Exploring Depression, Bipolar, and More through Theater

Posted on March 3, 2013 by wellsdc

“Normal Like Us – The Depression Chronicles” opened last night to a sold-out house at Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, Texas. I am very proud to have the opportunity to be a part of this show, and I hope that everyone has the chance to see it or something like it. (The show repeats the first Saturday of each month through August 2013.) Removing the stigma attached the mental health, by which I mean the negative assumptions, the incorrect or false beliefs, and the fear of judgment or ridicule (or the instinct to judge or to ridicule), is a cause to which I am committed.

Our show is both by and about people living with a variety of conditions tagged as “mental illness”: depression, anxiety disorder, attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on.

Note the frequent use of the word “disorder.” It is true that mental illness represents a lack of order, a disruption of order, or a complication or error in the mind’s best-functioning order. It is the responsibility of each person living with mental illness to do what they can to find an order that works for them, and I believe it is the responsibility of everyone else to support them. This support, in its broadest sense, may be adequate funding and resources for mental health treatment, but it is also education about the reality of mental illness. Most people living with mental illness are probably people you know or see every day. We need “support” in the form of understanding, attempts to learn, and the occasional bit of patience. We may never be able to see or live in the world in the same way as someone who is free of these “disorders,” but we already live alongside you.

The New York Times Says Something Mildly Critical of Profit-Driven Healthcare; Conservatives Predictably Lose Their Damn Minds

Posted on January 15, 2013 by wellsdc

983494_13007489 From the din certain people on the right have been making, they apparently think that the New York Times has the unilateral power to set American domestic economic policy. Someone really needs to explain to some people the difference between offering an opinion on a matter of public interest and tyrannically imposing dictates. Newspapers generally do the former. Very, very, very few people do the latter.

The pages of the New York Times featured a rather poorly-sourced, polemical piece by Eduardo Porter entitled “Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix.” He cites a 1984 study that found that for-profit nursing homes used far more sedatives on their patients than comparable nursing homes that were affiliated with churches, and therefore non-profit. The reason, according to Porter (citing other authors), was that sedatives are cheaper than caregivers, and it is better for the bottom line to dope up your residents as opposed to hiring trained staffers who can provide individual attention and treatment.

That sounds perfectly rational, actually. Is Porter right? Well, he only has the one study that was published during Reagan’s first term, along with a scattered assortment of other academic papers. That hardly builds up to a mountain of evidence indicting profit-driven nursing homes. There is a certain amount of common-sense appeal to the idea that nursing home administrators who are principally beholden to corporate shareholders have greater incentive to cut corners, and it certainly happens all the time. Nonprofit healthcare facilities, however, don’t exactly get to write blank checks for state-of-the-art care. Their motivation might be to stretch the money out until the next grant check arrives. Porter’s article raises some good questions, but does not give us enough information to state a definitive preference.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from going apoplectic. See, Porter committed the cardinal sin of saying something mean about the free market. The free market—sorry, the Free Market—is always right. Because shut up.

A Google search of the two authors of the 1984 study, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond, yields a treasure trove of overreaction. (Incidentally, their paper, “The Use of Hypnotics in Proprietary and Church-Related Nursing Homes,” does not appear to be available online, so none of us can check Porter’s work.) Let us bring on the hysterics! Continue reading →

This Week in WTF, October 26, 2012

Posted on October 26, 2012 by wellsdc

To the Beemobile!

– Bees in northeastern France have been producing honey in odd shades of blue and green lately. This stumped the beeologists at first (auto-correct really wanted to change that made-up word to “biologists,” but I showed it who’s boss!!!)

On the hunt for answers (which is what scientists do, and it’s awesome), they discovered a biogas plant about two-and-a-half miles upstream that processes waste from a plant operated by the candy company Mars about 62 miles away. Among the products made at the Mars plant are M&Ms, including the blue and green varieties. Coincidence? Mars isn’t commenting, so I’m going to speculate that it is not coincidence, but rather conspiracy!!! Of course, I can’t back that up with anything.

“I wore a five pound beard of bees for that woman.”

– From Australia, we have the Babes & Boars calendar, which contains, not surprisingly, pictures of babes with the boars they presumably just bagged. This is part of a publication by Sporting Shooter magazine known as Bacon Busters. I’m still trying to confirm if this is satire or not.

If you like pictures of babes and are indifferent to the presence of dead boars, this may be a good publication for you. If you like pictures of dead boars, please reevaluate the course of your life so far.

– Doctors saved a toddler’s life by performing a Fecal Microbiota Transplantation with the child’s mother as the donor. It’s a very touching story, if you can get past the fact that Mom donated poo to her son.

– Sometimes an awesome Halloween costume crosses paths with a profoundly mistaken individual, and tragedy results. A man in western Pennsylvania who, police say, was not drunk somehow, decided to shoot at a skunk with a shotgun. Upon hitting the stinky passerby, he learned that it was not actually a skunk, but a nine year-old girl in a skunk costume. Also, the two are related somehow. The girl was flown to a Pittsburgh hospital and was reportedly doing well. Police aren’t sure what to do with the guy. Until that gets sorted out, I guess kudos are due to whomever made the costume, because it was obviously good enough to fool a totally-not-drunk guy. Seriously, though, I hope the kid is okay.

Photo credits: “To the Beemobile!” via evergreenterrace.com.au; “I wore a five pound beard of bees for that woman,” via mmmsimpsons.tumblr.com.

A Very NSFW Charity Campaign

Posted on October 6, 2012 by wellsdc

The internet has brought a near-inifinte set of methods to raise money for charities. There are so many worthwhile charities in the world, it can be hard to decide where to contribute. Fortunately, the internet is here to propose clever solutions. As but one example, are you looking for a way to support breast cancer research? Do you not want to donate to Komen because of all that stuff they did? Do you like breasts in a possibly socially-inappropriate way? Via imgur, we have the following:

For the month of October, PornHub is donating 1 cent for every 30 views from its big tit and small tit categories to breast cancer research.

Sure enough, if you go to PornHub’s Save the Boobs page (do I need to actually tell you these links are not-work-safe? Didn’t think so) you will find the above message. The total number of videos viewed (I’m not sure if that’s all videos or just the ones that directly contribute to the campaign) has already gone into octuple-digits (I’ve actually seen the number go up by more than 1,000 in the few minutes it has taken me to write this post). I’m kind of amazed more charities don’t do this.

The rub, of course (double entendre alert!) is this: where will they be donating the money that the viewers, ahem, raise? They don’t say. The page just says they will donate to “a breast cancer research charity.” As of the moment I’m writing this, the tally on the site says 11,766,918 (actually, it just went up again, but let’s stick with this number.) If they donate $0.01 for every thirty videos viewed, that would be a total of $3,922.31 so far. Not exactly overwhelming, but not nothing. Keep in mind, of course, that I am writing this at noon on Friday, October 5. If we assume the daily rate holds steady, that’s about 2,614,871 views per day. Over the month of October, that’s 81,061,001 views, for a total donation of $27,020.33. Considering this would all be accomplished without actually doing anything, that ain’t bad. Continue reading →

“The wealthy are people too”

Posted on September 28, 2012 by wellsdc

The Daily Show had a report the other night on “Sudden Wealth Syndrome” (SWS), a newly-minted disorder afflicting the wealthiest of the wealthy, or about “1% of the 1%,” as Jason Jones puts it:

I am a big fan of the saying attributed to T.H. Thompson and John Watson:

Be kinder than necessary,
for everyone you meet is fighting
some kind of battle.

Everyone has emotional problems. Anyone can suffer from depression, anxiety, and any number of other mental illnesses. There should be no stigma attached to it, and there should be help and support for those afflicted by it. By that, I mean everyone afflicted by it.

My first reaction is this: It is going to be very hard to get a typical paycheck-to-paycheck 47-percenter to care about the emotional malaise of a beleaguered billionaire. If a millionaire or billionaire is having difficulties coping emotionally, how the *%$#&*!@$# hard do you think it is for someone who has to work 2-3 jobs just to keep the kids fed and clothed?

That is not the best response, though. This is not a competition to see who is more beleaguered, beat-down, or grizzled. Each individual sees the world from a unique perspective, and anyone can, as I said, be struck by depression, etc. The thought that other people have it worse does very little to lift any one person’s spirits (and when you think about it, that is a very good thing.) Here is a redacted anecdote, and then I will tell you what I think the correct reaction to SWS would be. Continue reading →

Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Lean Finely-Textured Beef

Posted on September 17, 2012 by wellsdc

Beef Products, Inc. (or “BPI”) is mad. You may have never heard of BPI, but you have probably heard of their product, lean finely-textured beef (“LFTB”). Of late, LFTB has gained some prominence in the public eye under the slightly more-descriptive name “pink slime.”

BPI is not happy that people in the media are calling their product “pink slime,” and they believe that it is hurting their business. They are therefore doing what we in this country always do: suing.

[BPI] has just filed a defamation (“veggie libel”) lawsuit for $1.2 billion (!) against an amazing cast of characters:

ABC News (owned by Disney)

TV news anchor Diane Sawyer

ABC correspondent Jim Avila

ABC correspondent David Kerley

Gerald Zirnstein , former USDA employee who invented the term “pink slime”

Carl Custer, former USDA employee

Kit Foshee, whistleblower former BPI employee

From what I understand, the concern is not just that the concept of “pink slime” is kind of gross. People have raised health concerns as well, due to questions of ammonia content or something. BPI disputes that the process that involves ammonia poses any danger to consumers.

I get that we cannot expect, as end users in a vast, complex society, to receive our consumer goods in anything much resembling their natural state. We’ve probably all been to Subway or Blimpie and seen the giant cylindrical loaves of turkey (just like the Pilgrims ate!) Continue reading →

This Week in WTF, September 7, 2012

Posted on September 7, 2012 by wellsdc

360px-Schneekranich_Grus_leucogeranus_090501_We_147 – Only about twenty Siberian white cranes remain in the wild. If they don’t migrate soon, it could be bad for them. To encourage them to migrate to their winter habitat, Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to lead them in a hang glider. This is not an Onion headline.

The stunt-prone Russian president will personally pilot a motorized hang glider during a stopover in the far north of the country this week on his way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum in Vladivostok.

There are only 20 Siberian white cranes left in the world. Putin will lead a group of the birds on the first leg of their 5,000-kilometer migration, and, if all goes to plan, they will spend the winter in central Asia.

– The FBI has accused a clerk for a federal district court of leaking sealed indictment information to Armenian street gangs.

– Proving the adage that there can be too much of a good thing, a nurse in England suffered an injury in a fall eleven years ago that caused “a medical condition in which she is constantly aroused.” As it turns out, having more than one hundred orgasms a day for more than a decade can be quite debilitating:

Even the slightest pelvic movement – on a train, in a car, doing domestic chores – can trigger a climax, but the sheer volume has left her tired, in pain and unable to have a normal relationship.

That sounds very bad.

– A college sophomore in Ohio allegedly threatened to slap a cop “across the face with his penis” when the cop confronted him about suspected public urination. He was reportedly drunk which, at least when I was in college, seemed to excuse nearly any sort of boorish behavior (at least in the mind of the drunk person.) (h/t to Bob for this one)

Photo credit: ‘Schneekranich Grus leucogeranus 090501 We 147’ by BS Thurner Hof (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

Please get help if you need it

Posted on August 21, 2012 by wellsdc

“You fly jets long enough, something like this happens” -Viper, “Top Gun”

Tony Scott, director of more than a few legendary Hollywood blockbusters, died Sunday in what by all accounts was a suicide. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, he jumped from a bridge near L.A., leaving several notes behind for his family.

The news has not said much beyond speculation about the reasons why. To a certain extent, it seems like a gross invasion of privacy to delve too deeply into the issue. He reportedly had inoperable brain cancer, but we do not know if that played a role in any way. For whatever reason, he was in pain, and this must have seemed to him to be the best way out.

Over a span of six months in 2011, I lost two friends to suicide. I’ll never know exactly why. I have a sarcastic or snarky responce to nearly everything in life, but this is a subject on which I will never, ever joke. It is something I understand far better than I would like.

Most people would have looked at Tony Scott and seen someone who “had it all,” whatever that might actually mean. He may not have created iconic classics of cinema like his brother, Ridley Scott, but he left behind a memorable body of work. His films included venerable blockbusters like “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” but also the cult classic “True Romance” and the cerebral blockbuster “Crimson Tide.” His lesser-known 1990 film “Revenge,” starring Kevin Costner and Madeline Stowe, left an impression on me when I saw it in high school. It was, as its title would suggest, a story about a man who cuts a path of destruction to save the woman he loves, but it is not a Hollywood love story. It explored the fine line between love and brutality, something Scott would return to in 2004’s “Man on Fire.”

I guess my point in bringing up his filmography is to say that his career had more depth than he may get credit for, particularly with movies that took a pretty stark look at what people do when they are pushed to an edge, like Costner in “Revenge” and Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire.”

However successful a person may be, that tells you little to nothing about what they are thinking or feeling. Suicide is almost never a rational action (allowing for some extreme examples), usually brought on by a sense of desperation or hopelessness. An excellent talk by JT Eberhard from late last year about his own struggles with depression offers the view of someone who went right up to that brink and came back. He sums it up in the perfect way, a point of view I have heard from friends, and one that I can recognize in my own thoughts at certain points in my life. To roughly paraphrase how he described his thought process leading up to his suicide attempt, he said “I didn’t actually want to die, but I wanted it to stop.”

As trite as it may sound, this too shall pass. Please get some help.

National Hopeline Network – 1-800-784-2433
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-799-4889 (TTY – Hearing & Speech Impaired)
Austin-Travis County Mental Health Hotline – (512) 472-HELP (4357), (512) 703-1395 TTY
More Texas and national resources

Don’t take my Thin Mints!!!!!

Posted on July 30, 2012 by wellsdc

I’m the kind of guy who, in the vicinity of a table where someone is selling Girl Scout cookies, is guaranteed to leave the premises with an amount of Girl Scout Cookie boxes equal in value to the total amount of cash on my person just prior to noticing the table of cookies. I was shocked, shocked, to learn that Girl Scout Daisy Troop #2753 in California says it will not be selling cookies anymore:

Who can resist the allure of a girl scout cookie? We all should, says one troop leader and mom of three from southern California. Monica Serratos, troop leader of Girl Scout Daisy Troop #2753, says her troop is opting out of selling Girl Scout cookies this year and will instead celebrate the Girl Scouts 100th anniversary by displaying a “cake” made of fruit at the Orange County Fair on July 27.

Serratos, 31, said she wanted to call attention to the fact that cookies aren’t good for kids who already get too much sugar at school and at home, so she asked other troop parents to talk with their daughters about the issue.

***

Serratos said she also worries about some of the ingredients in Girl Scout cookies, such as palm oil — the production of which leads to deforestation.

Okay, yes, they have a lot of sugar. Some of them have high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. Some of the cookies have mysterious GM ingredients, although I would hope to serve as living proof that eating one’s weight in Girl Scout cookies will not turn you into a betentacled supervillain (that might not be the primary concern of most people where GMO’s are concerned, but it is for me. Don’t judge.)

You have to understand, Girl Scouts, that I am in the “bargaining” stage of the grief process, perhaps tinged with a bit of denial. What can we do to save the cookies? If it is a concern over high fructose corn syrup, couldn’t we just eliminate it from some other part of our diets to balance things out? I almost never drink non-diet soft drinks, minimizing my HFC exposure. I avoid trans fats, too, whenever possible. What if we convinced everyone in the world to stop using shortening in anything but your cookies? Would that balance the scales in childhood health?

Please, just tell me what to do!!!!!!!

Photo credit: ‘US Navy 070609-N-6897L-018 Navy Cargo Handling Battalion 8 assists hundreds of Girl Scouts from Westchester and Putnam counties in New York load more than 33,000 boxes of cookies as part of Operation Cookie Drop’ by U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Lesley Lykins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This is why you shouldn’t smoke, kids

Posted on July 25, 2012 by wellsdc

You shouldn’t smoke, because it’s a bad habit and you set a bad example. In particular, you set a bad example for orangutans.

Via Tecca:

The Satwa Taru Jurug zoo in Indonesia announced that it is launching an intervention for Tori, a 15-year-old orangutan with a smoking problem. The great ape started the habit about 10 years ago by picking up old cigarette butts and imitating the people she saw. After that, zoo visitors began throwing lit cigarettes into her enclosure.

The zoo has decided that it would set additional volunteers to watch Tori’s home and putting up a mesh screen so she cannot reach any cigarettes. She and her mate will soon be moved to an island preserve where she will have even more distance from visitors and possible sources of nicotine. According to The Associated Press, the Center for Orangutan Protection is helping to launch the intervention to stop Tori’s smoking cold turkey and will test how the nicotine has impacted Tori’s health.

Smart ape, asshole visitors. It’s good that they’re getting moved somewhere safer, hopefully where people aren’t quite such…..I mean, who the hell throws lit cigarettes to an ape at the zoo???

Anyway, here’s a video of a monkey playing Angry Birds, sort of.

Cryptic Philosopher

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