meds
-Serzone to be pulled off the U.S. market
-Reboxetine is a selective noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor (NaRI), the first drug in a new class of antidepressants
-Neurontin was marketed illegally for bipolar disorder
more/other
-the basics of dialectical behavioral therapy
-discovering your stress type
-the L.A. Times interviews lobotomy victims (reg. required, but you can always bypass the process with www.bugmenot.com)
headlines that state the obvious
-Television Advertisements For Foods Promote Eating In Children
-Study: N.J. Suicides Outnumber Homicides
I often experience depression as regression, a return to my high school self. Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon,
"There's a sudden point when you can feel your chemistry going," Mark Weiss, a depressive friend, once said to me. "My breathing changes and my breath stinks. My piss smells disgusting. My face comes apart in the mirror. I know when it's there."When I'm depressed, my braces rematerialize, my breasts shrink, my hair goes a little frizzy. I fear I'll turn 14 again.
I'm unfairly prejudiced towards my high school years. I tend to use them as a container, stuffing my worst traits and qualities into them, and then sealing the lid so they can't contiminate my life. So, when social anxiety or depression or physical insecurities creep in, I feel like the lid's popped open. A younger self's infecting me.
I know my high school self has more dimensions, and a much greater range of moods, than I assign her. I had ups and downs then, like I do now. And back then, I had more friends and my depression was, at least, productive (which I wouldn't call it now). But, my high school self also experienced a type of daily, physical and social, discomfort that age has brought me far from. My self-consciousness was heavy and awkward, like an honor student's backpack -- bending my spine, making it easier to look at the floor than make eye contact with people.
Even nowadays, images of unattractive but happy teenagers make me cringe. The picture on the left, for example, inspires in me more emotion, and more narrative involvement, than it warrants. It appeared in the Sunday edition of the NY Times, accompanying an article on the improving relationships between teens and their parents; somewhere in the article was this passage about the mother and daughter pictured:
Alexis XXXX, 15, can relate to mother-as-fashion-muse. On a Saturday shopping excursion in Manhattan, Alexis looked to her mother, Susan, 48, for approval before selecting a pair of pink Hardtail pants at G. C. Williams on Madison Avenue. Susan XXXX is a personal shopper who takes clients to Paris. "Because of her business she's really into shopping and fashion, and that makes her a lot of fun," Alexis said.Alexis sounds happy, but while her mother looks poised (albeit, in a bitchy, overly-coifed way), the daughter looks lumpy, incohate. She may turn out to be very attractive, but she's at the age when features haven't settled into the correct angles and proportions, and, despite her mother's shopping know-how, she wears the wrong clothes and glasses for her frame. Pop culture tells us that teenage girls are hot and fun, but Alexis's mother, Susan, is the looker (at least, in comparison), and has the confidence her daughter, at 15, hasn't developed. Susan has a flouncy skirt, and fluffy hair, and a puffed-out chest; her daughter, on the other hand, is curling her face into her chest, as if she doesn't really know she has the right to take up space.
And, while Alexis, like I said, seems happy, her posture reminds me of the experience of depression -- when I don't want to take up space, and awkwardness contracts my body. To my mind, bad posture can, like depression, posit a certain relationship between the self and the world: the world wants as much of the body's space as it can have, and I can't, or won't, fight its (anthropomorphized) wishes.
Articles
-The Disability Movement Turns to Brains
-Different Approaches to Healing the Sick: Reversing the downward spiral of mental illness
-Wave of Mental Problems Follows GIs Home
Studies
-Thyroid function in clinical subtypes of major depression: an exploratory study
-Severe Depression Responds To Low-Frequency Stimulation
-Family Factors Less Crucial In Episodic Depression
Book Reviews
-Acquainted With the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children.
-Rethinking ADD
-A Social History of Psychology
Skip a dosage, and your apartment sinks underground. … You want to say never again. But you only get so many opportunities to travel.
—from "Starting From N," written in 2002
At 1 am, I was alone at a park, swinging. If I looked up, risking nausea, I could watch a star jump free from a tree and then, with the rhythm of a yo-yo, retreat behind the branches.
When I was young, my mother told me she was scared of swings and I decided I was, too.
A swing’s creak foretold disaster: a future moment when the bar finally releases the swing, and I lose the illusion of control; my swing and I fly into an uncharted arch, and I remember — from somewhere, where? —that life is suppressed terror. I fly into the loss opened by this thought, and might never touch the ground again.
Tonight, I ignored the swing’s creak and pumped hard. Even when my legs began to hurt, I kept swinging, because I was fine here, and hadn’t been fine anywhere.
I fell asleep yesterday — I’d meant to nap — at noon, and woke up today at 7 pm. My shirt was cold and wet, and when I tried to walk to my bathroom, I stumbled and let myself fall against a wall. In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror, though I knew better; when I miss a dose of Effexor, my eyes go wild, and my mirrored eyes meet mine with the intent of hunting; I’m prey.
If I’m awake during withdrawal, my nerves go kamikaze and electrocute themselves; I shake and spasm. If I’m asleep, I sweat ice, and dream such painful dreams, waking doesn’t stop them. My dreams are more vivid than life, and span more years than I’ve lived. I marry adulterous husbands; give birth to disfigured babies with small faces as numerous as freckles on their blue-ish bodies; I pilot a helicopter without windows; and I read violent novels about psychic sisters.
After waking up at 7, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t type. I tried to read, but my body was buzzing and my brain was scrambling words. I took my pills, and drank water. I tried to wash a pot so I could cook myself food, but I couldn’t coordinate the scrubbing. Eventually, I decided to wait for my body to reabsorb reality while listening to music and staring at the ceiling on my back. And, after a while of this, I called my boyfriend -- but my mouth was too slow to pronounce most words, and, when I did speak, I didn’t recognize my intonations.
I watched television, but didn’t enjoy it. I listened to more music, and felt manic. I wanted to go out, but my nerves still felt electric, and when I sang along to songs, I started laughing and the laughing quickly became crying. How long would waiting this out take? I had incapacitated myself.
At around midnight, I went for a walk, tripping on my own feet and swerving a little like a drunk. I called my boyfriend again as I walked to the park. I hadn’t told him I was worried about myself, and now I wanted to, but his voice was thickly overlaid with static, and all I could make out was that he had friends over and wanted to get back to them.
I called several in-town friends, hoping the reality of another person might ground me. No one picked up. At the park, I began to feel that sadness might be nicer company if I indulged it, and I began swinging; the sudden drops and rises in perspective made playground objects move, and I often mistook them for people approaching, maybe people I knew, people who could help me. And then, vision corrected itself, and my loneliness felt warm and maternal, even if the night was cold and my thoughts were empty or disjointed. Loneliness, at least, was familiar, and I could stay on the swing as long as I wanted.
I'm surprised and excited by how many links Another has racked up since its official launch two days ago. But I'm also worried that my entries from here on out will suffer from performance anxiety and aim for an "authoratative" voice that, if relied on to express honesty, might fall as flat as an EZ-baked souflée.
Either way, I thought I'd take this opportunity to respond to some comments that I've read about Another on other people's blogs. This is my way of saying yay! thank you for noticing and, also, clarifying what this blog's all about.
I saw your "extension" blog today. Interesting. One question/criticism. The french-"Je est un autre"-- is that a reference with which I'm unfamiliar? Because grammatically, it doesn't make sense. It translates to "I is an other." So shouldn't it be "Je suis un autre"? And if not, shouldn't it be "J'est un autre", if you wanted to use the improper conjugation?I should probably put up a sidebar link to a FAQ about my blog's title and the strange French embedded in the index page's banner. "Je est un autre" comes from one of Rimbaud's “Lettres du Voyant” (“Seer Letters”), addressed to his teacher Georges Izambard. It can be translated into English as "I is someone else," or "I is another," the second translation being what my blog title refers to. To lay out the naming process in its entirity, though, I also chose "another" because, in relation to my first and main blog, this one is just another. And, the word another easily splits into two, referencing the split referred to in Rimbaud's quote as well as the current postmodern usage of "Other." Mainly, though, I've always loved the line, "Je est un autre," because my experience of myself feels so deeply split; I watch myself as if I weren't myself but a sentient object with qualities and moods that my "I" doesn't always feel are its own (since an "I" can be the consciousness of a quality and not be the quality itself). This "split," by the way, rarely feels painful, but often feels especially noticeable during periods of depression.
Just me being nit-picky, I guess. But it struck me as incorrect.
Returning to the original question: I think Rimbaud conjugated Etre improperly to stress the experience of his self's other-ness and the split inherent to self-consciousness / self-documentation. "Je est un autre," as opposed to "Je suis un autre" (I is… as opposed to I am…), treats the "I" as "another" as it states that the "I" is another — so, while it might be grammatically "incorrect," it remains true to its own point. It's the "est" which makes it, in my opinion, a perfect piece of language.
Recently, the NY Times reviewed Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open, which sounds like it has the potential to be a fascinating book.
Until recently, introspective people could lie on a couch and free-associate, or sit at a desk and write ''The Metamorphosis.'' People couldn't look into themselves directly to explore what Gerard Manley Hopkins called, wistfully, our ''inscapes.'' But now we can. With M.R.I.'s, PET scans and many other high-tech mirrors that neuroscientists are holding up in front of us, we can see right through our own foreheads and begin to watch our mental apparatus in action.RelatedIn ''Mind Wide Open,'' Johnson makes himself his own test subject to see what the neuroscientists can show us about our attention spans, talents, moods, thoughts and drives -- our selves. He got the idea for this voyage of self-discovery a few years ago while he was hooked up to a biofeedback machine. Lying on a couch with sensors attached to his palms, fingertips and forehead made him feel nervous, and he started cracking jokes with the biofeedback guy. The machine was designed to monitor adrenaline levels, like a lie detector. With each joke he made, the monitor displayed a huge spike of adrenaline: ''I found myself wondering how many of these little chemical subroutines are running in my brain on any given day? At any given moment? And what would it tell me about myself if I could see them, the way I could see those adrenaline spikes on the printout?'
When write-ups of James Kaufman's paper, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young," appeared in magazines and newspapers last November, my reaction to the paper was similar to Mark Sanderson’s: I found Kaufman’s findings and the language he used to describe them “laughable.” The articles summarizing the paper were equally ridiculous; death was personified as a stalker, “drawn to” poets with a consistency that suggests creativity might emit its own magnetic field.
But, while I posted my response to Kaufman’s paper in December, Sanderson wrote about the paper (which originally appeared in the journal Death Studies) last week. In the past month, Kaufman’s work, for no timely reason I can name, has garnered another round of write-ups in major media outlets — and each write-up removes me from my initial response and prompts increasing queasiness. The study’s lasting appeal, to my mind, affirms the poet Maxine Kumin’s observation, quoted in the New York Times: "There is a lugubrious fascination, an erotic fascination, with the early death of poets.” And, earlier in the NY Times article (also available here), we get this quote from Kaufman’s paper: "The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research." Doom and tragedy, I suspect, are much too subjective to be measured by statistics, but Kaufman, throughout the article, continues to rely on a rhetoric that draws more on cultural tropes than psychiatric terminology. "If you ruminate more, you're more likely to be depressed, and poets ruminate,” Kaufman tells the NY Times. “Poets peak young. They write alone."
The article, though, does make mention of contradictory opinions and evidence. Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health, prefers to understand poets’ early death rates in terms of the relationship between social status and good health. And Arnold M. Ludwig’s book The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy, points out that musical entertainers, on average, live 57.2 years —undermining, or, at least, questioning, Kaufman’s thesis that poets’ short life span (62.2 years) is best explained by the strong causal relationship between introspection, isolation, and mental instability.
My discussion of what Ludwig calls “the creativity and madness controversy” will be an ongoing series; in this entry, I want to temporarily cast aside questions about the scientific validity of Kaufman’s research, and 1) focus on the rhetoric employed in discussions of “creativity and madness,” 2) examine the psychological effects of that rhetoric, and 3) relay the discussions in terms of several recurring, perhaps irresolvable, conflicts.
Kaufman’s paper, for several reasons, is a wonderful starting point. A paper’s findings are often less important than, or deferent to, the rhetoric used in, and around, those findings. Even if a study does prove a link between creativity and mental illness, what does a “link” really mean? Often, the language describing the proposed “link” is influenced more by cultural tropes than by empirical research. The phrasing of Kaufman's title, "The Cost of the Muse,” for example, encourages the idea, unexamined in Kaufman’s paper, that mental illness functions as a commodity, with a high exchange value in the marketplace of creativity and social recognition. But, if we think of mental illness as an exchange or acquisition, we may be at risk of dehumanizing the subjective experience (or, more precisely: the pain) of mental illness.
Biographies of troubled artists included in studies on creativity often imply that a life is the sum of its failures and successes; a depressive episode, counted as a negative, might be followed, and balanced, by a positive integer of success. In effect, episodes of mental illness are retroactively redeemed, justified, or glamorized — and, reading such biographies, we might forget that life occurs in the present tense (and that memory and mood are egregiously sloppy accountants). Past—or, more ridiculously, future—successes can’t mitigate the pain of mental illness, and I imagine that a friend or doctor, trying to console a depressive writer by suggesting a relationship between pain and talent, could easily seem cold — a miser with his sympathy, which would cost him real emotion, and a wastrel with his compliments, which cost him nothing.
Collapsing mental illness and creativity into each other also encourages several real misunderstandings of mental illness. Halfway into a 2001 radio segment on writing and depression—paneled by Jennifer Radden (The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva), Nell Casey (Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression), and Nell’s sister, Maud Casey (The Shape of Things to Come), whose depression was the catalyst for Unholy Ghost — a listener named Brian calls in with his thoughts on the topic. Here’s a paraphrased transcript:
Brian: In the past year, I’ve decided to step away from medications. Now, I’m using depression as a fuel or energy to create. Depression doesn’t have to a bad thing, or a negative, and I think ‘the artist’ eventually realizes what real creative energy they get from their depression. So, you begin to see the embracing of [depression] as a way to get things done.Without having experienced —or seen someone close experience — a major depressive episode, it is, as Brian demonstrates, very easy to turn a causal relationship between depression and creativity into a conflation of them. But, in reality, it’s nearly impossible to be productive during a major depressive episode; as Maud and other writers can attest to, depression can be an unsurmountable obstacle to writing, rather than writing’s catalyst.
Nell: But depression has different levels. Someone really suffering is not going to be able to embrace it and do things.
Maud: My depression was un-embraceable … [It] was an obstacle. It was paralyzing.
A similar radio segment from 2001, only available online in the form of a text summary, invited, among others, Dr. Louis Sass (Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought) and the writer Linda Gray Sexton, the late Anne Sexton’s daughter, to discuss the connection between "art and madness." The connection, as Sexton’s comments remind us, is not simply imposed upon writers; writers, too, often embrace it. Though Linda notes that her mother was “completely unproductive” when she was depressed or manic, Linda also “believes that her mother’s manic-depression gave Anne a sharper eye and sensitivity… access to things a ‘well’ person couldn’t have been able to access and use.”
Last year, I defended the connection between “art” and “madness” here. “Mental illness can inhibit creation,” I wrote, “but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.” Long episodes of depression have, in recent years, sapped my younger self’s ambition and my sense of entitlement to fiction; I wonder now if a style, tended to in a hothouse of depression, can yield real pleasures, and if the instincts I rely on when writing have become short-circuited by a self-indulgence so precise I mistake it for craftsmanship. But, when I was younger and un-medicated, my depression —or was it dysthymia back then? — forced productivity. Any psychological discomfort prompted a desperate retreat to my notebook or computer, and was translated into a story's dramatic tension.
I hated what my depression took from me — any sense of ease or comfort— and relied on, eventually learning to love, what it gave me — a delight in thought and language, a moral and critical self-awareness, and the secret belief that future greatness could be measured in degrees of difference and isolation. I needed to believe that depression was an early indication of literary talent — and that it might one day deliver me to a better life.
These hopes were as ridiculous as they were practical, as romantic as they were self-protective. But do such ideas, in some sense, promote mental illness? In the second radio segment,
Dempsey Rice notes that Linda Sexton’s writing and Anne Sexton’s poetry reflect one another and asks Linda if she thinks if either them would have been as successful had they not had manic-depressive illness. Linda replies that that one question is really the question of her life, “Does one have to be insane to be creative?” Throughout her career Linda has questioned weather she was ‘nuts’ enough to be a good writer. She continues to struggle with this question today.“Madness,” so often marginalized, here becomes a site of exclusion—a genetic marker of literary nobility.
And so: the rhetoric of madness and creativity has multiple uses and cross-purposes. It can be employed to redeem madness, reify it, and dehumanize it. It can commodify pain, turning it into a means to an end, and, consequently, can allow the potential value of suffering to eclipse the experiential reality of suffering. But, if that encourages an unfair "naturalization" of mental illness in artists, it can also encourage a necessary psychological endurance, and counter the nihilism of pain.
And yet, one last point: the relationship between writing and madness may romanticize madness, but writers’ accounts of madness have also been responsible for humanizing it. When Nell Casey was asked on-air if she worried about the dangers of linking creativity to depression while working on her book, she responded that “having writers come out and put words to this illness” would mostly offer “a great deal of help.” Sufferers of depression struggle not only against their illness, but the stigma attached to it. And, to my mind, they also, very often, struggle against cultural and psychological simplifications of the experience. That’s why, despite the ideological risks I’ve mentioned, this blog addresses not only depression, but depression’s relationship to writing. I want to provide accounts of depression, taken from myself and others, that complicate the rhetoric and articulate ambiguities; I want to offer others moments of recognition and new starting points for honesty; and, ultimately, I want to examine the powers, and limits, of language in relation to depression.
Toward the end of her 1981 book Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm reports on the last of her many intimate conversations with "Aaron Green," a disguised New York psychoanalyst. He had compared analysis several times to surgery, and Malcolm asks him why he is so attached to that analogy. "Because it's so radical," he says. "Because it indicates how impersonal and intimate analysis is. Because it tells you that it is not a casual procedure, that it is serious and dangerous, that it is dire." I know there's a difference between five-times-a-week classical psychoanalysis and the mere three-times-a-week psychotherapy that I'm putting myself through, but his radical analogy, and his use of that awful word "dire," have me, for now, in their grip. One of my many strange fantasies while in therapy has been to be hospitalized for an extended period. For what? I'm a healthy, reasonably socialized, reasonably happy person—or at least I was before I went into psychotherapy.The above comes from Rick Whitaker's short personal essay in the current issue of the Village Voice. The premise -- the unexpected perils of psychotherapy -- has potential, but Whitaker, either because of the essay's length or some reluctance to diverge from straight autobiography, lays out the premise with little development or nuancing. Can therapy, like a botched surgery, cause more harm than good? Or is the pain of repressed emotions, freshly accessed, the cost of improvement? Does therapy fetishize childhood trauma, and, most comfortable dealing with self-pity and feelings of betrayal, require or elicit those feelings from its clients? Or is therapy more self-critical and self-aware than we give it credit for?