Cute fix-o-rama
TTWS faithful have been great about sending in Cute Fixes. And I could use them because Tinsel seems to have some breathing problem, poor sweetie. I think he might have been allergic to his edible Snak Shack, but at the moment he’s sleeping under a hand towel. When I lifted it up, he squinted in my direction–irritably, I thought, but I know that’s impossible.
So thanks to Jennifer G., Sally and Simon for making my day.
lazy cat on a treadmill [Jennifer]
Cat vs. dog [Sally]
And the photo is from Simon, who writes, “…yup, even insects can be cute. I found this awesome little guy on flickr. What a fantastic photo.” It is indeed, and if the person who took it sees this post, let me know so I can either credit you or take it down. For the moment, though, it’s awesome.
liz | 9:43 AM | Uncategorized
From the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
File under: Stuff I could do if I didn’t have to go to work…
MEDIA ADVISORY: Briefing on Civil Rights of People with Mental Illnesses
The Bazelon Center wishes to express its deepest sympathies to the families, friends and peers of the Virginia Tech shooting victims. This tragedy has raised an array of questions surrounding mental health services and the civil rights of people with mental illnesses.
WHAT: Media Briefing with Bazelon Center Executive Director, Dr. Robert Bernstein
WHEN: Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 9AM (Breakfast will be served)
WHERE: 1101 15th Street, NW Washington, DC Suite 1212
WHY: To discuss legal and policy issues surrounding mental health and the civil rights of people with mental illness.
In the wake of this tragedy, many students may suffer emotional distress. It is critically important that counseling and other mental health services be available to them and that they feel safe asking for help. Seeking help is often difficult.
The goal of campus policies should be to maximize the likelihood that students who require mental health treatment receive it and to ensure that their problems not reach crisis proportions before services become available. To that end, schools should take actions to de-stigmatize mental illness, encourage students to seek help early, remove barriers to seeking treatment, and ensure that students will not be penalized when they ask for help.
Unfortunately, some schools have created a paradox for students in need: while encouraging students who struggle with mental health problems to seek assistance, the school administration then applies disciplinary measures when students take this difficult step, in an effort to remove mental health problems from the campus. Last year, the Bazelon Center represented a George Washington University student who voluntarily sought hospital treatment for depression and then faced disciplinary action by the university administration and was suspended from school. In another suit, we represented a Hunter College student who voluntarily admitted herself to the hospital for treatment of depression and as a consequence was locked out of her dorm room by the college administration.
By responding in such a way, schools create an appalling dilemma for students in crisis: either jeopardize their education by asking for help or forego needed mental health treatment. Such approaches may actually increase the risk of harm by discouraging students from getting help for themselves or their friends. The Bazelon Center’s successful representation of students who have been punished for getting mental health care is aimed at breaking down this shameful obstacle. In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, the Bazelon Center urges that educational institutions do all they can to identify and to remove barriers to youths’ getting help. We feel strongly that meaningful remedies rest not in abruptly diluting legal protections for people with mental health needs, but in addressing the enormous gaps in service availability
All students should know whom to call when they or their fellow students are in trouble and should have ready access to counseling and other support. Moreover, mental health programs need to work in partnership with schools to make mental health service readily available, including getting out of their clinics and reaching out to students who are at obvious risk.
One can only hope that this tragedy will focus constructive attention on how difficult it is for youth to connect with the help they need.
I wish I could be there. I wonder if they’ll have coffee and donuts? We’ll never know…
liz | 4:22 PM | Uncategorized
Unintentionally funny press release of the day
Maybe it’s just my webmail, but I received a press release whose subject line was: “Interviews available: Yeltsin.” Now that’s an excellent PR person.
liz | 4:43 PM | Uncategorized
Ooh! Lovely realization
I was just thinking about how I set goals for myself this year that I actually accomplished. That’s quite satisfying. I think I’ll share them with you. Who says mentally ill people (or people with mental illnesses) have to live abbreviated lives?
This year, I wanted to:
Grow my hair for Locks of Love
Get a poem published
Run a 5K
Do something new professionally
Win one journalism award that wasn’t for my column
Surpass 250 YouTube subscribers
Take up photography
Take animal photographs professionally
Go to Spain
The things I didn’t accomplish? I didn’t win a Webby Award. I didn’t get a dog (but I got a hamster). I didn’t win shit for my column (not because the awards are stupid, but because the column wasn’t good enough). I didn’t lose 20 pounds, or even 10 pounds. I didn’t get any better at returning phone calls. I didn’t fix my links on this blog. I didn’t … Well, we all know the list of things we didn’t do is the long one.
P.S. I know it’s April, and thus a weird time to say all this. But one strange cognitive deficit from the ECT is that I can’t keep track of time the way other people can. It’s hard to explain, but it being “April” or “November” doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s a sort of temporal autism, if that makes any sense. So now is as good a time as any.
[Photo by me, of abandoned monks' quarters at Montserrat, in Spain.]
liz | 12:21 PM | Uncategorized
New hot drug for depression: NS2359
I suspect the drug makers might change the name from NS2359 to something like Relaxia or Tonica or Joyquel. I feel like NS2359 isn’t going to capture the popular imagination. After all, even my birth control pill has a lovely name: Camilla.
Neurosearch and GlaxoSmithKlein initiate second phase 2 study on depression drug [Forbes]
liz | 10:43 AM | Uncategorized
We’ll stop talking about this soon, I promise
I did, though, want to run this excerpt from WebMD. I think there’s some interesting points made.
Mental Illness, Antidepressants, and Violence
Could the antidepressants that Cho was said to have been taking made him violent? No, [Robert] Irvin, MD, [medical director of a long-term residential treatment program that is part of the Bipolar and Psychotic Disorders Program at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass] says.
It’s not known whether Cho was taking antidepressants under a doctor’s supervision, whether he was taking the medications properly, and whether he was taking some drug other than antidepressants.
“Certainly just being on an antidepressant does not increase your risk of engaging in violence,” Irvin says. “Antidepressants causing increased risk of self-harm have been talked about, but there is much more evidence to support that they are effective in treating depression. The risk of self-harm is much greater when patients are left untreated.”
Might underlying depression be to blame? Probably not.
“People who are hopeless, who don’t experience any joy or happiness, their thoughts are far more likely to tend toward self-harm than harm to anyone else,” Irvin says. “If they are moved to violence, they are far and away more frequently the victims.”
There is a form of depression — some think it a form of psychosis — which doctors call “major depression with psychotic features.” People with this kind of depression have delusional thinking — such as believing everybody at their workplace is very clearly out to get them, perhaps by putting bugs in their offices in order to control them.
“If you are paranoid, perceiving you are threatened when you are not, you might be prone to violence,” Irvin says. “But these are people who, if given a choice, would hurt themselves or flee before acting in an aggressive way toward others.”
Victoroff agrees that paranoid individuals are more prone than others to commit violence.
“Someone who has a grossly distorted threat-perception system is more likely to commit violent acts,” he says. “Humans respond to threat by flight or by fight. Those predisposed to respond with fight, who regard innocent people all around them as terribly threatening to them, will be prone to harm those innocent people.”
Even so, Victoroff says, the majority of people suffering paranoia do not commit violent acts, so it’s impossible to say whether a particular paranoid man or woman will become violent.
We tend to think that only mentally ill people would commit horrific crimes. But this may be false reassurance, Irvin says.
“One of the reasons we try to understand this aberrant behavior in terms of an illness is that it gives us a sense we can identify these people ahead of time. But just because the act is crazy does not mean the person suffered from a defined psychiatric illness,” he says. “It is an ongoing debate whether these people need to be dealt with in the criminal justice system or the mental health system.”
That’s because there are two basic forms of violence: sudden, impulsive acts of aggression and premeditated violent acts.
“Premeditated aggression enters the realm of pathologic sociopathy — and there is no good known treatment for sociopaths,” Irvin says.
liz | 5:15 PM | Uncategorized
To do: Listen to Talk of the Nation
Tomorrow the show on National Public Radio has a program on forced psychiatric treatment. I can’t find any information beyond that, but you can find about the program in general here.
liz | 3:38 PM | Uncategorized
Have you met Tinsel?
I’m all goofy over my new pet. You should see his cuteness. I’m at work, and I can’t stop thinking about him. This phase will pass, but at the moment I can’t wait to get home to play with him. He likes to slide down things. We kept putting him up on higher surfaces, and he’d slide down, his little feet skidding behind him for traction. He also seems to like his hamster ball, which he zooms around in.
The sugar gliders, however, are less than pleased. They’d like to kill him. Rosemary won’t come out of her pouch. She’s pouting and nibbling reluctanly on yogurt drops. I tried to assure her that we still loved her, but she doesn’t speak English. Shame.
I truly feel that animals conquer mental health problems like no drug can. Although, I say that with plenty o’ Effexor, Seroquel, Ativan and Lamictal in my system, so who knows.
[This image is from Cute Overload. It looks just like Tinsel.]
liz | 3:56 PM | Uncategorized
Mother of all roundups
Brain Blogging, Seventh Edition
liz | 12:31 PM | Uncategorized
It means nothing.
Salon.com’s advice columnist, Cary Tennis, has some sad, weird words for a schizoaffective person who worries about being stigmatized in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders. Thanks to Masale Wallah for sending the link.
Dear Cary,
To many, the shootings at Virginia Tech are another senseless tragedy perpetrated by a mentally unstable person. This is doubly depressing for me. Not only is the specter of over 30 innocents killed by one individual depressing, but because I, too, am mentally unstable, I fear I will suffer even more stigma after events like that.
My official diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, which, I am told, is a mild schizophrenia combined with a mood disorder. I currently take two medications for my condition and see a counselor, along with a doctor for my prescriptions. I wish I could say I got help as soon as my condition developed. From college onward, I have, on and off, behaved badly and hurt some people.
So I feel some sort of empathy with the shooter. Like Cho Seung-Hui, I’ve written some disturbing things, spent time in a mental institution, and been accused of stalking women. (Although looking back, it could be one of my delusions, since everyone involved has denied any accusations.) But then again, I am quite different from Seung-Hui. I’m not hostile to most people, I don’t like guns, and the most violent I ever got was putting someone in a headlock. I’ve apologized to those whom I’ve hurt and for the last five years I have been trying my best to keep from hurting another human being.
My question is, though, shouldn’t that count for something? Fighting to remain reasonable and pleasant is a hard thing to do when your moods are nearly uncontrollable and your perception of reality is skewed. Yet most of my old friends and acquaintances are still angry with me. When I run into them, few will greet me and most just respond with a cold glare. At times it seems like people are going out of their way to glare at me. So when a tragedy like Virginia Tech happens, part of me feels it will just give people more reason to hate me.
I know I should expect it and for most of my life I’ve been dealing with the stigma of being mentally ill. My father was never shy about showing his anger to me about behaving “oddly.” In high school, I was known as the strange kid. Worse was the psychologist who said my attempts at self-injury were a “narcissistic effort for attention” and screamed at me for “accusing” a priest-coach of forcing players to strip to their jock straps and wrestling them. (Which was true and, by the way, the priest in question has since confessed to raping teenage boys.) I also realize that my behavior, even now, isn’t easy to deal with. But that doesn’t stop the hatred and anger from hurting.
So I wonder, is most of my life to be filled with anger, fear and hatred because I am mentally ill? Will I be lumped together with monsters like Seung-Hui?
–Unbalanced but Trying
liz | 11:41 AM | Uncategorized
