Category Archives: Society

On Fear

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I once read that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather fear. Interesting, right? Fear, is the absence of love, it is what drives anger, violence, and other negative emotions/actions. Hate is a complement of love, therefore, it is comprised of love at its core. This may sound a bit metaphysical to some, but the point that I am trying to get at is that fear is the opposite of love.

That being said, when we act out of fear, we unleash all kinds of wrath onto ourselves and others, which prevents us from doing good for ourselves and others. Let me give you an example. When you are stuck in a job that you absolutely dislike, but are too afraid to take the next step and apply somewhere else for fear of letting go of your supposed comfort.

Refusing to change for the better even though there are greater benefits than consequences to the change for fear of [insert excuse here]. There are so many instances where fear holds us back from our true potential, and let me tell you, I have been guilty of all of them I’m sure.

But the beauty of life and living, I believe, comes when we release that fear. Yes, it is easier said than done, but if you go through the correct process for yourself, the benefits are amazing. Suddenly, that new positive relationship you have been looking for everywhere appears to you. Your dream job becomes suddenly available and you have the opportunity to apply.

It is important to note as well that opportunities present themselves to us on the daily, whether we choose to act on them is on us. Again, what keeps us from acting on those great opportunities is fear.

Fear is comparable, in my opinion, to sucking our thumb as an infant. It becomes ingrained in us as a sort of comfort that we can revert to whenever something is different or challenging. We know that in the long run it is bad for us, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is what we learned as children.

Fear kept us from running into the street because a car might run us over. Fear kept us from touching the stove because we might get burned. Fear kept us from staying out too late as teenagers because we might get in trouble. Fear, fear, fear.

Now, in all of these examples I just gave fear has kept us safe, but it is a false sense of security with a double agenda. Yes, fear keeps us from doing dangerous things, but at the same time, it also keeps
us from doing amazing things.

What we should focus on, then, is respect. I respect traffic laws, therefore, I will not run into the street. I respect that heat can hurt me, so I will not touch a hot stove. I respect my parents and their rules, so I will not come home late.

See what I just did? I turned the fear around and converted it to respect.

If you respect someone, you don’t try to infringe on their rights. However, if you fear them, you try to take away their rights and privileges for fear of what they may do if they have them.

I can go on and on about fear and how it is the sole cause of so many terrible things that happen in our lives and in our country, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t want to. Why? Because I don’t want to sound preachy and you do not want to hear it either. It’s not hard to see for yourself how fear is at the core of violence, oppression, racism, discrimination, etc. I invite you to look beyond what the telecasters tell you and really examine the news for its core values. You will find fear in the most unlikely of places, even in a television commercial advertising a clothing sale.

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Re-Raising Yourself

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Even as I look at my own childhood, I see how my parents wanted me to stay young and innocent as long as possible, but without too much fantasy. I was not allowed to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and any other “fantastical” character. I grew to have a fear of people dressed in character costumes such as Ronald McDonald, the Red Robin bird, clowns, the characters on Sesame Street, you name it I feared it. I don’t blame my parents; they were trying to do the best they could with what limited knowledge and resources they had. Yet, I confess that in order for me to have become a well-adjusted adult, I had to re-raise myself.

Re-raise yourself I ask? It is a concept I stumbled upon in many a psych book that I have read after being diagnosed with Bipolar I. It is a very complex concept, yet it basically means to identify habits, fears, customs, or other behaviors that are counter-productive to your well-being and adjusting your behavior through constant re-direction and behavior correction. The term means what it means: re-raising yourself to the point that you correct your behaviors such as a parent would do so to a child. You must remember to be patient and kind with yourself, however, so as to not instill more fear into your psyche and fill those voids with love and compassion.

I recommend this exercise to everyone and anyone who feels they have been shortchanged in life and want to make some real positive change in their future. It seems as a human race we tend to repeat our errors over and over again, without any progress. My favorite saying is that the definition of insanity is doing something the same way repeatedly and expecting different results. If it doesn’t make sense, then think about it. Have you ever yelled at someone for not doing something correctly and after the umpteenth time of scolding them, they still don’t correct their behavior? Maybe, perhaps it’s time you correct your approach in order to produce different results.

I also recommend this to people who tend to run away from their problems, either literally or theoretically. It’s odd to see someone move to a new job, a new state, country, what have you in order to change their lives only to repeat the same behavior patterns. Like the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. And I have been guilty of this, so please don’t take this as condemnation or judgement of any kind; I am not exempt. It has been through trials and tribulations that I have learned to change my behavior and attitudes towards all kinds of issues. From child rearing, to marriage, to employment, to saving money. And I am still working on all of those because just like a plant, life is constantly growing, changing, evolving, so I have to constantly grow, change, and evolve my behavior and attitude.

Sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it? But life is work, because you get out of it what you put into it. However, if you do it right, it becomes a labor of love and can move you in more ways than you imagined.

Does Mania Reveal Our True Selves?

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I am antisemitic when I am in mania. I warn all my friends about it, ask them to note it as a symptom, and let my wife know that I am spinning into the fire cloud. I am also sexually inappropriate. I enjoy arguments. I quote scripture when I argue even though I am an agnostic.

There’s a theory flying about, mostly held by the sane, that I am revealing my true self in my manic state. This stems from psychoanalytic theory and the notion that there is this subconscious running our affairs from behind the scenes. Supposedly, when I am stable, I am still an antisemitic rat. I’m just able to control it. But this theory crashes because these thoughts do not even enter my consciousness when I am stable or depressed except, in the latter case, in the context of reproving myself for having had them in mania. Nor do I dream about them except when I am running hot.

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Should We Lock Up the Sane?

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A new study — the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study — found that those living with classic mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression — alone are not likely to use guns when they commit acts of violence:

“For the small group of people with mental illness who are at risk of committing gun violence, improved collaborations with the criminal justice system are clearly indicated,” the researchers stated. “However, directly targeting mental illness as the major driver of gun violence is misguided. … Prior violence, substance use, and early trauma are more likely to contribute to subsequent violence than is mental illness per se. In this regard, the politically inspired haste to focus gun control efforts on people being treated for a mental illness, rather than on people with demonstrated indicators of violence risk, such as restraining orders related to domestic violence, seems particularly misdirected.”

This contradicts the latest psychophobic reign of error that comes upon the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. It isn’t the mentally ill who shoot people, but those who have no psychiatric diagnosis. So what are we going to do about them?

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Charleston AME Shooting

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As I write this, I can only begin to imagine the number of people who have jumped to the conclusion that the shooter at the Charleston AME Church was mentally ill. By this time tomorrow, even if the shooter has not been caught, we will hear the pundits debating what kind of disability afflicted the shooter. Undoubtedly there will be more calls for Forced Outpatient Treatment.

There are a few things to keep in mind before we turn Charleston into our reason-to-support-Murphy’s-Law-of-the-day:

  • We have no idea who the shooter is at this point, except that he is white and in his twenties or thirties.
  • South Carolina has “Assisted” Outpatient Treatment. So even if he was mentally ill, the much ballyhooed program sure as hell didn’t prevent anything here.
  • The man had a gun that let him kill a lot of people including a state senator.
  • White supremacist activity has been on the rise.

Rest assured that the NRA — which backs the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act — will blame this on mental illness at the earliest possible press conference. We’re the scapegoat for this kind of thing every time it happens.

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Buzzfeed Petition

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I am deeply disturbed by the recent quiz on Playbuzz that purports to inform its takers whether or not they are bipolar. For this reason I have composed the following petition on change.org which I ask you to sign and circulate among your friends:

Buzzfeed calls itself the largest humor site on Facebook. It reaches nearly 500,000 people, many of whom are impressionable teenagers and young adults.

Recently, it published quizzes purporting to identify whether the test taker was bipolar or OCD. There were many problems with these quizzes.

The first was that many of the questions — especially on the Bipolar quiz — had nothing to do with the disease itself. People with bipolar disorder who have taken the test have been told that they don’t have the disease. Others who don’t have it, have been told that they have.

Second, they make light of syndromes that wreck the lives of those who struggle with them.

Third, the results may give the people the illusion that they have the disease when they don’t or don’t have it when they do. This can lead people to unwisely abandon their treatment or eat up valuable time at the psychiatrist assuaging their fears that they have the illness when they do not.

Fourth, the test has no medical disclaimers to the effect that it is no substitute for accurate diagnosis by a medical professional.

Fifth, the staff at Buzzfeed has been disingenuous about these harms and refuses to remove the tests from their site on the grounds that they are “just entertainment”.

We who live with mental illness live with the hardship of stigma. We are treated like children. We are told that we are faking our symptoms or that they “really aren’t that bad”. Buzzfeed’s arrant insensitivity must end.

Please sign the petition at the site.

The Merry Month of Self-Murder

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The sky was open to Space and the world was green. The sun shone on the grass as only it can in January. But despite the pleasant weather, my brain filled with pessimism. For many years, I had answered the question “Are you thinking of killing yourself” with “Not the fast way. The slow way.” What I meant was I propelled myself towards death by eating badly and refusing to exercise. Eventually I would suffer a major heart attack and that would be the end of it. But on that January day I texted my last will and testament to my wife, sat down on a log, and began to study the veins in my wrist.

I bucked the statistics by my choice of time. The media gets it wrong; the holidays and the winters that follow are not the time when hospitals see an increase in the number of suicides: it is May. Scientists have not hit upon why self-murder spikes at this time of year, but they have made some observations:

Doctors first observed in the 1820s that suicide rates spike during late spring. Researchers have since postulated and tested all sorts of explanations for the global phenomenon, making this one of the most studied questions in psychiatry. There’s still no consensus, but evidence suggests it has to do with so-called sociodemographic factors. During the winter, many people go into semihibernation: They work less, see fewer people, and are exposed to less frustration and conflict. That all changes in the spring, when increased interaction with others and the stress of work may trigger suicidal thoughts. The theory is based on a couple of observations. First, the spring suicide peak is more pronounced among people employed on farms or in factories who experience greater seasonal variation in the intensity of work and social interactions. In addition, developing countries with a higher proportion of agricultural workers see more seasonal change in the suicide rate than do developed countries. The magnitude of seasonal changes in the suicide rate is more than 10 times higher in Uruguay, for example, than in Belgium. Researchers have also detected a smoothing out of the seasonal variation in suicides in recent decades as more people move from farm to office. (There are smaller peaks in other parts of the year. Cubicle workers are more likely to commit suicide in the fall than in the spring, as are mothers who send their children off to school in September.)

I am not so sure of this theory or of some of the others. Some link the suicide rate to the weather. The amount of sunshine in the day, pollen counts, and air pollution have all been indicted. But one thing that I think affects me heavily by the time May rolls around hasn’t been investigated: Daylight Savings Time.

Why? Because Daylight Savings Time interferes with our inner clock. It makes us wake up an hour earlier than we are used to waking up. It hits us like a hammer in March and continues its drumming through the Spring. The ones who are worst affected are those who are most susceptible to bipolar disorder: night owls.

Owls aren’t early risers like larks. A Lark doesn’t feel the shift much if he has to wake up an hour earlier, but for an owl — who already has a hard time getting up early in the morning — the moving forward of the clock is catastrophic. Six o’clock is taken over by five a.m. A whole hour is stolen and it is not given back until the fall. I have met few people with bipolar disorder who like Daylight Savings Time. It’s proponents, in fact, are few. But big industry — especially retail — like it because people are more likely to leave the house to buy during daylight hours than during darkness. Oil companies like it because people do more driving and more driving requires more gasoline. Despite the health risks, we keep this destructive institution for the profit of a few.

I know that my sleep is sucky at this time of year. When my alarm goes off, it wakes me out of a deep sleep that my body has made no plans to end for another hour. I am dizzy and depressed on many mornings. A gray malaise overcomes me. This darkening of the mood affects my thoughts and those thoughts turn increasingly to negativity and the belief that I am a burden to others. Wouldn’t the world be better off without me?

The cheap fixes I employ are to adjust my medications if the depression gets too deep and to seek out the help of my therapist more often. I stick to my clock, however. Millions of others are in the same boat. So why do we persist in this? Well, our country puts corporate interest over people. What is my life to them? I am collateral damage.

For Further Reading:

  • The Suicide Rate Doesn’t Peak During the Holidays. Why Does It Peak in Spring?

    • I was forced to grow up

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    At age 20, I was diagnosed with Bipolar I after a manic episode mixed with psychosis which sent me straight to a psychiatric hospital. Well not really a hospital, rather, a rehabilitation center in Georgia. No, I’m not from Georgia nor have ever lived there, but it just so happens that I was visiting a friend when I went “manic”.

    But don’t be alarmed, this is not an account of my (mal) treatment in the rehabilitation center or in the jail I was held for 5 days because of all things, my mania began at the Atlanta airport. No, this is about how I was forced to grow up after my experiences. How I could no longer consider myself just a care free college girl with no worries, but rather, an adult woman with a mental health diagnosis, which was tough, at best.

    I could not accept my diagnosis, nor did I want to admit that perhaps I needed help from someone other than myself. As a psychology major I should have known better than to fall prey to stigmatizing myself and my diagnosis, I thought “But I’m not crazy.” How ignorant and little of me to think such a thing.

    And after yet another stint in a psychiatric ward in the Bay Area, literally three days after returning from Georgia, I was convinced I had Bipolar I. It wasn’t the psychiatrists who convinced me, nor my arsenal of daily meds that did it. No. It was my mood swings. My constant flow between happy and sad. My to and fro, that’s what convinced me I had Bipolar I, and yes I needed help.

    I became my own advocate, then. Seeking help and resources in my community. Standing up for myself whenever necessary and becoming an adult, in a manner of speech. I never thought I would have to grow up so fast and so soon, it was in the summer before my Senior year in college.

    I felt as though the Universe had screwed me over, big time. And after wallowing in my self-pity, I got it. I understood. Sometimes it takes a huge life change to make you appreciate life better and make you a better person. It’s life’s way of putting you back in your place and giving you perspective. And wow, did I ever get perspectified! Yes, it’s a new word, I just made it up because I can do that. 🙂

     

     

    We Should Stop Using Mass Murderers as Our Poster Children for Change

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    It’s going to happen again with the same reaction by the media. Maybe we will wake up tomorrow morning and see the report in our morning newspaper; maybe we will hear about it from a coworker at lunchtime; or it will be the lead story of the evening news. Mass murder. Mentally Ill Man. The words will be slung together and dished out to a public which has been bred to believe that mental illness and violence are strongly correlated. Politicians, doctors, family members, and activists will devise plans to cope with the problem. It happened with the Virginia Tech shootings, it happened with the recent Germanwings crash. Autism, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia have all been implicated at one time or another. The mentally ill cannot be trusted, goes the drumbeat. Schizophrenics and bipolars are killers.

    Statistics show that about 3% of the mentally ill are violent. We are ten times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than perpetrators. Yet when we are portrayed on television or the movies, sixty percent of the depictions commit crimes, especially violence. So coupled with the way news outlets spin stories about mass murder, the general public believes that we are ax murderers and serial killers.

    Some reformers use this fear to drive some very specific agendas, namely destruction of our rights to privacy, forced medication, and the resurrection of mental hospitals. The objective is to control the mentally ill. They might argue that this is the best we can get in a society with our values, but that is a weak defense of some very problematic and questionable policy changes.

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    Why We Shouldn’t Let Our Loved Ones Do the Talking about Stigma

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    square850Glenn Close is a woman who I admire for her dedication to her sister and her resolve to upend stigma. When Jessie Close was 51 years old, Glenn drove her to McLean Hospital in Boston where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Their commercials questioning the labels applied to mentally ill family members and their relatives are known to millions. We have every reason to admire and respect her for her work. But recent research suggests that maybe family members aren’t the best ones to be talking about stigma.

    The research has nothing to do with the political issues surrounding mental illness. A pair of researchers looking into the rise of a culture willing to accept same sex marriage outline a successful strategy that we who live with bipolar disorder and other organic brain dysfunctions can employ:

    Michael LaCour, a UCLA doctoral candidate in political science, and Donald Green, a Columbia University political science professor, have demonstrated that a single conversation can go a long way toward building lasting support for a controversial social issue. In addition — nearly as surprisingly — the effect tends to spill over to friends and family members.

    The key is putting voters in direct contact with individuals who are directly affected by the issue.

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