Shawn King: A Deliberate Overdose?

There are few things more mind-boggling than Larry King and his ability to find gorgeous women to sleep with and marry. They all seem far too attractive for a batlike homonculous like King. Check out this video, and see if you don’t agree that he’s sadly desperate to seem young, hip and not batlike. But then the black jacket just makes it worse.

Sadder still than the jacket is the fact that wife Shawn is by his side, defending his aggressive questioning of Marie Osmond, whose son committed suicide. Now King is dealing with a suicide drama of his own: Wife Shawn has overdosed, and the rumor is she left a note implying that she wanted to die. Now TMZ, a guilty pleasure of mine, suggests perhaps Shawn wanted to die because of Larry’s affair with her sister. That’s right all-you-smart-people-who-wisely-don’t-keep-up-on-gossip-and-thus-didn’t-know-this-before: LARRY KING, A BATLIKE HOMONCULOUS, SLEPT WITH HIS WIFE’S INCREDIBLY ATTRACTIVE YOUNGER SISTER.

Shawn King Depression Triggered by Alleged Affair

Sources tell TMZ Shawn King’s depression started, continued and never stopped over Larry King’s alleged affair with Shawn’s sister.We’re told Shawn has been “extremely depressed” for more than five years … and the trigger was Larry’s alleged long-term involvement with Shannon Engemann.

As we first reported, Shawn had a showdown with Larry several years ago and as a peace offering Larry transferred title to all three of the couple’s homes to Shawn. We’re told Shawn has struggled for years, believing her husband remained involved with Shannon. One source says, “She fought like crazy to remain sane, just to take care of her kids.”

We’re told even though Shawn reconciled with Larry and put the divorce proceedings on ice, she remained deeply depressed. One source says, “Shawn’s not a pill popper, but she feels it’s her only way to deal with her depression.”

Shannon has denied having an affair with Larry.

Larry King’s Wife — Evidence of Suicide Attempt

liz | 7:58 PM | Uncategorized

Lost My Edge

I got a letter today from Chicago. It was anonymous, but said that since I left PW, I’ve lost my edge and have become too soft. It also lamented the fact that I post so infrequently.

Both are probably true (and certainly the latter), but it’s hard because I have a full-time job that doesn’t involve blogging. Before, when I was at PW full-time, it was part of my job to be a writer and to blog. Now it’s a luxury — it’s whatever time I can grab during a day when it would be appropriate, which isn’t very often. Doing direct services and program management in a mental health organization doesn’t exactly afford gobs of time during the day.

That being said, I am still alive and trying, trying, trying. I miss you all. I miss this forum. I wish when I got home at night I felt more like blogging and less like zoning out with a book or TV or iPhone solitaire. For those who live locally, I am going to do a reading at an upcoming First Person Arts event. So that’s a little something. Here’s the info.

It’ll be with Emily Steinberg — a graphic artist who I LOVE. Any fan of graphic arts/novels should check her out. Go here.

I wish I had more right now, but I don’t. I’ll post later, and I promise it’ll have some edge.

liz | 1:31 PM | Uncategorized

The New DSM

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, a revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is underway. Public comments are being solicited One of the doctors who worked on the last version, Allen Frances, tells Judy Woodruf on the PBS Newshour that the last changes, though well-intentioned, caused an epidemic of overdiagnosis of autistic disorders, childhood bipolar disorder and ADD.

But new changes must be made. As anyone who follows this subject knows, many, many children have been aggressively diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a label that often subsequently confers the blessing of antipsychotics. Antipsychotics, don’t forget, have never been tested on children. We have no idea how such harsh medications affect the developing brain. The drugs increase risk of diabetes, metabolic disorder and tardive dyskenisia — among other mishegas — in adults. God only knows what we’ll discover a generation from now, when these kids are grown up.

So how did we get here with childhood bipolar? There’s a great report on NPR.org you should read in its entirety, but I’ll give you some excerpts:

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased a staggering 4,000 percent. …

… many of the kids now categorized as bipolar were, once upon a time, diagnosed as having conduct disorder. Kids with conduct disorder are seen as very combative, aggressive, and prone to destructive behavior. But the treatments for conduct disorder are woefully limited, says Carlson. …

Which is why when every day psychiatrists were told that they could now think of this set behaviors as manic-depression, not as conduct disorder, they got so excited, says Carlson. “They thought, ‘Heck, if that’s what it is, we have a bunch of medicines that are supposed to be helpful for mania — maybe I can make it better,’ ” she says. This has deep appeal to doctors face to face with parents who are heartbroken over the difficult time their child is having.

Another advantage to the bipolar label, Carlson points out, is that the insurance industry saw bipolar as a biological or medical problem, while conduct disorder was seen more as a parenting problem, so insurance companies were reluctant to reimburse for it.

“If you’ve got something that says it’s not a medical problem,” says Carlson, insurance is not going to pay for it. “Conduct disorder is bad parenting, lousy environment, poor supervision, you’re a bad seed. It ain’t a medical problem. Bipolar they’ll pay for.”

Finally, Carlson argues, parents themselves were relieved on some level. Because this set of behaviors was no longer seen as conduct disorder, the psychiatrist sitting across the desk from them was no longer blaming them for the terrible things that were happening to their child.

So clearly there are some real advantages to using the bipolar label. The problem, says Carlson, is that because bipolar disorder is understood as a chronic lifelong problem, you really want to be very careful about how you apply it.

“If you have a child who’s got this behavior but you’re not sure how it’s going to evolve, to say to somebody, ‘You’ve got to be on this medication for the rest of your life’ is sentencing someone to something that’s premature. And in the case of some of these medications, where we’re not sure of some of the metabolic side effects; you may be exposing them to a risk that they don’t need to have.”

Of course, many advocates, activists and journalists have been saying for years that the childhood bipolar diagnosis is highly problematic. And there’s been no one more vocal than Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons. Check his site for his take on the proposed revisions, including the one on childhood BP.

liz | 8:43 PM | Uncategorized

Video: Suicide, Death and Other Goodies

liz | 10:54 PM | Uncategorized

Effexor to Cymbalta: Not So Bad

You know, if you rely on the Internet to inform you about medication side effects, you might have a panic attack before you’ve even got the Ativan in your system to calm you down. When I started Effexor, I read such horror stories that I was absolutely terrified, and though some of the info was true, that drug pulled me out of an unbearable abyss. I was truly losing it — the depression was becoming psychotic and I was contemplating suicide. And who knows why, because such things are mysterious, but it worked.

The thing about Effexor that I didn’t like was my dependence on it. For instance, if I miss a night of Lamictal, I’m okay. I do get some facial twitching, but that’s more amusing than bothersome. It’s not like I’m going to vomit my face off.

With Effexor, I was unable to even be off by an hour. I’d start to get really dizzy and nauseated, and it was just awful. I felt like a slave to it. In fact, when I was on Seroquel and Ativan, I could easily (though sleeplessly) miss doses for one night. Not so with Effexor.

Recently I realized I haven’t been happy for a while. I haven’t been depressed, exactly, but seriously dysthymic. And I was having some intrusive PTSD stuff — I kept flashing back to awful times in my life when I was psychotic and very ill, and it would make me want to crawl into bed. So I told my doctor about it, and he suggested bumping up the Effexor, given that it worked so well. I pretty much always listen to him, because he’s brilliant and kind, but this time I put my foot down: no more Effexor.

He was fine with that. He said, let’s just switch you to Cymbalta and do a slow withdrawl of the Effexor. And I panicked. Everyone has told me that withdrawal from Effexor is a living hell. Brain zaps, vomiting, shaking, sweating — it sounded like my withdrawal from Klonopin, which was only achieved with the benefit of phenobarbital, and only after about 10 years of trying.

But the thing about having a chronic condition of this sort is that you go through a lot of shit and you come out the other side. So my attitude when I’m confronted with a med challenge is this: Bring it on. And in my bluer moments: You don’t know who you’re fucking with.

Funny thing, though: Nothing’s happened. I’ve cut the Effexor in half and added the Cymbalta and I am utterly without withdrawal symptoms. If I believed in God, which I don’t, I might say it was divine intervention. But it’s not. It’s just that things aren’t as bad as you think they’re going to be.

So that’s my story these days. The PTSD stuff has lessened a little, but it’ll take time. I’m feeling more obsessive lately, which I’ll write about later. But hey, as I always say, I can handle anything. As Seneca remarked at dinner last night: “Fire is the test of gold; adversity of strong men.” And women, too.

liz | 11:16 AM | Uncategorized

Bizarre New Hobby

I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’m newly fascinated by the websites of businesses that craft furniture for psychiatric facilities. I often think about how different that furniture is than the chairs, tables and beds in the “real” world — no hard edges, nothing you can use to kill yourself.

Yet despite the depressing reality of the nature of their business, these websites sell their products as though they’re just like any other product. It’s kind of surreal. Many such companies also make furniture for correctional facilities, and some have transitioned into exclusive manufacturing for prisons and jails — which in the States, is a growth industry of collossal proportion.

Check these sites out if you have a morbid fascination, as I do:

Norix
Glasspec
PSI LLC
Max Secure

liz | 6:11 PM | Uncategorized

James Cameron Is Making People Sad

Sometimes I can’t believe the weirdness. From Marie-Claire UK:

Fans of Avatar, the sci-fi epic set in the Utopian world of Pandora, are reporting that the return to earth and real life is making some feel depressed and even suicidal. ….

The fan site ‘Avatar Forum’ has receive more than 1,000 posts under the thread ‘Ways to cope with depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible’, reports CNN.

And that’s just one article about this. I saw the movie and the only thing that depressed me was the headache I got from those 3-D Wayfarers. I was very reluctant to see it, but I will see anything the New Yorker’s David Denby likes, and he said it was (visually)beautiful. The storyline was stupid, but it’s true that the first time I saw the glowing world Cameron created, I did a little intake of breath. It is kind of exquisite (visually). I enjoyed it, against my own better instincts. Because, I mean, Titanic was just awful.

But in order for a movie to send me into a depression, it has to be violently, appallingly bad — suggesting to me that the world is collapsing into a sea of poor taste. Even then, I think the Effexor will keep working.

liz | 5:20 PM | Uncategorized

Coming Up: Depression and Ethnicity

If you’re interested in diagnoses and ethnic categories, check out Tell Me More, like, now. A segment on that is coming up.

liz | 2:28 PM | Uncategorized

Song(s) of the Day: Vic Chesnutt

I’m very sad this week because Vic Chesnutt, an amazing musician who faced down demonic depression for years, took his own life — finally. He’d tried it several times, and in fact wrote about his romance with suicide in a song called “Flirted With It All My Life.” Though he had new albums out and was supposedly looking forward, when I heard his recent interview with Terry Gross, I had an awful thought: “This man will die by his own hand.” I just didn’t expect it to be so soon. He was such an amazing poet and thinker and dreamer and grouch.

Vic Chesnutt’s Last Song: Folk-Rocker Dead at 45 [Village Voice]

liz | 12:06 PM | Uncategorized

Human Rights Violations at Psychiatric “Hospital”

If you haven’t heard of investigative reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas, that’s a shame. I hadn’t heard of him either until Joe sent me a link to his latest expose on an inpatient facility in Accra, Ghana. It’s unbelievable, though Ghana has an appalling history in its treatment of the mentally challenged and regularly chains people who are mentally ill.

From GhanaWeb:

President Barack Obama praised Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian journalist with a paper called the New Crusading Guide, who worked undercover for eight months, risking his life, to expose a child trafficking ring. The evidence he amassed led to the prosecution of traffickers accused of sending Ghanaian girls to Europe for prostitution.

On his first presidential trip to sub-Saharan Africa, President Obama boosted the Ghanaian investigative reporter profile. He went undercover to break stories about human trafficking, Obama cited the “courageous journalist” as an example of what democracies that respect a free press can produce.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas was named among this year’s CNN/Multichoice African Journalists of the Year Awards finalists for 2009. Anas was the only Ghanaian among 25 finalists from 12 countries.

Okay, so that tells you a little bit about his courage and determination. Now, on to the story:

It is a sad and sorry sight of unimaginable human suffering; of bright lives, powerful brawns and brilliant brains badly bruised and blighted by disease. It is a tale full of terrible and tragic oddities.

The Accra Psychiatric Hospital (Asylum Down), Ghana’s leading psychiatric treatment centre is haemorrhaging from serious administrative, operational and ethical lapses that have seen patients living in subhuman and monstrous conditions.

One inmate is eating from the upturned bottom of a dirty rubber bowl, rather than from the inside. …. Leaning against a wall in another corner, a youthful fellow looks vaguely and forlornly into the sky, mumbling to himself; “I see the moon though it is a bright afternoon.” His shrinking waistline is barely able to keep his trouser firmly on his buttocks; his faded jeans has dropped loose, revealing a not so manly groin bristling with an untidy mass of neglected pubic hair. And over there is a bizarre ritual by a group of four who are full of smiles while slurping some curious liquid that an inmate (Jah) is dropping on their tongues from a goblet he is holding. In fact the officiating “priest” has just urinated into that cup in their very sight and yet, they are licking it with relish!
…
Yet, if you find the above narrative about our less fortunate compatriots to be unsettling, then what pertains among some of the supposedly normal, sober and more privileged workers at the facility would outrage you beyond measure.

The appalling lack of oversight is nothing compared to the drug dealing and abuse of “patients.” It’s hard to read, but essential.

Click here.

liz | 4:31 PM | Uncategorized