The Trouble With Spikol: Print Edition: Philip Dawdy!

A column about our friend over at Furious Seasons.

I don’t remember how Philip Dawdy and I first became aware of each other, but we quickly identified as kindred spirits.

He’s bipolar; I’m bipolar. He worked at an alt-weekly; I worked at an alt-weekly. He wrote about mental health in a way that got in people’s craws; I do that too. Finally—and perhaps most important—we both have mental health blogs, though they’re very different.

Dawdy’s blog Furious Seasons is more serious. It’s more analytical. He doesn’t feature photos of cute animals. He doesn’t confess things like having a crush on Jeremy Northam. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jeremy’s dreamy!)

Dawdy’s strength lies in his willingness to be disliked. He challenges accepted notions. He’s on the front lines when a pharmaceutical company lies, or when research is fudged by pundits. He’s combative, sometimes annoyingly so, but in the interest of providing information you won’t get elsewhere. As a result, he’s the most rigorous online mental health journalist out there.

A San Francisco Bay native, Dawdy fell into journalism by accident. An aspiring novelist, he started writing music reviews about 13 years ago, and found he liked it—so he went to the University of California at Berkeley to learn news writing. Since then he’s racked up a ridiculous number of journalism awards, and garnered serious cred as a tough investigative journalist.

Dawdy was at Seattle Weekly for four and a half years, and spent much of that time writing about mental health—a subject that didn’t come naturally. “It’s another one of those accidents in life,” he says. “In January 2004 I wrote a feature about a Seattle public radio DJ who’d committed suicide the previous summer, and the article included my own ruminations on depression, bipolar disorder and somehow not killing myself. The response to the article was humbling—more letters and calls than Seattle Weekly had had in its 30-year history.”

Dawdy’s editors recognized the potential of having him continue to cover the subject. But despite national honors from the National Mental Health Association and other regional awards and accolades for his coverage of the subject, Dawdy left Seattle Weekly last year when the paper’s new owners Village Voice Media took over.

“I quit because I found our paper’s new editorial management to be utterly clueless as newspeople,” he says. “They’d forced me away from writing about mental health, and then one of the new editors asked me to commit a crime in order to report a story. And the paper began running fake stories—fun stuff like that. So I quit.” It was a loss for print journalism but a win for the online world.

Dawdy actually started the blog a couple years ago, when he found out that Village Voice Media—formerly New Times—was taking over.

“I knew they’d want none of the mental health reporting I did, and certainly not with the frequency the situation demanded,” he says. “I’d worked for New Times during grad school, and knew they didn’t fancy stories that smacked of social issues, and they didn’t care for reporters who pursued such stuff.”

Given the political blogs Dawdy was into, he figured it might be the perfect approach for mental health issues too—a sort of hedge against the possibility that the print mental-health beat was nearing extinction.

“The ironic piece of what launched me into doing the blog is that I’d done a lot of reporting in homeless shelters, state hospitals, treatment centers and residential housing facilities the previous two years, and had really been amazed at how little care and results for schizophrenics had improved despite the advent of the atypical antipsychotics—the alleged silver bullet in treating schizophrenia,” Dawdy says. “I saw far too many patients in real-world clinical conditions who were getting zero benefit from the meds and whose bodies were being blown up in the process. Then all of a sudden in September 2005 there was independent scientific evidence of what I’d been picking up on in the field. And I sort of jumped on that and other evidence on those medications right out of the chute.”

Since then Dawdy has continued to break stories and hammer away at the issues that mean the most to him: moving psychiatry away from a medication-only or polypharmaceutical approach, and identifying and developing psychiatric drugs that actually work reliably. It’s the kind of message mainstream America—and a medical establishment enraptured by prescriptions and diagnosis codes—needs to hear.

“I suspect at some point the blogging will pay off, but I’m not sure of the when or how,” Dawdy says. “But I know I have some kind of role to play in forcing a new level of accountability into the mental health industry. It’s badly needed, and since only a few others are doing it, I’ll stick with it until it doesn’t make sense anymore. That could be tomorrow and it could be 20 years from now.”

For my part, I don’t imagine I’ll be mooning over Jeremy Northam 20 years from now, but I’ll probably still be on meds. If Philip Dawdy has anything to say about it, they’ll finally be the right ones.

Fast Facts

>> Philip Dawdy’s blog: www.furiousseasons.com

>> Number of alternative weeklies now owned by Village Voice Media: 17.

>> Two that aren’t: Philadelphia Weekly and Philadelphia City Paper.

>> Amount of time American broadband users spend online in a typical weekday: an hour and 40 minutes—48 percent of their spare time.

>> Raymond Carver, author of the short story “Furious Seasons,” on writing: “I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.”

liz | 3:37 PM | Uncategorized