What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this wold abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

- Adam Haslett

'as if I had been born in a mood as some are born in a caul'

My most pervasive memory of young childhood, however, is of being in ‘a mood’, which really consisted of just the one mood in several shades of monochrome: a spectrum that ranged from a comforting solitary dreaminess inside a softly enclosing gentle shadow at one end to, at the far side of the continuum, the grimmest darkness in a hard-frozen, fractured icescape. Always it was me on the inside, them out there, beyond my enclosure, unable to reach in. And me, sometimes not wanting, sometimes not able, to reach out.

- Jenny Diski

If it's true Marx said "God save me from the Marxists" I can imagine DFW muttering "give me patience to withstand the bros," sure. I think the same kind of thing happened with Kurt Cobain, who was often frustrated when fans didn't share his political views (that whole "Polly" thing).

I did know a lot of BRO-type DFW fans (they dominate the discourse over on Goodreads AKA Badreads, sadly) but I first read Infinite Jest because it was about addiction, and I know a lot of other people who've done the same. Did he often act like a dirtbrag bro, even write like one? (I have never read Hideous Men and don't fucking plan to.) Sure, it was a macho pose; a pose a lot of other male intellectuals assume because GOD FORBID someone with a DICK value something other than fighting and fucking (the girly version of this is GOD FORBID someone WITHOUT a DICK values something other than makeup and babies. One of the worst things about sexism is how anti-intellectual it is, on both sides). If you want the epitome of smart-sensitive-guy-crushing-himself-beneath-macho-armour, look no further than Hemingway.

I don't think DFW was quite that far gone, but any time a guy announces his intention to go off antidepressants because he wants to be more creative, or he wants to be free, or he wants to be calm, or perfect, I hear the same old bullshit: men are supposed to need nothing. (Women get the opposite treatment, our daily lives and thoughts are pathologized into male-centered illness. You don't want a career, you're hysterical because you don't have a dick and want Daddy to fuck you! and so on.) Add in an unhealthy slug or two of perfectionism bred of child-prodigy status and you should be good enough to do this all by yourself turns into not just a mindfuck but a twisted moral imperative.

So yeah, it's not surprising young male intellectuals In Pain because they're Nice Guys flock to the shrine of the bandana. But that was armour too, that's not where his heart was. (It never fails to amuse me the media absolutely does not pick up on how the bandana was a STYLE for young rappers and bangers back in the day. I dunno how popular it is anymore, but when I see a guy wearing it I instantly flash back to Santa Fe in the mid-eighties.) He suffered from that whacked-out Lockean ideal that you can peel back all the qualities (the bandana, the addiction, the pretension, the intelligence, on and on) to some kind of Pure True Self that would be able to transcend everything. But that's like someone with polio deciding to crawl out of the iron lung because they want to run a marathon.

His brain was sick -- not his self, but his brain -- and when it wasn't treated, the disease overwhelmed his mind, that big, beautiful, powerful engine of treasure, and killed him. That's it. That's what happened. That this happens over and over in literary history doesn't just tell us this is true, but also how powerful the myth is that we want to believe will overcome that truth.

There is no war on drugs because you cannot have a war against inanimate objects. There is only war on drug addicts. Which means we are warring on the most abused and vulnerable segments of the population. You can see left and right of the war on drugs and you can see it is not working.

But you know what, I have a different point of view. If decade after decade, after decade, after decade, if the intentions of the policies are not being realized; in fact the opposite is what is happening … maybe it's serving some purpose, the raison d’etre of repressive apparatus is that it can be used against the people when the need arises. Is it really a failure or maybe it has a function of demonizing a certain section of population, that justifies more repression. Maybe it has a function of keeping the legal apparatus going, maybe it has a function of making a money for a lot of people, maybe it has a function of fueling the privatization of incarceration industry.

So maybe it is not a failure at all. And from that perspective, was the Vietnam War a failure? No, not at all. It was militarily. But, the end result was that US took control of the economies of Southeast Asia. Is the Iraq War a failure? Well, it is for the people who died there, for a half a million Iraqis who died it is, but it is not a failure for American oil companies. So that everywhere we have to be careful before we call them failures. Somebody wins. The somebody who wins are the same people who destroy neighborhoods, communities. It is the same system that undermines human health, that undermines dignity, that undermines human connections and makes life less tolerable on this planet. 

Now, we don’t have to agree on what the solutions might be. And that’s okay. But what do we agree on is the importance of speaking for truth,  but what we do agree is on importance of people getting together and struggling in a healthy way for different life.

- Gabor Maté

My brain, my mind, my soul -- whatever terrestrial or transcendental organ you choose to assign responsibility for the functionality of my person -- does not work. It is broken, and it has consequently spent the duration of its existence trying to dismantle itself. My better angel is defective, and the manufacturer has been extremely uncooperative in my attempts to obtain a replacement. Indeed, much of my treatment has involved convincing myself not to approach the executive prematurely, to demand an explanation of his organization's incompetence.

- Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Fletcher Wortmann

I basically didn't top myself because of this performance of this song today

If Richard Thompson wants to quote me on that he can do it for free.

mental health or lack thereof: a sequence of fragments

MOI'S BRAIN: Do you expect me to talk?

HYPOMANIA: No, Moi's Brain, I expect you to FZZZGHGTTHTLLLFGHGHTPHHHFFFFFBTZZZZZZZZZZZT

MOI: Fair enough.

*

FRIEND OF MOI: I seriously think you should seriously think about going back to therapy

FoM: again

MOI: //looks at huge ugly black frizzled snarled hopelessly tangled ball of emotions she can't even figure out enough to feel other than "this truly sucks"

MOI: I think there are laws against doing that to therapists

FoM: ....

*

Then T got upset (seriously it was the CAPTAIN AMERICA ISN'T ANGRY HE'S JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOU FACE, I can't handle that one) I didn't tell him my medz ran out when his UI check was like a day late (something weird about the direct deposit). IT WAS LIKE A DAY AND A HALF! JEEZ. BACK ME UP HERE, INTERNET.

ENTIRE INTERNET: *crickets*

FUCK!

I FORGOT TO TAKE MY MEDZ!

_AGAIN_

HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS HAPPEN WITH:

1) A PILL-A-DAY CONTAINER
2) A REMINDER IN MY GMAIL (EVERY DAY)
3) A REMINDER ON T'S PHONE (EVERY DAY)

WTFFFFFFFFFF, BRAIN, HELP ME OUT JUST A FUCKING LITTLE BIT HERE, I TAKE THESE FOR YOU

"Depression," Jim Hines

- Depression lurks in the corner.

- Depression waits for an opening.

- Depression is exhausting.

- Depression has little patience for others, and even less for you.

- Depression remembers every mistake, real and imagined.

- Depression is afraid of change.

- Depression is “fine.”

- Depression teaches you to lie.

- Depression is ashamed of you.

- Depression is forgetful.

- Depression doesn’t want you to go out tonight.

- Depression thinks you deserve it.

- Depression tells you not to talk about it.

- Depression is abusive.

- Depression is seductive.

- Depression disguises itself.

- Depression is always tired.

- Depression thinks you’re weak.

- Depression wants you to read the comments.

- Depression doesn’t care about the good things that happened yesterday.

- Depression expects you to fail.

- Depression doesn’t believe things will get better.

- Depression is overwhelmed.

- Depression wants you to think you’re the only one.

- Depression knows you more intimately than any lover.

- Depression is a glutton, and depression can’t stand the thought of food.

- Depression demands perfection.

- Depression undermines success, and magnifies failure.

- Depression is comfortable.

- Depression is a bully.

- Depression lies.


via

To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering -- a literary act before it becomes a medical one. A patient, long before he (sic) becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering -- a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story.

- The Emperor of All Maladies


ETA Just a few pages on, a quote from a surgeon on eighteenth-century mastectomies: "To perform the operation, the surgeon should be steadfast and not allow himself to become discomforted by the cries of the patient."

OK, this is DRIVING ME NUTS.

 Vincent Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because he thought it would get the happiness inside him. Many people thought he was mad and stupid for doing so because the paint was toxic

BULL
FUCKING
SHIT

As far as I can tell this is unsourced, off someone's two-year-old freewriting on a blog, and no, van Gogh didn't eat yellow paint to GET HAPPY. His doctor and an asylum attendant both witnessed him drinking turpentine in a suicide attempt (possibly even several different attempts; sometimes it's reported as kerosene). This is right out of that soppy Vincent & Theo movie, which, while sweet, was really inaccurate in places, and also there's a bad docudrama in which Andy Serkis (yes, Gollum played van Gogh) noshes on an entire tube of yellow paint. I haven't seen it, but presumably he squeezes it right into his mouth as if it's orange fake hot nacho cheese from a can or something.

And! There is A LETTER ONLINE in which his brother says

In his first letter (Vincent's doctor) gave me to understand that it was dangerous for you to go on painting, as the colours were poison to you, but he went a little too far, which might have been due to his having relied on unverified rumours, as he himself was ill at the time.

So that sounds to me a lot more like "That crazy bastard, he even eats his paints!" which got passed on via unsympathetic people. Not anything verifiable.

Oil paint was FUCKING EXPENSIVE. Vincent didn't have any supplies unless Theo sent him money for him, and if you read the letters, he was desperate to work. Not to eat paint. An artist is not going to stand there while painting and just lick his palette like it's a fucking Creamsicle. (Also, have you ever fucking tasted oil paint? I have, because I used to do terrible oil paintings on paper in my twenties, and would inevitably forget and bite my nails, a longstanding terrible habit. It tastes GODAWFUL. Worse than it smells, which is impressive.)

van Gogh was not some kind of whacked-out baby or John Green hero sucking on his paint tubes. He was a grown man! An intelligent, articulate artist. His letters are probably some of the most moving documents on earth. Put them on the moon in an airtight box, instead of Richard M. Nixon's plaque, so if aliens ever get here, we'll know what the best of us was. Yes, I said that.

-- Why does this fucking upset me so? (I checked, I've been annoyed about it for days, I got enough sleep, and I took my medz.) I know, I know, forget it Jake it's Tumblr, and this is one of the reasons I got off Tumblr, all those huge posts about utter bullshit being passed around and affirmed and reblogged and quoted without a second thought. Or a first thought even. It's got something like 450K notes and will probably go well past that. It's so....it's just everything I detest about modern online culture. It's not sourced. It's pathetic. It's syrupy. It's so sentimental it made me gag. (People get on me all the time about how Schindler's List is sentimental, but THIS? This is sentimental bullshit.) It's right out of the endless fucking cliches about how artists are permanently off their nuts! and do Whacky Things! because they are Artistic! and it is necessary to be in pain and be whacky to do Art! and I believed all that, sure, when I was about seventeen.

If you were so unhappy that even the maddest ideas could possible work, like painting the walls of your internal organs yellow, than you are going to do it. It’s really no different than falling in love or taking drugs....

I just, I seriously can't even believe this terrible bullshit. Eating paint (or drinking kerosene) is like falling in love or taking drugs? What the actual shit? It's not even that someone was dumb enough to write this (we've all written dumb things, I'm sure when I was young and dumb I wrote even dumber shit) (yes, probably about van Gogh and Plath, too) or that it's gotten popular, it's that people just don't fucking bother to think about it. Why read van Gogh himself, or think about mental illness or addiction or art, when you can just pass along the equivalent of a virtual chain letter instead?

This shit has NOTHING to do with van Gogh, or mental illness, or art. You could swap in "Spongebob Squarepants" and it would make the same fucking amount of sense. If not moreso. It's a misconception about a shitload of sentimental misconceived cultural cliches that's just taken up happily into an endless echo chamber and there's no way to stop it, let alone fix it. How many people have read that letter of Theo's online? Probably far fewer than people who have clicked "Reblog" as happily as mindlessly as a rat in a lab seeking the next happy hit.


("That's my secret. I'm always angry." When dealing with Tumblr, apparently.)

'When Mentally Ill Students Feel Alone' - the Atlantic

I personally just dropped out of my grad school program after getting inadequate (and really expensive) "mental health care" from the student health center, which I mainly couldn't afford -- at the time, Prozac cost $120 for one month, and the insurance only reimbursed me half over a month after payment. So most of the time, I couldn't take it. I didn't commit suicide (this was 1996 or so), but it was a pretty close thing. (Nobody asked why I was leaving, or tried to figure out a way to help me stay, either -- "goodbye and good luck" was pretty much it.)


The debate at Yale comes at a time when mental-health issues are on the rise at schools nationwide. A recent UCLA survey of more than 150,000 college freshmen nationwide found that nearly 10 percent of respondents had "frequently" felt depressed in the past year, up from 6.1 percent in 2010; additionally, respondents rated their emotional health at an average of 50 percent, the lowest level in the survey’s five-decade-old history. Likewise, in 2012, the Association for University and College Counseling Directors revealed that 70 percent of officials who completed its annual member survey said that the number of students on their campus with "severe psychological problems" had increased since the year before. It’s worth noting that at Yale, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates use the school’s mental-health resources before graduating—a demand that, some students claim, has caused long wait-times for appointments and is believed to take a toll on the quality of care.

We live in an era where the hard sciences are valued far and above other academic disciplines and where the humanities are frequently treated as luxury pursuits. This has resulted in a clinical culture, especially within psychiatry, that tends to treat neuroscience as the only rubric for understanding human experience, a clinical culture that applies the language of chemistry to describe patients' suffering, as in "titrating" a patient's emotional response to "prolonged exposure" therapy, as if a person suffering from a mental health disorder can be balanced like a chemical equation....As William Normand, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York, said succinctly, "Psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless."

- The Evil Hours, David J. Morris

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. Trauma is the savagery of the universe made manifest within us, and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness, the myth of self-mastery, and the experience of time, but also our ability to live peacefully with others, almost as if it were a virus, a pathogen content to do nothing besides replicate itself in the world, over and over, until only it remains. Trauma is the glimpse of truth that tells us a lie: the lie that love is impossible, that peace is an illusion. Therapy and medication can ease the pain but neither can suck the venom from the blood, make the survivor unsee the darkness and unknow the secret that lies beneath the surface of life. Despite the quixotic claims of modern neuroscience, there is no cure for trauma....Trauma is our special legacy as sentient beings, creatures burdened with the knowledge of our own impermanence....The best we can do is work to contain the pain, draw a line around it, name it, domesticate it, and try to transform what lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.

- The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, David J. Morris

(He's clearly remembering Feeble's "we owe God a death" from 2 Henry IV, which is neat, as part 1 has Lady Percy quizzing her husband on his PTSD symptoms: "Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth, And start so often when thou sit'st alone?....")

Problem: While on mood stabilizers I always feel like my actual feelings are about three feet to the left of me. I can see them! but they're not quite over here.

Solution: THIS IS NOT AN ACTUAL PROBLEM. KEEP TAKING THE MOOD STABILIZERS. (this past summer when we had like no income I had to go off all my medz for about a month and hoooo boy, that got real ugly real quick) (my unmedicated feelings are like Godzilla. They can crush actual cities)

saudade

The English language has a great deficit in words to describe the impenetrable hopelessness that mental illness visits upon those afflicted with it. I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of time seeking out words in other languages that give form and substance to this lifetime of experiences. Germans have Verzweiflung, it is the direct translation of despair but it is also accompanied by fear and pain. The Czech litost is the torment of suddenly seeing the extent of one’s own misery. Toska is what Nabakov said could never be fully expressed in English words and described as “a sensation of spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.”

But my personal favorite has much less to do with misery. It is the Portuguese saudade, a melancholic longing for someone or something that is lost or gone, likely forever. It is often felt for lovers and for the Utopian landscapes of youth, for things that might have never even been but can be longed for nonetheless. My affection for the feeling is not because of its familiarity but because of its absence. I have no such longings. I have no memories of utopias or of perfect lovers or of anything that took might take the shape of bliss. I don’t have any reference points to long into goldennes and then ache for. It is heartening to realize that I don’t suffer from every kind of heartbreak available, just the particular kind that I do.

- The Circumference of Despair: On Depression and Language

most awesome thing I have read all week

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe I think that if I (or the person who is me, but whose body I am not currently occupying) write this down, I will draw some logical conclusion. I will identify the root cause of this current round of anxiety, and I will suddenly recognise the street I live on, and be able to go to the supermarket without being afraid of the fact that we are hurtling through space, and stand in the bookshop and feel calm and easy. Maybe I think that someone else might read this and go me too! your anxiety is not the most insane anxiety! and I can put my socks on and we can go for a walk in the park and no one will turn into an antelope.

Last week, at my regular counselling session, I told my psychologist I was beginning to feel like A Girl Who Is Separate From But Also Experiences Anxiety. It was wonderful. I was thinking about all the things I could do with my life if I didn’t have anxiety, and I could suddenly see each thing discretely. I could see that I might go on a book tour and feel anxious, but that they were not the same thing. I could imagine being a person who had anxiety, but wasn’t an anxious person. I felt newly purposeful, motivated, insightful but pragmatic.


And now this week I feel like a turnip.

- Anna Spargo-Ryan

I have just discovered Maria Bamford

and oh ghod she is so funny it feels like my face will CRACK OFF

and then she starts talking about obsessive thoughts (which I have, in spades, and have almost never talked to anyone about ever, including any shrink, because they make me feel INSANE) and I nearly start crying. God fucking bless you, Maria.

do the work

Maria Bamford has a mantra of sorts, and here it is: Do the work. Three words, three syllables. An easy, orderly thing. She tells it to herself when she wakes up in the morning, whether it’s at her bungalow in a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles or at a Holiday Inn in Boston or a Marriott in Bloomington, or any of the other highway-side hotels she hits for one night before moving on. Do the work. It’s a stay against paralysis, against the descent of dread. It’s less dramatic than “seize the day!” more affirming than “stop overthinking everything!” It is functional, and that’s what she’s trying to be. Do the work. She repeats it on airplanes, in taxis, on the long walks she takes to calm her nerves before a show. Sometimes she amends it to: Just do the work, the “just” a reminder that she’s not, after all, performing surgery on babies. There’s another, more refined version, too. Do your bits, she’ll tell herself, resigned to the idea that this may always be a struggle. Just do your bits.

- via (h/t aerialiste)

....and speaking of stigma and shame!

Latuda antipsychotic site artwork:

They APPARENTLY changed it, because that banner is gone (bless you right-click-save-file!), and now the artwork on the tab for 'professionals' (non-crazy doctors) and 'our patients' (desperate crazy people and their even more desperate caretakers) is similar. Sort of. But this is still pretty awful:

And this is the page for patients (i.e. desperate whackos). Note the LACK of artwork-effect-ripped-off-from-Claire-Fisher, here.

....us desperate bipolar whackos get NO artwork. EVER GET THE FEELING YOU'VE BEEN CHEATED


(You know, I also deeply resent the idea that we mentally deranged people slob around in ugly maroon hoodies and brown T-shirts. My T-shirts of Depressive Anguish and Suicidal Despair are stylishly black. With slightly less stylish food stains.)