dysfunction / disorder : page 3.........Talent Development Resources..home page...site map
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dysfunction / disorder : page 3........
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 saying
who is "crazy"Psychiatrists have a surprising amount of subtle power in our society because we get to say who is "crazy" and who is "sane." ... [In the] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.. paranormal experiences such as telepathy and precognition are listed only as important diagnostic features of Schizotypal Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder. There is no discussion of the value of these experiences or their history of emergence in the context of spiritual development. Despite sour faces from some traditional psychiatrists, spiritual orientation and practice are clearly associated with greater quality of life, less depression, and less anxiety, as well as greater longevity. Likewise, people who report paranormal experiences such as precognitive dreams, out-of-body experiences, or visitations by spirits are also more likely to have high scores on quality-of-life measures. |
However,
the spiritual traditions teach that it is not these unusual experiences
themselves that carry the value, but rather the expanded awareness that
may accompany them.
While a single experience may lead to a shift in values, it is usually more extensive exploration and practice that lets a person integrate that new awareness. The fact that people are afraid to bring their spiritual experiences to their therapists and doctors raises some important concerns. While some "spiritual" experiences may be pleasant or inspiring, they may simultaneously lead to confusion, fear, or a sense that one has wasted years in trivial pursuits. If a person fears being pathologized, a potentially healthy experience may instead put one at risk for becoming isolated, depressed, or even grandiose. Many such people gravitate toward abusive cults, where aspects of their experiences may be validated, with no respect for the person's autonomy or individual needs. Others simply bury the new reality they have glimpsed and lose a potentially important new resource in their lives. ... Therapists and religious or spiritual teachers have complementary roles. from article: Who's
to Say Who's Nuts |
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|
and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. Herman Melville, "Billy Budd, Sailor" It is often said that genius and madness are related, usually by people who do not know know the first thing about it. Dr Nettle, by contrast, has done the research. The first few chapters discuss the nature of the main mental disorders - depression, mania and schizophrenia - and show evidence to prove a strong genetic element in predisposition to these illnesses. |
 .. .. from Guardian Unlimited [UK] book review posted on Daniel
Nettle. Strong
Imagination : |
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| Insanity comes in two basic varieties:
slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the
quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.
There are a lot of names: depression, catatonia, mania, anxiety, agitation. They don't tell you much. The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity. Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception. The body temperature is low. The pulse is sluggish. The immune system is half-asleep. The organism is torpid and brackish. ... |
 Viscosity
occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity. .. velocity endows
every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of
knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions.
> related page:**depression |
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 .. .. In fact, she was confined for two years. Twenty five years after her discharge she got access to her records and read her diagnosis: "Borderline personality... profoundly depressed-suicidal... promiscuous. Might kill self or get pregnant," the paperwork said. |
Susanna Kaysen's version today is that she was an unhappy,
sensitive, underachieving daughter of eminent academics.
She may have been a typical teenager during the late 1960's, except that she'd made a lame aspirin suicide attempt. Her therapist at MacLean told her she seemed sad or puzzled. "Of course I was," she writes. "I was 18, it was spring, and I was behind bars." from article: Girl Interrupted, theconnection.org 1/24/00. image: poster for movie Girl, Interrupted starring Winona Ryder |
~ ~ ~ ~
| The
film that really excites her is one she's been developing for five
years: Girl, Interrupted, a movie adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's
harrowing memoir about the two teenage years she spent in a mental
institution. "I wish every adolescent girl in the world could read this
book," Ryder says, "because it's about that loneliness everyone
feels."
The book came out in 1993, when Ryder had been through some rough times. She speaks obliquely of a death close to her; unspoken are troubles with a stalker, the breakup of her relationship with Depp, the famously difficult making of Bram Stoker's Dracula, during which Coppola raged at her to elicit a more dramatic performance. "I've had a good life, and I have a great family and stuff," Ryder says softly, "but there have been some traumatic experiences in my life that have resulted in me kind of feeling that maybe I was going insane for a little while. I had those same questions she asks in the book, like how do you define sanity, and how do you ever explain the feelings of anxiety and paralyzing fear?" ... "It's just a feeling of 'Am I crazy? Am I too sensitive to be in this world?' A feeling that the world is just too complicated for me right now, and I don't feel like I belong here. |
 "It passes, you know. But when you're dealing with things like death for the first time, you start asking yourself these really profound questions." She pauses. "Especially if you don't know where you are spiritually. When you grow up, and you don't have any idea what God is, and then these big huge things happen, you find yourself praying, but you don't know who you're praying to, and you don't know if you believe in what you're praying to." Winona Ryder [Los Angeles Magazine, Nov, 1998] Girl, Interrupted - book by Susanna Kaysen / dvd // bio: Winona Ryder by Holly George-Warren |
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from article: What I Realised - by Astrid van Woerkom For the last about four months it has really struck me how kind everyone is to me, although I'm blind and - also in comparison with other blind teens - quite dependent on others.
I've noticed that it isn't bad to need people, if you ask in a kind way. This seems like something that everyone knows, but it's a fairly new realisation to me and it makes me feel a lot better than I did before, because then I felt really bad about my "special needs".
Three years ago at age 13, when I left my special education institute for the blind and went to a public high school in my hometown in The Netherlands, I in the first weeks learned to accept my blindness. I'm namely blind as a result of ROP (Retinopathy in Prematurity)...
related page of Astrid's site: Blindness and Visual Impairment
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 ....Henry
Darger: In the Realms of the Unrealby John M. MacGregor Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. Shortly before his death in 1973, his landlord.. made a startling discovery in his tenant’s room: the history of another world in fifteen volumes, In the Realms of the Unreal -- at 15,145 type-written pages, possibly the longest work of fiction ever written. In startlingly vivid detail, Darger’s Realms recounted the role of seven sisters, known as the Vivian Girls, in a violent conflict over child enslavement on an unnamed planet. ... [His landlord] also found three huge bound volumes of brightly colored illustrations for the work, many painted on both sides and some over twelve feet in length. In the decades since his death, Darger’s alternate universe has attracted the intense interest of collectors, critics, and scholars around the world. His illustrations and writings have been the subject of major museum exhibitions in Europe and North America. [Amazon.com summary] |
 .. .. For the next six decades, Darger worked as a janitor in the Chicago area. His artwork was primarily included in a 15,000-page narrative, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." [Variety, Dec. 1, 2003] |
~ ~ ~ ~
 Hollywood has chiefly elected to film the biographies of tormented artists over their happier counterparts, presuming that boffo box office was more likely to be generated by the spectacle of Chopin coughing blood over gleaming keys or Van Gogh's demented self-surgery than by Mendelson's tediously contented life. Typically, magna opera like A Song To Remember (l946) and Lust For Life (l956) emphasized the anguish precipitated by the artist's disorderly nature and/or the wounding world. ... The career of David Helfgott, a prodigiously gifted Australian pianist, was cut short in his twenties by devastating psychotic illness. He spent a decade in obscurity, then took up performing again and married well despite the residual stigmata of his condition. ... Luckily Shine, Scott Hicks' compelling account of Helfgott's triumph over adversity, rejects bathos in favor of a distinctive lyrical rigor. ... |
Shine
has been attacked for refurbishing the Hollywood stereotype of the
agonized virtuoso, as well as the myth that madness and creativity are
always desparately linked.
This agenda exists in the mind of the film's critics, not Hicks and his colleagues. With immense compassion, the latter have recorded the rescue from ruinous chronic illness of a single suffering soul who happened to be an artist, and whose gifts admittedly enhanced his chances for redemptive human contact. If any general inference is to be taken from Shine's account of David Helffgott's harrowing history, it is that other sufferers, lacking his gifts or charisma, might be as well served if we would but heed, instead of turning away in fear, abhorrence, or derision. from Shine - a film review by Harvey Roy Greenberg, MD - from his list of reviews: Classic Films on the Couch
Emotional Illness in Your Family: Helping Your Relative, Helping Yourself photo: Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott in Shine [dvd] |
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 .. .. It's
not snapping out of anything. I had created a fantasy world where I was
safe. I realized that the earthly life I created at the same time was
now giving me the safety I'd always wanted. So I could integrate both
lives.* |
When I
met Jessica [Lange] and asked her about how she approached her
characters, she said she did it from the outside in. She got the
clothes and the wig right so she could look at herself as the
character, and then step by step she would build the emotional
interior. I guess that's a description of where I was at this stage in
my life.
The exterior of me
was starting to find its shape, make its mold. I was an actress. I was
a person dedicated to healing my life. I had good, solid friendships to
help guide my way and a therapist and healer who had laid the
foundation for me in my journey toward self-love. I was ready to start
building my emotional interior. * |
~ ~ ~ ~
This family is so highly functional. They eat dinner together evey night. No one gets away with anything. There's no passive-aggressive behavior, no silent treatments... People just use the dysfunctional label to describe "odd." Sure, there's a sense of craziness. But there's also a sense of truth.
Jane Kaczmarek- about her TV show "Malcolm in the Middle"[LA Times, Nov.4.00]
who are gifted and creative, and one way to say a very nasty and dangerous
thing is to say they're mentally ill.Paula Caplan, PhD - from interview
~ ~ ~ ~
shoplifting
kleptomania
impulsive behavior
..
Winona Ryder in court with her attorneyThe FBI reports that there were nearly a million arrests for shoplifting in 2001. But.. apprehension rates for shoplifting are low, and store owners turn over only 24% of the perpetrators they catch.. Teens, who constitute about a quarter of shoplifters, often steal on a dare or in groups. Adults are more likely to steal alone and for more complex reasons. For them, shoplifting can become a habit they find increasingly difficult to break.
Nineteenth century psychiatrists coined a term for the irresistible impulse to swipe: they called it kleptomania, from the Greek kleptein, to steal. It was applied after the fact to Jane Austen's aunt, who was tried in 1800 for pocketing fancy white lace. By the 1920s Freudian psychologists, always attuned to underlying sexual drives, were comparing the rush from a successful filch to the pleasure of an orgasm. ...
"Kleptomaniacs might have started stealing on a dare as kids," says Dr. Jon Grant, a director of the Impulse Control Disorder clinic at the University of Minnesota Medical School, "but it becomes so pleasurable that the addiction takes over their actions." ...
Winona Ryder.. fits the profile of a kleptomaniac. ... "If you look at what Ryder was doing to those clothes - cutting holes in them to get the tags off - do you think she was going to wear them?" says Dr. Marcus Goldman, author of [the book] Kleptomania..
from article: Why Did She Do It? - Something drove Winona Ryder to steal so flagrantly, but even she may not know what it is
by Nadya Labi, Time magazine, Nov. 12, 2002~ ~ ~ ~
And a pair of shoplifting arrests -- neither of which resulted in convictions -- caused headlines in later years. She was acquitted by a jury in Los Angeles on charges of stealing $86 worth of merchandise from a department store in 1966. Then in 1991, she was arrested and accused of stealing $21.48 of merchandise from a Florida drugstore. Lamarr was never formally charged. .... from page: Hedy Lamarr: Inventor
~ ~ ~ ~
There's a long list of celebrities arrested on shoplifting charges. Just last week, Olympic gold medalist Olga Korbut was charged with stealing $19 in groceries from a Georgia supermarket. Tennis star Jennifer Capriati shocked her fans a few years back when she was accused of stealing a ring from a small store in Tampa, Fla. Movie critic Rex Reed was once charged with lifting a couple of CDs. And Bess Myerson, the former Miss America, was arrested 15 years ago for stealing $44 dollars in merchandise.
Why would celebrities, who have fame, fortune and a reputation to protect choose to shoplift?
UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Heather Krell said the drive to shoplift is similar to the drive someone has to become a star. "In order to be a celebrity you have to take lots of chances," Krell said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "You have to believe in yourself and that you're going to prevail and you have to get caught up in the moment. And it certainly seems that that's part of shoplifting."
Krell said shoplifters are often misunderstood individuals. "People often think that it's a specific kind or type of person and that perhaps they even need the items that they are shoplifting," she said. "Often it's not the case at all. Socioeconomic status can vary, education can vary, background can vary, and certainly fame is no protector." ....[abcnews.go.com Feb. 7 2003]
Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior: A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry - by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Beverly Beyette
Kleptomania: The Compulsion to Steal - What Can Be Done - by Marcus Goldman, MD
Stop Me Because I Can't Stop Myself : Taking Control of Impulsive Behavior - by Jon Grant, J.D., M.D.
Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals: The Hidden Epidemic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - by Ian Osborn, MD.
~ ~ ~ ~
excerpt from "In Praise of Positive Obsessions" by Eric Maisel, PhD The common wisdom of therapy has it that obsessions are always bad things. As a feature of its namesake disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or as a feature of some other disorder, an obsession is a sign of trouble and a problem to be eliminated.
But the main reason therapists find themselves obliged to consider obsessions invariably negative has to do with language: an obsession is invariably negative because clinicians have defined it as negative.
Clinicians define "obsession" in the following way: an obsession is an intrusive thought, it is recurrent, it is unwanted, and it is inappropriate. Defined this way, it is obviously always unwelcome.
But suppose a person is caught up thinking day and night about her current painting or about the direction she wants to take her art? Thoughts about painting "intrude" as she balances her checkbook or prepares her shopping list. She can hardly wait to get to her studio and her rhythms are more like Picasso's on painting jags than like the rhythms of a "normal" person.
This artist is obsessed in an everyday sense of the word - and more than happy to be so! ...
For a contemporary intelligent, sensitive person, it may well make more sense to opt for a life of positive obsessions that flow from personal choices about the meanings of life than to attempt to live a more modest and less satisfying normal-looking life that produces dissatisfaction and boredom.
After all, no one can say how normal ought to be defined. In what sense is it normal to work at a job that constricts you and bores you rather than risking everything on a life that challenges you, even as it frustrates you?
Much of what we call normal behavior is simply based on fear. Indeed, the average person might even prefer a negative obsession, despite its horrors, to a positive obsession rooted in excitement, passion, and active meaning-making, so wild and unafraid would he feel if he were obsessed that way.
~ ~ ~ ~
 .. .. [These women [in your documentary "Dialogues with Madwomen"] all have strong, creative personalities, and that's all mixed in with this view of them as "madwomen," which sounds ironic.] Allie Light:In the '50s, any woman who was articulate and spoke out, could be labeled mad. I wanted to show that women think as well as feel and that what you so often get when you listen to a woman's story is a feeling. ... [You also make clear connections betwen the idea of art and
madness. |
 .. .. You can take that power and use it, whereas you sort of get lost in it when you're "mad." When I was depressed, it was the least likely time I could work as an artist. Whereas somebody in a manic state could make art out of that feeling. Hannah [in the movie] is prone to do all kinds of things when she's in a manic state. She says the only thing that limits her is that she doesn't have good concentration, she can't focus on a project. That's the other side. from Bright Lights Film Journal interview (1995) by Gary Morris Dialogues with Madwomen is distributed by Women Make Movies |
~ ~ ~ ~
...
Shoshannah Stern is a regular on "Threat Matrix" as security analyst Holly Brodeen, whose computer wizardry speeds the mission of her spy unit at the National Security Agency. On "The West Wing," Marlee Matlin was one of the first actors to play a TV role in which a character's deafness was merely incidental.
Now Stern [part of the fourth generation of her family born deaf] follows that path, one she embraces.
"I've been watching deaf characters on TV and film all my life And so far, almost all of the deaf characters that I've seen are characters about what?
"About deafness or about their deafness, how other people accept their deafness," she says.
"I don't wake up every day going, `Gosh, I'm deaf. OK. How do I brush my teeth?'
..
.."I'm deaf... I'm just a person, and Holly is a character. Her deafness is just a part of the package. It's part of who she is. It maybe will shape her choices, it may shape who she is, but it's the same as me. Only I can't really work computers."
[The Charlotte Observer, Sep. 13, 2003 - posted on wgms.com]
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|
Marlee Matlin on growing up deaf
I've always wanted to write a book relating my experiences growing up as a deaf child in Chicago. Contrary to what people might think, it wasn't all about hearing aids and speech classes for me or frustrations that I felt growing up deaf. I grew up in the early 70's and it was very Brady Bunch with our family, with a funny, Matlin twist. ... I also had a lot of friends in the neighborhood and drove everyone crazy with my Billy Joel music (I would learn his lyrics and listen for the beat while I signed the words in time with the music). These were the kinds of experiences I wanted to share with other kids. ... The title comes from the sign that my dad had the city erect in our neighborhood to warn drivers there was a deaf girl playing in the neighborhood. The sign is sort of a metaphor for the obstacles and barriers which the lead characters, a 12 year old deaf girl with a fantastic imagination and her hearing friend, another 12 year old girl, overcome during the course of a summer.*** Marlee Matlin***********photo from marleeonline.com |
 .. .. At times I believed what people said, that I would never be a success in the acting field because I was deaf. Until I changed my attitudes, nothing would change for me. Marlee Matlin......[response to a fan letter] |
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