Mental Health Blogs

Throughout the years I’ve agonized when working with dual diagnosis clients who attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or any of their sister programs. Too often there are well-meaning people in the groups who take it upon themselves to give psychological or medical advice. All too often, this results in tremendous damage. One of the major offenders is the idea that any member of AA, CA or NA who is taking psychiatric medications is not “clean and sober”. Not only is this bad advice it’s not the official policy of AA.

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For those of you who never saw the post below, I brushed it up.  Please let me know if you’re still not receiving the emails from Feedburner, btw.

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Old Yiddish Saying:  When things come in threes, it is likely they are blogworthy

 (Yes, I made that up) 

            therapydoc
 

I’m riding my bike to work, pass a woman in her ninth month talking to herself.  Surely she has a Bluetooth in her ear, but from my angle she really looks like she’s talking to herself.

And just last week, as I’m loading groceries into the trunk of my car, the young man parked next to me remarks good-naturedly,

“I swear, I thought you had some kind of mental disorder, talking to yourself like that in the store. I thought, 

Someone should tell her kids! Do they even know!?’

Then I watched you, kind of followed you a bit, and I could see that you were okay, that you had to have been on the phone.”

That’s reassuring.  Not suffering from schizophrenia, on the phone.

When I was a teenager, a mobile phone, or “communicator,” was something that Spock used to reach McCoy, the stuff of science fiction,  the technology of Star Trek.  Off television, however, even to an untrained mental health professional, an animated conversation with an invisible other indicated psychosis.  Something very wrong.

And it was a little scary, seeing that psychosis, for every once in awhile a person is going to see a naked person in the middle of the street, or someone walking, gesticulating wildly who is not on the phone. We are afraid of this because intuitively, we tend to be afraid of what we don’t understand.

The irony is that the person who has the psychotic disorder who is more afraid, more anxious, fearful of invisible dangers, the voices speaking only to them, shrieking, spewing hate and rage, negativity.  And under the influence of fear, like most of us under stress, a person with a severe mental disorder is capable of lashing out, usually to self-protect.

A couple of summers ago, riding home from work,  I caught the eye of a woman walking toward me.  She was on the sidewalk wearing mismatched brightly colored clothing.  (I’m drawn to bright colors like a moth to a light.)  When she sees me looking at her she flashes a ferocious glare; I feel the fire.  Then she spits as far as she can, misses me by a foot. Violent psychic energy, aggression.  Strike first.

Believe me, as soon as I caught that look in her eye, her diagnosis was clear in my head.  I didn’t need a DSM.

A person with mental illness who is lashing out violently is more often than not doing so in self-defense.  She  might even be hearing threatening voices.  Tell everyone or you will die!  Show the world!  Make a difference!  You scum, son of scum, you filthy human!  Show your worth! 

James J. Lee, the gentleman who marched into the Discovery building in Silver Spring, Maryland, last week,  had explosives on his person.  He listed his demands on a blog.  He demanded that the Discovery Channel  agree to changes in its programming, that the station become more environmentally sensitive, more green. He thought humans filthy, babies the ultimate source of destructive pollution, the giraffes, the lions, benign.   From his blog: 

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

. . .  It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

In therapy we might say, You sound angry.

Most of us don’t need a prophet to know that our world is in trouble. The heat wave across these past two months should tell us something.

So back to those threes.  We have:

(1) Me seeing schizophrenia everywhere, or so it seems, like a new psych student who has just learned about different psychotic disorders,

(2)  Blogging about James J. Lee soon after the Discovery Channel lockdown last week, that Mr. Lee probably suffered from Schizophrenia and that students should study his blog, Save the Planet Protest, and the news stories that tells us he was homeless.  Then down came the post before most of you read it, me unwilling to face the criticism of those who are sensitive to the issue of population growth, who asked me to defend my diagnosis on the Prophet of Doom.

and (3) One Thousand White Women, The Journals of May Dodd.

What is One Thousand White Women? It is a novel by Jim Fergus about life in the United States in 1876 (really 1854).  The Cheyenne, determined to make peace with urban sprawl and the pollution of white men, offered Ulysses S. Grant an option for assimilating the red-faced with the pale-faced. 

Suffice it to say that it is a biological solution and I just can’t spoil it for you.  I just started the book, but it is captivating and very funny.  And then there’s this quote!

Little Wolf, the Sweet Medicine Chief , is speaking to a specially appointed commission of Congress on behalf of the Cheyenne:

The People are a small tribe, smaller than either the Sioux or the Arapaho; we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People, just as it can only carry a certain number of the bears, the wolves, the elks, the pronghorns, and all the rest of the animals. For if there are too many of any animal, this animal starves until there is the right number again. We would rather be few in number and have enough for everyone to eat, than be too many and all starve.

He goes on to say that for this reason his children must become members of the white man’s tribe, thus offers his modest proposal.

His ideas about population growth, actually, are not all that different from Mr. Lee’s.

So what makes Little Wolf an environmentalist and Mr. Lee a person suffering from schizophrenia, a man who just thought he was an environmentalist?

Little Wolf contains his anger, is very controlled, even when the men on Capital Hill practically throw him and his entourage on a train back west, rejecting his amazing suggestion.  He’s tried to be empathetic, to give the white man the benefit of the doubt.  He is educable, this white man.  An empath, Little Wolf is highly evolved.

The Sweet Medicine Chief reaches out to a culture clearly foreign to him, a people who leave a wake of upheaval and destruction, who ravage fields and the habitat; a people out of touch with the balance of nature, uninterested in learning, particularly.  But capable of empathy and change.

Unfortunately, lose that, lose empathy, lose the ability to intuit the feelings of others, and the desire to change, to look within, to see the enemy inside, rather than blame, and we’re all clueless, out of touch.  Or more to the point, sick.   Like  James J. Lee,  spewing hatred and negativity on his blog in an insular psychotic rage. 

We don’t know if Mr. Lee had been treated for the illness, or even if he heard voices. We don’t know and never will, probably, if anyone told him to call attention to the problem of population growth and the destructive nature of human beings, or not. But he probably had it, 295.30, Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type. A tough disorder to live with.

I know it like I know why the woman spat at me when our eyes locked.

Lee’s website: http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com

And the Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications

therapydoc

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Thanks to Dr. T for bringing this to my attention.

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Listen to our latest podcast at mythreeshrinks.com or subscribe to our rss feed. Email us at mythreeshrinks at gmail.

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I just went to add someone to my Facebook list. It’s someone I’ve spoken to once on a professional topic, but hey, it was a nice conversation, and information about this person came through my Facebook newsfeed, and if I can have all these friends from my past lives, why not?

This time, however, I got an interesting message from Facebook. The button didn’t just say “Send Friend Request”….it asked “Are you Sure You Know Zelda?” (Not her real name). And then, there was a whole disclaimer, which I found to be a bit threatening:

If you send a request to a stranger, it will be considered spam and your friend request will be blocked temporarily. Please only send this request if you know Zelda.

I was about to press the button but I thought, Do I know Zelda? How well do I have to know someone to qualify? I’ve never actually met Zelda–oh, actually I did pass her on the street in New Orleans during APA, but I was in a rush so I didn’t stop and introduce myself and say “Zelda, it’s me, Dinah, can I know you now?” I decided that one phone conversation was enough, and that I know Zelda. Maybe she’ll agree, but if she doesn’t that’s fine. I just hate being threatened with a “spam” designation. I’m many things, but Spam I’m not.

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Listen to our latest podcast at mythreeshrinks.com or subscribe to our rss feed. Email us at mythreeshrinks at gmail.

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The opposite of being totally consumed by someone you cannot live without is not being totally consumed by someone you can’t stand. The consumption is still there, only inverted. The opposite of love, therefore, is not hate…

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The after school program called to say they had a medical emergency with a child and could not locate the mother. They were asking if we could help them find the mother and have her call them. Then the drama started…

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Sometimes some of you get a notice that I’ve posted something, only to find that it’s gone.  You visit and see  nothing new.  That’s because I’ve reread whatever it was and decided it wasn’t ready for prime time, so down it goes. 

I appreciate the visit anyway, you should know, and the communication, the questions. 

It happened this week, so even though I should be making someone a lunch, I put up the Garage Sale post below, cleaned it up a little.  Has anyone ever cleaned a sixty year old garage?  It’s not pretty.

therapydoc

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Technically it’s a front yard sale.

My son stops by to see what’s going on, exclaims, “For sure you’re going to blog about this!”


After the smoke clears and I have a little distance, weigh all the risks, the benefits, because who can move without doing that, it seems like a good idea. 

 Once I had a patient who worked for the stock exchange.  Or was it the commodities exchange.  In the pit.  Everything about it, he said, wreaked mania.  The sheer energy, the excitement, the thrill of buy-sell.   Of course, that was when the millennium was new, the economy flourishing.  Now we all feel a little older, slower.

I never knew it, but garage sales are the real American stock market.  It never grabbed me, however, the old furniture, old light fixtures, what people called OPJ, other people’s junk.  Not that the show, The Antique Road Show  couldn’t keep my attention, it did.  But it wasn’t like browsing thrift stores turned me on, and I only bought a few things second hand — winter jackets for the grandsons.  One was for girls, apparently, so that was a huge faux pas.  Some of us need more direction than others.

Like many immigrants who come to this country, my father, after serving in a world war, had to decide what to do with his life if he expected to buy property, support a family, that sort of thing. He started setting up windows in a jewelry shop and thought, How hard is this?  I should own the shop.

And without the Internet to guide him, without a degree in business administration, he and his brother set up a business or three.  They hired someone to fix watches and Dad watched carefully.  The modest idea morphed into a buying and selling obsession.

It is an obsession, I’m learning, one that is not in the DSM, yet millions of people have it.  Most are on Ebay.  They have stores and monikers and merchandise and self-esteem, pride themselves on their packaging, their advertisements, the text of the sale, the pitch.  For now, sales are primarily online. 

Selling online, as even my father could see, is replacing the store.    My father wanted to get into it, selling online, but his illness overcame him.  That and age.  At some point you really do stop retaining new information, even old sober sharpies like my dad. 

So when he passed on he left us a lot of stuff.  Things like china, stoneware.  Random gift plates and jewelry, ID bracelets, new, in cases worth at most, $18 bucks a pop.  Clock radios.  Wallets and lighters.  Cigaret lighters!  Most of the jewelry was neither hisht nor haihr (Yiddish for neither here nor there).  Meaning not very valuable, but it might be. You never know.

Perfect garage sale stock.  Your average buyer at such an event will embrace the prospect and think about the problem for as long as you keep the tables up, as long as you attend to them.

“Do I buy it or not?”  they’re asking themselves.

Real pressure.  I had no idea that putting a few things out to make a couple of bucks for my mom would be so intense!  Each sale so meaningful, so important.  It’s like me at the grocery store.  Do I try the generic?  I want to, I really do, but will it give me a rash?  Is it worth the rash to save a couple of bucks?  Probably not.  But it might be.  (Certainly the generic Pantene is fine.  At least for me.)

The heat at the garage sale, palpable.  Do I buy it or not?  Can I get it for less?  Why won’t she come down.  And everyone calling my name, because I’m the one who sat down with my mother for days, went over the stock with the glass, weighed it, loved it.  All this work to set a fair price.

So it’s the closest thing to a family manic episode, or to being at the stock exchange on cocaine (for it’s quite common, or used to be synonymous, market and cocaine) or to working in a gift shop the week before Xmas.  And obviously, it is grief work. 

It was hot.  Being there was being in the hotbed of America.  The wonderful people of Chicago would have felt it anyway, the heat, 90 degrees in the shade.  This is an annual neighborhood gig, the neighborhood yard sale, and there are twenty-six other yards to pick over.  Why everyone seems to come back to mine is still a big mystery.

Of course there’s much more story here, but it can wait.  Suffice it to say there was jewelry, and the thing that seemed to draw shoppers to the yard was the jewelry.  And Israeli coins.  Why, when we’re in a recession that has affected every one of us in one crazy way or another is jewelry the hot ticket item at a garage sale, well, you tell me.  My hunch is that it is beautiful, and garage sales are synonymous with deals, and beautiful and deal, go together. At least that’s one of the things I learned as a child.

Anyway, this event took some preparation, and you could say it was highly anticipated, we were all pretty pumped, looked forward to hanging out in the hood on a Sunday and divesting of the junk that had moved from my mom’s basement to mine.  Had to get a city permit and everything.  This just felt important.

And we were mobbed.  All day long, the same people kept coming back.  I felt we were old friends by noon.

You’d have thought it was the California gold rush. They’re squinting at things, peering through loops.  If I had sold nothing but jewelry loops, mom would have walked away a rich woman.  They’re weighing little trinkets from one hand to the next. 

“Is it 14K?” Everyone wants to know. “14K? 10K? Any 18K? Can’t you go inside and look for more? You know you have more! This couldn’t be everything from the store!”

How do you tell people, Listen, my grandkids took all the good stuff back with them when they were here for the summer. They might be young, but they’re not stupid. 

“What we have here,” my standard reply, “you have to buy it at your own risk. This isn’t what I do for a living.”

Oy vey! Wrong answer. So what do you do?

Well, when you’re caught off-guard and you’re me, you’re honest, and let’s just say, . . . we’re off.

But let’s not talk about me. What’s really interesting is that there is a garage sale culture, the ecosystem that has passed many of us by.  We can’t do everything, can’t have our hands in everything.  We have to miss, on occasion, an awesome ecosystem or two.

Sometimes people come to therapy and they haven’t got hobbies, haven’t got a social niche or a social system they’re comfortable in, or haven’t  things to do during their discretionary time.  Many people, these days have a lot more of that than they wish they had, discretionary time.  Discovering how to develop an interest in everything, maybe even old things, collectibles, or free things, like the exoskeletons of the cicada (see previous post) is the cure. It’s called personal growth, learning who you are, what you like, doing it, and convincing others, this is good to do, this is good to have.

Who knew I would have liked the stock exchange?  Never in a million years would have thought such a thing.

therapydoc

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… that is the question. A veteran of Vietnam was talking about his experiences over there, coming home and the trauma he experienced and he made an interesting statement. The mental health professionals, the V.A., his family and his friends all want him to heal. But he disagrees.

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