Crazy on You, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld
May 31, 2014 Martha Thomases 2 Comments
After I wrote last week’s column, which inspired a lot of discussion (which pleased me), I realized that I had missed my own point. Since I get to pontificate (is that something a Jewish girl can do?) here on a regular basis, I decided to get in a last word. Or at least some further words.
And then this happened.
And just like we did after every other senseless tragedy involving a crazy guy with a gun (are there any sensible tragedies? Is that a subject for another column?), we are talking about changing the gun laws, or changing the rules about hospitalization for people with mental illness. We wonder if teachers or parents or police officers should be liable if they don’t report certain kinds of behavior to — well, I don’t know to whom. The Great God of Getting One’s Head On Straight?
These discussions usually devolve into a blame game, with one side saying the problem is the easy access to guns, and the other side saying the problem is that we don’t lock up the crazy people. As someone who doesn’t like guns, it’s easy for me to say this is the fault of the NRA. That may (in part) be true, but it also lets me off the hook.
We have a huge problem in our society with mental illness. We don’t understand where it comes from. We don’t know whether to treat it like a disease or a moral failure. We don’t know how social constructs influence people who are susceptible, nor do we know how to make changes when necessary.
Which is why this happens.
Let me use a rather trivial example from my own life. I’ve had a problem with depression since I was a child. At the time, I thought this was my fault. I couldn’t muster the strength to have a better attitude. If I wasn’t so lazy, I wouldn’t have a problem. By the time I was an adult, I had learned how to hide my mood from others, so I could function in public without letting people know how horrible I was. When I felt good, I thought my depression made me a romantic, tragic heroine in my own life.
My therapist wanted me to get a prescription for anti-depressants, and for years, I refused. I’m suspicious of medicating problems anyway, so I tried all the non-pharmaceutical remedies I could. I exercised. I changed my diet. I took herbs. I meditated. Nothing worked.
So I went on Zoloft. It was like a light switch. I felt better immediately.
So quickly, in fact, that I worried it was a placebo effect. Still, in felt so good to not want to die anymore that I kept taking the pills.
This was more than 20 years ago. Since then, I have occasionally tried (with my doctor) to get off the medication. It never works. I taper down to a certain point and then the bad thought patterns return. Obviously, I need the drugs to have a productive, satisfying life.
Depression is a fairly common illness, one that hundreds of millions of people will experience during their lives. Even so, it took me several years and a few doctors to get to a solution that worked for me. When we’re dealing with something as complicated as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, there are a lot more variables. We simply don’t understand enough about the way the brain works to have a quick fix.
And, since it is only a very small percentage of the mentally ill that is violent, it is that much more difficult to diagnose that minority.
Still, one reason it’s easy to not recognize mental illness is that it hides so easily in our popular culture. Racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia — all have a home online, in our books, and on our screens. In general, I think this is a good thing, because the only way to get rid of these bigotries is to expose them to sunlight and show how ridiculous they are. Unfortunately, while we go through that process, some crazy people find a home <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html>, not help.
Fixing this problem takes time, and it takes money. We don’t like to spend either.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s take a completely different issue, government spending on school lunches. Four years ago, Congress passed a law that would require that the nutritional standards of the food served in public schools be raised to include more fruits and vegetables and less salt, sugar and fat. The law is intended to reduce childhood obesity, which has reached epidemic proportions.
Healthy kids, we all agree, are a good thing. Why should the government spend our tax dollars to serve kids junk food?
Except we don’t agree. Congress decided this week that schools didn’t have to comply with the law because it was too expensive and “difficult” (those are sarcasm quotes, not actual quotes). The First Lady is for the higher standards, which, I suppose, is another reason the GOP-led Congress is against it.
Which is odd, because the Right is against using government money for non-nutritious foods in other contexts.
Childhood obesity (and the resulting adult obesity) is a complicated problem. It’s the result of poor food distribution patterns, changes in society that discourage routine exercise, and a society that requires most households to earn at least two incomes, so there isn’t anyone at home watching the kids. Too many parents, rich and poor, let their kids choose the food they like rather than the food they need for good health. Fixing the school lunch program won’t solve the problem. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough.
Fixing the problem will take time and money. We don’t like that. We want someone to blame. We want the problem to go away so we don’t have to look at it. We want the cheap, quick fix.
The quick fix isn’t often the cheap fix. Problems don’t go away just because we blame someone else.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes, taking action that addresses these complications really works. It works for the people who need help, and it works for the community at large. Here, for example, it was found that giving homeless people homes was not only a better solution, but a cheaper one as well.
I don’t know why we have so many lone gunmen shooting up schools and businesses and public squares. I don’t know how to stop them from getting to the point where guns are the only answer they see to their torment. But I do know we won’t make a dent in this problem until we admit that individual humans are complex and settle in for the long haul to find solutions.
Media Goddess Martha Thomases was actually in the same room as Maya Angelou once, and it was fantastic.
Mike Gold
May 31, 2014 - 7:29 am
Can a Jewish girl pontificate? I think that depends upon you having had a mikveh the last time such positioning was appropriate.
Rene
May 31, 2014 - 10:35 am
My problem with medicating problems away is that there are too many doctors out there that throw anti-depressants at anyone that comes to visit them. Sometimes it works wonderfully, like in Martha’s case, sometimes it doesn’t.
A friend of mine started to have hallucinations after two years of taking them. Another friend of mine got a prescription after ONE short 10-minute visit. Yet another friend is medicated, but it has replaced his depression with being constantly on edge and jumpy. And I know of many more horror stories.
I think the problem here is that many doctors have a very materialistic viewpoint. It’s tempting to see human beings as machines that just need a little adjustment, a little grease so the wheels spin better. Yes, sometimes the problem is just brain chemistry. But many times it isn’t.
I wish more people were like Martha and tried other options before taking anti-depressants.
Frank Joyce
May 31, 2014 - 3:55 pm
These are all good points. Here’s some more food for thought. Other societies comparable in many ways to ours (capitalist for example, Canada being a good candidate for exhibit A) have far fewer per capita homicides, fewer guns (still a lot though in the case of Canada) and better approaches to mental illness (and mental health).
To put it another way, they have better social contracts and better social behaviors. Why? Race. Once we get to a better understanding of the price we pay for 500 years of the theory and practice of white male supremacy we’ll be able to do better at all these things.
Gun worship (“who’s the alpha male now,” said Eliot Robert’s manifesto) is but a symptom of the larger problem of violence worship. The brutality of slavery and Jim Crow, genocide against indigenous people and non-stop warfare is deep in our culture and consciousness. Really deep.
We practice violence extensively. Always have. It’s not that we are reluctant to spend money. We spend it like no society in the history of the world spends it—even when we don’t have it. Don’t like the unemployment/underemployment rate now? Take arms manufacturing and other components of war making out of our economy and see what happens. Take mass incarceration (where we spend as much as we do on schools) out of it too. Two million plus locked up. Two million more paid to be the locker-uppers. What would that do to the unemployment rate? Do we spend on “health care”? Sure, more than any other nation by far, by any measure. Results? Not so good. There are lots of reasons but devoting as much as we do to treating the results of violence is one of them.
Because we are so violent we also invest a lot in justifying violence which creates a very vicious cycle indeed. The United States has been at war somewhere almost every day of my life and I ain’t no spring chicken. That condition is true of no other country. None.
By many measures, despite hard won progress on greater opportunities for some African-Americans, disparities measured by race in income, wealth, health, education, incarceration, and other metrics are as bad or worse that they have ever been.
A step to changing these dynamics is to acknowledge and discuss critical root causes.
Mike Gold
May 31, 2014 - 4:48 pm
Yow! Holy crap!! Frank Joyce! Damn…when did the Internet finally come to Detroit?
At least — at the veriest of very leasts — a few states have figured out they can’t afford the price of mass incarceration. Of course, companies who suck at the governments’ teats don’t want any of that pasteurized bottled stuff and they won’t go down quietly… they’ll just lay off staff (the American Way!), combine facilities (making it even harder for families to see their imprisoned members), and sit back and watch their stock rise in value.
There is racism in Canada, but it’s smaller and quieter. That, alone, is not an improvement. Inuits have been treated better than our native population down here, but they haven’t been treated like full citizens. It’s a lot better now, but it’s not for me to say it’s good. There’s a lot of prejudice against Pakistanis dating back long, long before 9-11. And every time some American asshole talks about solving our draught situations by tapping the Great Lakes, Canadians have a tendency to dislike Americans as well.
But, yeah, they’re polite about it. And they’ve been saving our senior citizens a fortune in drug costs. Personally, I’m just grateful to them for hockey.
Mindy Newell
June 1, 2014 - 11:27 am
Rene:
Like Martha, I, too, have had to deal with depression for most of my life, and, like Martha, I am also on a maintenance dose of anti-depressant. Like Martha, it was like a light going on when I started the medication. (I’ve always described as the scene in THE WIZARD OF OZ when Dorothy walks out of her black-and-white home and into the technicolor land of Oz.) Unlike Martha, I’m on Effexor XR, which is a once-a-day medication.
As an R.N., I also have a problem with doctors throwing anti-depressants at their patients. To be more specific, I have a problem with doctors who prescribe anti-depressants when psychiatry is NOT their field of practice.
It is my belief (both personally and professionally) that not only should an antidepressant be prescribed by a psychiatrist, who can judge what specific type of antidepressant should be prescribed, along with the dosage, but that cognitive therapy (i.e., therapy sessions) should be conducted (and mandatory) at the same time.
Of course, finding the right “shrink” takes work, patience, and time.
R. Maheras
June 2, 2014 - 12:53 pm
I don’t buy the fast food blame game for obesity. When I was a kid, there was plenty of crappy food available, such as Twinkies, donuts, sugar cereals, soft drinks, candy, hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream, etcetera.
Yet if you looked at all of my class pictures during the 1960s, there’s only one or two heavy-set kids out of 30-40 kids in a class.
In almost every case I can recall, the heavy-set kids were bookwormish and shy, meaning they probably never went outside and played.
I went to a huge public high school — more than 4,000 students — and one could opt for gym or ROTC. In almost every case, the heavy-set or geeky kids took ROTC. Watching them in formation was actually kind of humorous, as the ranks looked like a cross-section of Mutt and Jeff and Laurel and Hardy.
What is different today is that it is easy, and even preferred, that young kids stay inside and lead a sedate, “safe” life, while they suckle on the glass teat, or its contemporary replacements. From a health standpoint, this is bad on many levels, and is probably the leading reason for the obesity explosion — not sugary drinks and McDonald’s hamburgers.
When I was in my early 20s, I’d been active my entire life, so when I could finally afford fast food, it had zero impact on my weight. My routine order at McDonald’s was two Quarter-Pounders with cheese, a large fry and a large Coke. I was 5′ 9″ and 150 pounds, and I didn’t gain a pound in four years. On movie weekends, where me and my buddies would spend all night watching 16 mm prints of King Kong or Flash Gordon serials, we each downed half a extra-large pizza, and washed it down with a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi. But, as when I was a kid, I was active in sports, had manual labor jobs, and I walked a lot.
As I entered my 30s, my metabolism began slowing down as my activities decreased, and I started getting desk jobs. That’s when what I ate began to catch up with me.
So, in my opinion, it’s not so much what you eat (especially when you are young), as much as it is how active are you?
Exercise is the key.
Dwight Williams
June 14, 2014 - 12:07 pm
There are people in Canada who fervently desire the dismantling of our nation’s social contract, particularly where health care is concerned. Sadly, one of them is currently our Prime Minister. There are a lot of people in that same camp seems to be of a mind that Canada would also be better off with NRA-written gun laws.
Keeping an eye on Martha’s writings (and those of a lot of other Americans), the rest of us are encouraged enough to keep trying to hold our own ground anyway.