Showing posts with label celebrity mental. Show all posts

Happy "Let's Talk" Mental Health Day!

Happy "Let's Talk" Mental Health Day!

Does that sound cynical?

It's not intended to...

It's now about 6pm on "Let's Talk" day*, and if the local news
is to be believed, there has been a lot of talk-
people posting/tweeting/w.h.y. about depression and other
manifestations of mental illness today so much that Bell
is kicking 57,000,000 nickels towards "improving care
and access, stimulating research and encouraging best
practices in the workplace.".

That's a lot of nickels.

Big respect and thanks to Clara Hughes for stepping
up to front this undertaking. She's my nominee
for "best use of cred".

And fair's fair - respect to Bell for doing something good
in the world. Yes, it's a mad bang for the ad buck buy,
but people are talking. That is a good thing, and in my
experience, rare enough to remark on.

It's even getting talked about during the sports report.
Amazing!

One can't help wondering what sort of world this might
be if more corporations-that-are-also-people showed
some fucking humanist initiative.

*

But all this 'good' is not without it's ironies...

Such was the result of my attempt to check out the web site. There's always room for improvement.

It's now about 7pm, and according to the local news,
it's up to about 62,000,000 nickels. Sweet.

This is my 4th post so far, and I'll probably do another
to kick it up to a quarter (as in 5 nickels, baby!).

It's not like I don't have quarters laying around the house.
It's not like I feel like I'm I'm stickin' it to the Man by costing
them money every time I do...

...but it is like "today's your day day, boyo.
Today you don't have to be ashamed".

I was diagnosed as bipolar 2 nearly ten years ago.
It was mostly a relief, frankly.

Why? Because it meant everything wasn't my fault.

All those days when I would lay in bed, so sad and broken
that only the thought of letting someone down that I cared
about could get me up.

All those meetings where I'd feel like a fricken'
Martian every time I suggested a possibility.

I could go on for days. Sometimes I do...

Why not? I've got the time...

I used to be "high-functioning". I used to be one of the best
in the country at what I did. I used to make shit up,
and then build crews to make it happen and together
we would turn it into magic.

That was then. Now, I'm just another broke-ass guy
in a broke-ass town. I'm 58 years old, and I haven't worked
for years. I'll probably never work again.

My doctor is not equipped to deal with my medication needs.
I used to go see a shrink for that, whose practice was
a mere two hours a day, but he's gone now.
Nobody knows where.

I'm hoping I can get a welfare claim running soon.
I used to hope for a disability claim, but that apparently
those can take nearly five years to get going.

In the meantime, my Mom stretches her pension

to include me. And my dog.

Even if I wasn't pre-disposed, it would be depressing.
And the beat goes on...

*

So, there you go. That's me celebrating Let's Talk day...
by talking about depression, and mental illness, and stigma.

If I was to try and boil it down to one thing I would say
to everyone who is not bipolar, it would probably come
down to this:

... that's my nickel.

* Bell has launched a campaign to encourage discussion
of mental health issues in the lead-up to its national
"Let's Talk Day" on February 8.
Bell introduced the mental health initiative in 2011,
committing to spend $50 million over five years in a bid
to change Canadians' attitudes on the subject.
Besides deflating the stigma around mental health,
the campaign also focuses on improving care and access,
stimulating research and encouraging best practices
in the workplace.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/bell-launches-2012-let-s-talk-mental-health-campaign-1.754199#ixzz2KjNXQQUc

The campaign against depression

Bell launches 2012 'Let's Talk' mental health campaign

Vincent van Gogh

... another person with "mental health issues"
who decided death would be better...

Hunter S. Thompson - bipolar, maybe?

Was Hunter S. Thompson bipolar?

Maybe.

It could be i'm just projecting. Ever since Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas blew the top of my head off as an impressionable adolescent, i've admired his spirit, curiousity, courage and ability to articulate the distemper of the times we were living in,
or trying to live thru...

Long before i was diagnosed, his manic spells and the darkness
of depression as well as his abiding interest in self-medicating
were more than clear- they were splattered across the pages
of everything he wrote, as though it was all written in blood,
cut with tears of rage and sorrow.

Whenever i'd find myself among people trashing America,
he would be something i'd throw back at them, as in
   "What? You don't like barbeque? You don't like jazz?
    You don't like Hunter S.?"

As time went on, there was more and more darkness in
what he saw, and his decision to end his life could also
be one more sign that there were more bad chemicals
than good ones in his synapses, in that bipolar way.

In the end, a diagnosis one way or the other of the good
doctor doesn't much matter nearly as much as the passion
and insight he brought to his life and his work.

Forty years later, he still inspires me to keep going
and as Bruce Cockburn sang,
       "to kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight".

in his own words...

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—
fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy,
fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting
locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges
of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

—"Extreme Behavior in Aspen," February 3, 2003

"What is the desired effect?"

*

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip.
He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion"
without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook
realities that were lying in wait for all the people
who took him seriously...

“I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.
I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs.
Old whores don’t do much giggling.”

             *

"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about
a generation that has been taught that rain is poison
and sex is death?

If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze
on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into
a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there
is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others
eat shit and die."

       —Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame
          and Degradation in the '80s

"Just sick enough to be totally confident"

*

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty,
the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves,
the only final sin is stupidity."

“I have in recent months come to have a certain feeling
for Joe Hill and the Wobbly* crowd who, if nothing else,
had the right idea. But not the rights mechanics.
I believe the IWW was probably the last human concept
in American politics”.

* the International Workers of the World

"It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family
from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only
errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving
Jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled
for at least the last 20 years, and arguably the last 200 years.
They take orders well, and they don't ask too many questions.

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy
of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness
or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards,
and they don't mind admitting it.

They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution
to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel
of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are
not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt
for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up
their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage
they have been conned into believing will be freedom
from fear. Ho ho ho.

Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday
in this country. Its value has been discontinued. The only
freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness.
Nothing else matters."

"buy the ticket...take the ride"

and his final words...

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking.
No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50.
17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring.
I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67.
You are getting Greedy. Act your old age.
Relax -- This won't hurt."

   Hunter Stockton Thompson
            July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005
             American journalist and author

learn more about his life at this exceptional site:
Hunter S. Thompson

what did this champion have for breakfast?
Hunter S. Thompson's Very Gonzo Breakfast Habits

*

10 Days in a Madhouse - Nellie Bly

In 1887, already well known for evocative articles on social reform, Nellie Bly took an assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World newspaper to enter the asylum disguised as a patient.

She would feign the symptoms of an added young woman,
in the hope of being assigned to the New York Asylum
and report back on the conditions she found there,
and share the stories of the inmates she met.

"Tell me, are you a woman of the town?"
"I do not understand you," I replied, heartily disgusted with him.
"I mean have you allowed the men to provide for you and keep you?"
I felt like slapping him in the face, but I had to maintain my composure, so I simply said:
"I do not know what you are talking about. I always lived at home."
After many more questions, fully as useless and senseless, he left me and began to talk with the nurse. "Positively demented," he said. "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where some one will take care of her."
And so I passed my second medical expert.

After this, I began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever had before, and a greater one for myself. I felt sure now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane or not, so long as the case was not violent.

"From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island,
I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity.
I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life.
Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted,
the crazier I was thought to be by all...."

"The beating I got there were something dreadful. I was pulled around by the hair, held under the water until I strangled,
and I was choked and kicked.

The nurses would always keep a quiet patient stationed at the window to tell them when any of the doctors were approaching.
It was hopeless to complain to the doctors, for they always
said it was the imagination of our diseased brains,
and besides we would get another beating for telling".

"The remembrance of that is enough to make me mad. For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally, so that I shall never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet, and, throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water.

They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. At other times they took hold of my ears and beat my head on the floor and against the wall. Then they pulled out my hair by the roots, so that it will never grow in again."

When her story broke, a grand jury was convened to investigate her allegations. When she and members of the grand jury went to the asylum, the administrators had plenty of advance warning and many changes had been made...

I hardly expected the grand jury to sustain me, after they saw everything different from what it had been while I was there. Yet they did, and their report to the court advises all the changes made that I had proposed.
I have one consolation for my work–on the strength of my story the committee of appropriation provides $1,000,000 more than was ever before given, for the benefit of the insane.

By 1893, the asylum's patients were transferred further up the East River to Ward's Island and the building was given over to more traditional medical services, becoming Metropolitan Hospital until closing in 1955.

Nellie Bly would go on to more to more adventures and a variety of triumphs as a reporter, inventor and industrialist. So would the former asylum...

Nowadays, all that is left of it is the rotunda,
which has been restored and forms the centrepiece
for a block of - you guessed it - condominiums!

The condominium website makes passing mention of the fact
that there once was "a hospital" there, preferring to
linger longer on a visit in 1842 by Charles Dickens, who described
the rotunda as “remarkable,” its flying spiral staircase “spacious and elegant” as it rose from an illuminated glass-brick floor.

Dickens went on to say...
“Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.”

more perspectives on asylum life & the impact of Nellie's work

get your FREE PDF of “Nellie Bly's "Ten Days in a Madhouse”

more about The Octagon, the Asylum and what happened next...

Excellent Madness quotes

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who
locked in what cage.
Ray Bradbury

Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets
deport their lunatics.
Voltaire

The whole religious complexion of the modern world
is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
       Thomas Paine

Being born into the Royal Family is like being born
into a mental asylum. Marrying into it is not something
to be taken lightly.
       Johnny Rotten

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.       Mike Royko

Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.       Dogbert

Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
       R. D. Lang

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity!
       Edgar Allan Poe

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments
when he was merely stupid.       Heinrich Heine

There is a pleasure sure in being mad,
which none but madmen know.
       Dryden 1681

See, the human mind is kind of like... a piñata.
When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside.
Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing
your mind can be a peak experience.
       Jane Wagner

Madness need not be all breakdown.
It may also be break-through.
       R.D. Laing

You're only given a little spark of madness.
You mustn't lose it.
       Robin Williams

Sanity is a cosy lie.
       Susan Sontag

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