If you have HBO and anyone in your life with bipolar disorder (or you have it), you should watch “Boy Interrupted,” a documentary that played at the Sundance Festival.

I think this movie will be up there with Kite Runner as one that sticks with me. It is haunting and it is powerful.

The filmmaker is Evan Perry’s mother, and Evan Perry killed himself at age 15. His parents did everything right, got him into therapy, saw a psychiatrist regularly, loved him unconditionally.

If there’s anything you take out of this movie, it should be this: there’s no black and white with mental illness. The media portrays it as two ends of a spectrum: either the person with mental illness is a crazed killer (most killers are sociopaths and assholes, but not necessarily mentally ill, and most persons with mental illness are not violent) or psychiatry cures it all.

I’ve been afraid to watch the show “Mental” precisely for this reason. I have taped every episode, but haven’t had the heart to watch it. I’m afraid it’s going to be the typical bullshit of “these poor mentally ill folks, if only they’d take their meds, all would be right with the world.” And add a rogue psychiatrist who goes out of his/her way to be cool and avant-garde. There may be a couple of them out there, but your chances of finding them is remote. And who knows if a groovy hat and James Deanesque personality means anything with respect to recovery.

This documentary is a real heartbreaker. I could so empathize with Evan. I just got him, that’s all I can say.

The quote in the title is something the psychiatrist said. It’s pretty true.

So the president apologized over his joke with Special Olympics as the butt. Okay, yawn. Any politician who has made an idiotic statement like that has apologized. Now he’s gonna do time with Special Olympics. Swell. The kids are retarded. They won’t notice they’re being used for a photo op, right? Isn’t that the funny part?

The problem isn’t so much that he said it, it’s that he said it and didn’t have a clue that it was offensive. I thought he was the genius president.

It’s appearing more and more like he’s not.

I don’t know if he came up with the joke on his own, or it was his crack writing team. Either way, he should have known better. For a guy who is supposed to be so real and understanding of marginalized groups, he’s a REAL DUMBASS.
Reporter Mark Schnyder of KMOV in St. Louis says he really underestimated the anger. Add this guy to the clue train. Would you have expected the anger had it been President GW Bush? Of course you would have. Somehow Barack Obama is held to a different standard, and his insensitivity is supposed to be okay.

I underestimated the anger. Every athlete and parent I talked to about President Obama’s comment on Leno Thursday night said it was outrageous and they’re not sure they’ll be able to forgive him.

To paraphrase some of the comments: Words hurt and while everyone makes mistakes, the President should do a better job of thinking before he speaks. While no one thought the comments were premeditated, it doesn’t matter.

A woman who’s in the Missouri Special Olympics Hall of Fame said the President’s comments “put me down” and made her feel like he doesn’t care about Special Olympians.

Note to joke writers:

The only group you can now make fun of without getting into trouble: crazy folks. People with mental illness.

Next time, try something like

“My bowling score was so bad, you’d think I was a schizo.”

:::applause:::

“I accidentally dropped my chewed food back onto my plate during a state dinner. I had to tell the British Prime Minister, hey, forgive me, I’m a mental patient. We drool!”

::::applause:::::

“My wife took a shopping trip and came home with a limo full of new shoes. What is she? Bipolar in the manic phase? Somebody get her some lithium!”

:::applause:::

“The White House is so big, my daughters get lost all the time. You’d think they’d had electroshock therapy and had their brains fried to extra crispy!”

:::applause:::

So there you go, just choose persons with mental illness next time, and nobody will notice.

Hope this helped, Mr. President.

I wonder if there will ever come a time when mental patients won’t be less than.

I just finished taking a peek at some bloggers who blog about celebrity stuff, curious to see who they chose as best and worst dressed. Fashion is fluffy fun and I enjoy snarky comments about kooky dresses and hair.

The bloggers are all gay and were overcome by the dude who wrote the screenplay for Milk, his acceptance speech. He used the term less than, saying to GLBT youth that they are not less than.

That’s all fine and good, but mental patients are. It wasn’t all that long ago when Lou Reed was electroshocked (the brain kind, not tasers) to shock him out of being gay. (Didn’t work.) I’ve heard from a number of people who were shocked for the same; I know people today who were shocked for it. It never cured the gay.

But that’s not the point. (For the record, I’m strongly pro-gay rights, although I’m on the fence about marriage. None of my many gay friends ever cared about that until it became a political agenda. Now all of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of paper.)

The point is that the mental patients’ union has somehow missed the boat.

We are less than, and I do not believe I’ll see a day when we aren’t.

I always go back to a conversation I had online a few years ago. The Hartford Courant had done a great series on unreported deaths in mental wards in Connecticut. The patients had all died while under restraints, some suffocating, some choking, and so on. It was a great piece of investigative reporting (a genre that seems to have evaporated).

Nobody cared that these people died, other than the reporter and people like me, mental health activists. What was finally said in the conversation was this: so what if these people died? They were mental patients and a few elderly folks. So what.

I’ve never gotten over that. The people who said this were not bad people. They weren’t raving maniacs; they were articulate and intelligent people. And it was okay that people died cruel deaths while being chained to beds, because they were mental patients.

They were less than.

I’m certain that’s the opinion of many folks out there. While everyone is patting themselves on the back because they voted for a black man, and they’re salivating over the fact that they aren’t racist, many of them - maybe most of them, believe that mental patients are less than. Less important, less than human.

Consider the mental patients who have been recruited as homicide bombers. It barely received a mention in the mainstream press. It was more important to whine about Gitmo and compare Bush to Hitler. As I recall, the only people who expressed any outrage were Michelle Malkin and Robert Spencer.

I once chatted with the guy who founded Act Up, the group that has used civil disobedience to bring about real change regarding AIDS issues. I had hoped that we (the psychiatric rights movement) could model ourselves after them and possibly affect some real change.

But we just can’t seem to organize correctly. There are wonderful coalitions of good people, and people are doing good works. But our agendas are so vast, and even opinions differ so widely.

I don’t know what the answer is. From time to time, I really lose heart.

Somehow all the kudos for this guy who wrote “Milk” and his wonderful speech pissed me off. Gays have a long history of being treated as crazy, losing their rights as any person with a psych history can, having “treatments” forced upon them.

Real issues. Bad things that have happened to gays under the guise of treatments. They were killed, along with the Jews, the gypsies and mental defectives in the camps.

And yet all that matters to their movement is being able to get a legal marriage certificate. I guess that’s what bothers me the most - there is still genuine mistreatment, genuine discrimination, every bad thing that has happened to marginalized groups in history still happens to psych patients.

There’s a bit of jealousy, too, if I’m being honest. I’m jealous that the GLBT community has been so successful in organizing, so successful in gaining public support, and the crazy community (with many gays and lesbians as well) can’t seem to get anything at all.

It’s okay if we die under bad conditions because…we’re less than.

I can’t imagine Hollywood wearing little ribbons to show solidarity with mental patients.

We need some kind of cool factor, but drooling, shaky hands, and sitting in a stupor after shock therapy isn’t very sexy, is it?

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by reporters is “Why did you start ect.org?” The answer is that I started it over a decade ago to simply share information about electroconvulsive therapy.

I am not opposed to anyone having ECT as long as it’s an informed (emphasis) choice. Unfortunately, the majority of patients are given a one-minute sales pitch that overplays the effectiveness and mostly ignores any side effects.

My strongest belief is that if doctors were candid about it all, and took the time needed to answer questions truthfully, outcomes would be better. Even when the results were bad.

In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dan Shapiro, who has survived battles with deadly cancer, says the very same thing:

NYT: You quizzed your radiation oncologist about treatment side effects. If all patients did this, wouldn’t some refuse treatment?

Dr. Shapiro: About 85 percent of patients are information-seeking and want to know the limitations as well as the strengths of their treatment. Unfortunately, a lot of physicians overestimate the treatment benefits and underplay the side effects. In the short term more people accept treatment, then become surprised, dismayed and often panicked when predictable side effects occur. If patients know about side effects in advance and are taught how to anticipate and cope with them, they would do a lot better.

This so clearly defines how I feel that I believe I’m going to add it to ect.org in a prominent way.

Dan Shapiro has a website at http://www.danshapiro.org

Here is a great interview with the New York Times from 2001:

May 15, 2001
A CONVERSATION WITH: Dan Shapiro; A Doctor’s Story of Hope, Humor and Deadly Cancer
By JANE E. BRODY

In May 1987, Dan Shapiro, then a 20-year-old junior at Vassar College, discovered he had Hodgkin’s disease. After seven months of treatment with four chemotherapy drugs and radiation, he seemed healthy again.

In 1988, in his first year of graduate school in clinical psychology, he counseled a young girl named Jodi who was not doing well after a bone marrow transplant for the same cancer and who soon died. Six months later, he learned that his own cancer had returned and that his only hope was a bone marrow transplant. His survival chances were 40 percent. Sixteen months after the transplant, in July 1991, he had a second relapse, and few options remained. Read more…

By chance (or was it fate?) I came across an article that appeared in Salon a few years ago. It’s called “Why Me” by Dan Shapiro, associate professor in the college of medicine at the University of Arizona.

He has an interesting perspective on medicine and mental health, as he has survived bouts with Hodgkin’s Disease. It’s quite a story, and I guess I’m going to have to make an Amazon order and read his books.

Here is his article from Salon called “Why Me?” It reminds me of a quote from The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano asks his mother’s Russian nurse why she stays so optimistic when she only has one leg.

She replies: “That’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. And they are not disappointed. You have everything, and still you complain. … You’ve got too much time to think about yourselves.”

Why me?
Why not you? Misery makes the world go round, and nobody gets a free pass.

By Dan Shapiro

Aug. 06, 2002 | I can’t talk about this at work, but I’m tired. Tired of patients with illnesses moaning that this shouldn’t have happened to them. Tired of their asking the fates to explain why they’ve been singled out for solitary anguish. Tired of the relentless vocal vacuums that can suck the life out of a medical team faster than HMO reimbursement forms and billing sheets. Read more…

While mourning the loss of the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I think back to a good friend in St. Petersburg, Russia.

My friend’s name was Ol’ga and she had lovely, waist-length blond hair. She was so typically Russian, loved to drink and could drink me under the table, enjoyed art and good poetry and literature. Yet underneath was that sadness that so many Russians carry with them. In some ways, I think it’s part of the Russian soul.

No matter how drunk you are, how crazy you get singing drunken songs, no matter how happy you are in the moment, it’s always under the surface. Melancholy.

I actually didn’t know the person who died in the psychiatric gulag in the 1980s. It was Ol’ga’s husband, a man who died before I knew her. He had been quite an accomplished artist, a great talent. But he didn’t always paint “approved” art. He was a dissident and used his art to criticize the communist leadership.

He was warned, but some Russians refused to conform. Eventually, they are taught a lesson, sent to a gulag, or sent to a psych ward. My friend’s husband was pronounced severely mentally ill and sent to a psychiatric gulag.

She visited him as often as they would allow, and his spirits were high. They could control his person, but could never control his mind, despite the heavy drugs and other tortures.

One day, on her scheduled visit, she arrived at the “hospital” and was told her husband had died. Just like that, told in the same way you’d tell someone “Nice hat.” He had hung himself, they said.

She simply walked away, went through the motions of burying her husband’s body, and day by day the sorrow lessened. She didn’t become a martyr for dissidents and scream “They killed my husband.”

In the Russian tradition, she simply accepted her lot in life and pushed on. But she knew there was no way her husband killed himself. He had reasons to live, and he wasn’t despondent. They killed him and called it a suicide. It wasn’t unheard of. Sometimes it’s apparent that you can’t break someone, and it’s easier to just get rid of them.

That’s how her husband met his end. Convenience of the state.

He was, after all, mentally ill.

It took Farrah Fawcett’s battle with cancer being splattered all over the media to find out that hospital employees in Los Angeles have been selling celeb medical records. It gets worse. It seems that a number of hospitals have “medical professionals” working both sides: working their day jobs as “medical professionals,” and by night, being on tabloid payrolls.

In my world, that’s called being a snitch and it’ll get you a lot more than a day in jail plus a fine. Let’s just say these people ought to be glad I’m not Farrah’s best friend. I’m talking a blanket party, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s because you’re not from the Midwest. Read more…

Surely it’s been noticed that mass knife stabbings are happening more frequently in Japan.

I’m not making light of it; it’s a horrible thing. Gun laws in Japan are some of the strictest, so I guess this kind of shows that if you want to go on a killing frenzy, you don’t necessarily need a gun.

Japan boasts a low crime rate compared to other industrialized nations and Tokyo, with a population of 12.7 million, is considered relatively safe. But stabbings, once rare in the country, have become more frequent in recent years.

In March, one person was stabbed to death and at least seven others were hurt by a man who went on a slashing spree with two knives outside a shopping mall in eastern Japan. In January, a 16-year-old boy attacked five people in a shopping area, injuring two of them.

A spate of knife attacks also have occurred in schools, the worst on June 8, 2001 when a man with a history of mental illness burst into elementary school near Osaka killing eight children. He was executed in 2004.

From Yahoo News today.

I remember not that many years ago, as I debated gun control issues with a libertarian I knew. We probably had more similar views than we realized, but chose to take opposite sides for unknown reasons.

My biggest argument - against guns, although I’ve never been anti-gun actually - was that if there were no guns, you wouldn’t have a Columbine-type thing again. He argued that sure you could…the guys could have used knives. Perhaps fewer would have died, but maybe not. Then he argued that more people died at the hands of autos than guns.

And I replied when was the last time a student drove a car down the hall of a school, mass murdering students? It was so ridiculous. And at the time, the idea of mass murder with a knife was ridiculous, too.

Now I’m having to rethink that.

Radio is carrying new PSAs emphasizing the importance of friends when dealing with mental illness.

Here’s a case where I think tax dollars have been very well spent. Some of the ads are a tad annoying, but that’s after I’ve heard them too many times. They make the point: if you have a friend who has been diagnosed with mental illness, stick around. A friend can really make a difference. Read more…