Mental Health

I wasn't going to review this book, but the issues that it brought to mind by its conclusion were more than enough to inspire me to write about it.

I could have called this review My Lobotomy, which is the title of the book and which I know is eye catching. But for me, the question that is asked of the author after a groundbreaking NPR story was done on him gets to the heart of why the book is so important and why I am writing this review. "How could this happen?" This is, sadly, a question that can be asked of many aspects of our society and which is too rarely asked.

I was browsing at my local library and saw the title My Lobotomy. When you see a title like that it's like when you hear the screech of brakes and the sound of metal hitting metal. You know there is a car wreck and you know there's something you probably shouldn't want to gawk at but you just can't help yourself. The title of the book is like that. I had no idea what the book was, but I felt compelled to check it out.

It sat around awhile until I had finished a few other books I was working on, but then I picked it up. It is largely the memoirs of Howard Dully who was, at age 12, given a "transorbital lobotomy" by none other than Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who made transoribital lobotomies chic. This is the third memoir I have recently read where it is clear that the author has such a literal mind that you know what you are reading is the solid truth as the author sees it. The first such memoir I read was Grief of my Heart (which I reviewed here), the memoirs of a Chechen physician who lived through the two Chechen wars. The Chechen/Russia conflict has so many twists and turns and distortions that when you read anything about it you have to look for the bias of the author. Yet this book rang true. My wife's comment on this book was that she felt the author was not very imaginative and that he was telling the brutal truth about what he lived through. I felt the same. The power of the story was enhanced by the fact the author seemed so literal. The second memoir I recently read that had that same literal, unvarnished truth feel to it was A Long Way Gone, the memoirs of a child soldier from Sierra Leone who now lives in New York. This is a book I have been meaning to review for months now but haven't gotten up the emotional energy to do so.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without
dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over the essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

There are for all of us certain moments in time or place when we say something changed our lives, for me it is most often music or the written or spoken word. When asked what attracts me most to someone, it is the way they speak, the words they choose to use, the way they romance me with their words, not by gender but merely by being, or it is in a certain phrasing or idea or the way words are written and woven, it’s often a sentence or two that stays with me long after I’ve closed the back cover of a book or novel, or even the last page because that last page is often read after the first four or five, it’s always been so for me, the need to know how something ends before it’s even truly begun.

I just found out Owen Wilson is in the hospital after attempting suicide this past weekend. It's not only weird since he's the last person I would expect to do something like this, but because I spent the weekend thinking of suicide.

The pain that has encumbered my body in the past 3 weeks has left me with a new insight as to why people kill themselves "to stop the pain". Such a cliché, no? "Stop the pain". Yet, this past week the pain has been so brutal that I found myself breaking down and sobbing for hours the other day.

It's hard enough to deal with the fact that once I past 40, I am official "old". It is harder to contend with the possibility of spending my old age inside an achy, ill and broken down old body.

So I thought a lot about Kurt Cobain. Not that I would ever pull a Kurt Cobain. Yet I hear that Kurt suffered from Chron's disease. That disease is supposed to be so horrible and debilitating that it was not a shock to a lot people to know Kurt had pulled the trigger. And all weekend, I spent thinking that if Kurt's pain was worst than what I am experiencing now, then I can completely understand why he did it.

I first posted this at Hollywoodistas.com, but it's such a culturekitchen topic to discuss that I just had to cross-post it.

I hate it when I get beaten to a story. For days now I have been researching the possible cause of Britney's meltdown ... and effing TMZ.com beat me to it by a day. URGH!

TMZ has learned Britney Spears' troubles may have little to do with substance abuse. Sources say doctors at her rehab facility think the underlying reason for her trouble may be post-partum depression.

Sources tell TMZ that Britney's doctors have two operating theories -- either that she suffers from post-partum depression or bipolar disorder. The doctors strongly believe post-partum is the problem.

I am not a doctor, so I cannot give a technical assesment of the pop tarts' situation, but as one of the many women who've been felled at one point or another by post-partum depression, I can tell you that what Britney's going through is way more extreme than your run-of-the-mill PPD.

Hers may be a case of post-partum psychosis.

There is actually quite a lot written about post-partum depression, easily available with the click of a google search. What seems still to be a subject of taboo is the idea of post-partum pyschosis, thanks in part to the Andrea Yates multiple infanticide case.

A growing number of women of color are seeking alternative mental health services to help cope with stress and other recurrent struggles in their lives more effectively. Many of these women are now utilizing hypnotherapy, breathwork, and reiki as means of effective therapeutic intervention minus psychiatric labels and medications.

One of them is "Maya," a 36 year-old African American woman. Among many things, Maya is a single mom of two pre-teens, and a lawyer. In the past, Maya sought treatment from a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She had been an incest survivor since age 8 and experienced recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, and anxiety attacks. Maya also had difficulty maintaining relationships with men as a result of her childhood trauma. Years of intensive talk therapy and anti-anxiety medication led Maya to see very little improvement in her recovery, until a friend recommended that she try hypnotherapy.

Maya says, "At first, I was skeptical about hypnosis and what it could do for me. But I was frustrated. I felt like I was hitting a wall with my therapist and that she didn't really understand where I was coming from. This had been the eighth therapist I had been to, and I was beginning to feel like talking about my symptoms and my past was beating a dead horse. When was I going to get over it? I just wanted to feel better and stop the panic attacks. . . "