a depressing death. Indeed, the final scene shows Harold putting aside his morbid ways and embracing life anew.

Harold and Maude is one of the cleverest films to wrestle with existential themes, but the interplay of morbidity and zest for life is a recurring theme in art and literature. And in real lives as well: People who have close brushes with death often report a sharpened appetite even for the ordinary stuff of daily life. Facing one’s mortality appears to give new meaning to being alive.

But why would this be? It’s not obvious. One can imagine becoming negative and fearful when faced with life’s fragility, or reckless, but that doesn’t seem to happen. What cognitive crunching transforms morbidity into hope, mourning into joy? In other words, what was taking place in young Harold’s neurons when his soul mate’s death lifted his spirits out of the doldrums?

Some new science offers one possible explanation for this cognitive phenomenon. A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, headed by Laura King, decided to look at the death-and-zest interplay in terms of mental heuristics. Heuristic is just scientific jargon for the ancient, deep-wired rules that shape many of our thoughts and actions, and the Missouri scientists were especially interested in two of these rules. The so-called scarcity heuristic states: If something is rare, it must be valuable. This explains, for example, why we prize gold, even though steel is much more useful. The flip side of the scarcity heuristic, often called the value heuristic, states: If we desire something very much, it must be scarce.

Neither of these cognitive rules is necessarily correct or useful all the time, but they are both powerful—powerful enough to explain the common intertwining of morbidity and zest. Because scarcity and value are so tightly linked in the human mind, King and her colleagues reasoned, the mind might interpret death as a scarcity of life, which according to the theory should enhance its perceived value. They decided to test this idea in their laboratory.

The experiments were fairly straightforward. In one, for example, the researchers had a large group of volunteers complete word-find puzzles—those grids of letters with words embedded in them. For some of the volunteers, the embedded words were death-related, like tombstone and coffin, while for others—the controls—they were pain-related, like headache. Then all the volunteers completed three widely used measures of life’s meaning and purpose. The findings were simple and unambiguous: Those with death on their mind found life more meaningful and, well, simply better. They valued life more when primed by funerals and hearses.

So that’s the scarcity principle at work. But the scientists wanted to test their idea the other way around. That is, if it is indeed the heuristic mind finding meaning in death, then loving and embracing life should also enhance awareness of death’s constant presence. They tested this idea in an ingenious way. They approached strangers on the streets of Columbia, Missouri, and asked them to read a brief prose passage. Some read about how valuable the human body was if the organs were traded on the market—in the neighborhood of $45 million, the equivalent of “400 Porsches, 265 houses, or 45 luxury yachts.” The idea was to spark thoughts about life’s monetary worth. Others read about how the body was made up of common chemicals with a total value of about $4.50—the equivalent of “a Big Mac Value Meal at McDonald’s.”

Then they had all the volunteers do a different word test, this one requiring word completions like coff__ and de__. These words could be completed with either death-related words like coffin and dead, or with neutral words like coffee and deal. The idea was to see how much the two different groups of volunteers were thinking about death and dying. And the findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were again clear: As the value heuristic would predict, those who were imagining themselves as the $45 million bionic man were also focused on the inevitability of dying—much more than those primed to devalue life. Valuing life made it seem scarcer and thus more fragile.

So the reality of death does not render life meaningless. Indeed, the opposite. And what’s more, when we embrace life, death is not pushed out of awareness; it lurks just outside of consciousness, easily accessible. That’s a psychological reality that Maude knew well from experience, and 19-year-old Harold was just beginning to sense.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book on the heuristic mind will be published by Crown in fall of 2010.

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It’s that time of year when blogging gets a little lame.
I’m off to pack up my old office, feeling a bit sore after two days of trying to keep up with my high school athlete kid….I’m feeling a little out of shape these days, and so after a day on the ski slopes and an hour or so being yesterday’s squash partner, well, I’m not moving so fast today! And my college kid has finally made it home after days of exams…. arrived for a month with a small suitcase containing his XBox and some dirty crumpled clothes, still refusing to be my Facebook friend.

Clink is off to the cold to ski and climb things. Roy….he was in the mall last night… who knows what he’s up to? His new puppy seems to have a better designer wardrobe than I do.

So we’ll blog or we won’t, but if we don’t, please know we’re wishing you the best for a joyous holiday season and a safe, happy, and (mentally & physically) healthy new year!

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Another $120 came in yesterday from three people and that brings the total raised so far to $3,630.26 from 78 people. Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed so far. That leaves a mere $369.74 to go from 22 people to reach the overall goal of $4,000 from 100 people.

I’d really like to wind up this extended fundraiser over the next few days. It’s very close to goal and that should be doable.

If you’d like to contribute, the PayPal button is on the right. Or if you prefer using snail mail, send me an email and I’ll send you my mailing address.

Thanks in advance for your support.

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It is with a very heavy heart that I tell you all that Stephany of Soulful Sepulcher yesterday lost her three-year fight to keep her daughter Lindsay out of Western State Hospital here in Washington State. Stephany has written about the loss here.

Linds, as she’s known, was sent there because there’s no other placement for her even though a King County Superior Court judge found her not to be a danger to her self or others. She is instead at danger from society…ie, being hit by cars because she has a habit of walking off from her housing. Linds is officially diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis NOS, depending on who’s diagnosing, but her mom makes a compelling case for Linds having autism.

Linds is 21 with the capacity of about a 13 year old. She was at WSH for about two weeks a few years ago and got molested by one of the male patients. I’m hoping to God that doesn’t happen this time, but the last time I checked there were 19 registered sex offenders at WSH. While I suppose most of those are guys in WSH’s forensic unit (ie, jail), there are likely some on the general adult units. A young woman like Linds is–excuse the expression–fresh meat to them and if one of those creeps goes after her I will hit the roof.

The system is bad enough already, but women should not have to face the prospect of sexual abuse. Same for the men.

Stephany has fought heroically for three years in ways that I have never seen a parent fight for a child. She and Linds deserved a better outcome. I hope they get one soon.

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OK, news is just coming out this afternoon that the Senate health care reform bill will include a 10 percent tax on artificial tanning. Apparently, this was done to replace the Botox tax on cosmetic surgery that was in the bill at some point. I’m not a fan of the whole artificial tanning thing, but if people are into it, then whatever. Some folks use tanning sessions to ward off seasonal affective disorder. But a federal tax on it? To help pay for health care reform? I think there needs to be a diagnosis in the DSM for this kind of political chicanery and nanny statism. Heck, I’m just waiting for someone to declare this tax discriminatory against white people.

Meanwhile, here’s a post by a public health type at the Huffington Post who’s predictably ecstatic at the prospect of the tanning tax.

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The AP had a small item today on a new and interesting project called Pets2Vets, which seeks to match military veterans with post-combat stress/PTSD with a suitable dog or cat from an animal shelter. This is such a great idea not only because animals have been proven to be quite useful therapies for PTSD, but because this country’s animal shelters are overrun with unwanted animals, far too many of whom end up being euthanized. Anything that works to address those twin problems is good with me.

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I’d hoped that the fundraiser would meet its goal on Friday, but despite $160 coming from three people on Friday and $40 from two people on Saturday, the fundraiser is short of its goal by $489.74. That’s simply too close to the goal to not extend things a bit and see what happens, especially since I know a couple of checks are still headed my way and because I don’t want this thing to fall short.

So here’s where things are at: $3,510.26 from 74 people has come in to date. That leaves $489.74 to go from 26 people to reach the overall goal of $4,000.

Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed so far.

If you’d like to join them, the PayPal button is on the right. Or if you prefer snail mail, send me an email and I’ll send you my mailing address.

Thanks in advance for your support.

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The Chicago Tribune had a short piece a couple of weeks ago detailing that hundreds of foster kids in the Illinois state system were winding up on psych meds without consent and without approval of the state program. That’s apparently an improvement over a few years ago when many more kids were getting them without consent. Even more stunning is that 9 percent of foster kids in Illinois have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and methinks those can’t be all troubled teens (the paper doesn’t get at how young some of the kids are).

“‘This is a really concerning statistic,’ said Dr. Michael Naylor, a University of Illinois at Chicago psychiatrist who reviews psychotropic medicine regimens for the state Department of Children and Family Services. Naylor said he worries that drug firms’ marketing efforts are driving the diagnoses.”

No kidding. In other news, the paper found than about 10 percent of the 3,564 wards getting psych meds were taking four or more medications.

This sounds like what has been cropping up in Florida, New York and other states. And it pretty much needs to stop.

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Posting this week will be pretty light after Tuesday as Wednesday is a travel day for me and Thursday and Friday are holidays. So most posts will go up today and tomorrow.

I hope you all are easing into a peaceful holiday season.

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