“A Toronto woman denied a flight to New York as part of a cruise trip wants to know how U.S. border agents knew about her history of mental illness.
Ellen Richardson says she was told by U.S. customs officials at Pearson International Airport on Monday that because she had been hospitalized for clinical depression in June 2012, she could not enter the U.S.
…Richardson told CBC News that border guards referenced her 2012 hospitalization, and not her book, in denying her entry into the U.S. At the time, Richardson was told she could only enter the U.S. if a doctor — not her own doctor, but one from a short list of others whom she had never met — signed a document vouching for her. She would also have to pay a fee of $500.
…U.S. border guards are allowed to bar anyone they deem a threat to themselves, others or their property. They have access to police records — including even uneventful encounters with officers — but medical records are supposed to be held in the strictest confidence.”
‘Canadian woman refused U.S. entry because of depression’
For a lot of reasons, I’ve been listening and collecting a lot of electronica and house music lately — actually, it’s pretty much mostly due to the fact they’re my wife’s favourite songs to listen to in the car.
Until we started dating, a little more than four-years ago, I had never really given the genre much of a chance. I once bought a Moby CD. Another time, I think in 1988, I stole my brothers copy of ‘Pump Up The Volume’, by MARRS.
Several years before I met my wife, I bought a Chemical Brothers CD based solely on the recommendation of someone with perky breasts… but it turned out to be a sampler CD, with no actual songs, just random beats. Or something, and she wasn’t that interesting.
The closest I’ve come before now, really, was during my ‘Industrial Phase’… which I’m still kind of in: ‘KMFDM’, ‘Ministry’, ‘Marilyn Manson’, ‘Butthole Surfers’, ‘Lords of Acid’, other crazy German stuff.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself actually tapping my foot at 260-bpm to our new assortment of in-car mixed-CD’s, which includes ‘Avicii’, ‘Swedish House Mafia’, ‘Lorde’, ‘deadmau5’, ‘Hecq’ and even (!) ‘Skrillex’.
.
So… my ‘No Post Day’ challenge, for anyone willing to play along, is:
Go to YouTube, and find a song you shouldn’t like but, for some reason, not only do you like it, you’ll actually turn it up while in the car, bus or subway… then post it in the comments section.
Bonus points: Find one of your all-time favourite songs, and post that as well.
These are two groups I’ve discovered in the past few months… ‘Icona Pop’ and — one of my favourite new finds, ‘A Tribe Called Red’. [YouTube alerts: if you can’t see them, you’ll find them here and here.]
…I’ve lost some of my self-respect by liking this but, fuck it, it’s catchy.
…but then I get it all back by associating myself with this awesome piece of awesome.
I’m having a discussion with my little sister on Facebook right now about conspiracy theories. She’s a “believer” in pretty much everything — chemtrails, fluoride as brain control solution, grand conspiracies involving shadowy forces bent on… stuff. And things.
Right now she’s convinced FEMA is building camps in the United States, for the purpose of enslaving members of the population who dissent… who are on an ‘enemies list’.
It’s a theory — a junk-hoax — that started way back, during the presidency of George W. Bush. At least that’s where I first came across the videos of earnest sounding people talking over earnest looking documentaries showing bland buildings with fences, with a narrative cherry picked from Robert Ludlum novels — which were sent to me by a friend of mine who had, by then, smoked his way into a pot-induced psychosis.
Back then it was a group of mostly far left-leaning, basically mentally ill people who believed that, if GWB lost his reelection bid, the federal government would put aside the election results, and open nation wide FEMA “concentration camps” for anyone on the magic lists.
Now the FEMA camp hoax is being spread by the far-right, who believe the camps are being readied by the Obama government for anyone who complains about health care and gun control laws.
And, somewhere in there, is my sister. Who is not motivated by politics, but by her belief she “sees and feels things average people do not”. Then she kind of accused me of being part of the “Illuminati”.
It’s very difficult for me to have these discussions with her, because she does believe in these hoaxes. She needs to find reasons for her mental state, and believing there are people “Out There” who are controlling her thoughts, makes more sense to her than believing her thoughts lack control because of a mental illness.
She does recognize her diagnosis. She refers to me as her ‘bipolar mentor’, but she has actually been diagnosed with ‘schizoaffective disorder’. She was, and might still be, seeing a psychiatrist. But she doesn’t take medications, she’s convinced having side effects from the them means she’s allergic to them.
The reason it’s difficult for me to have these conversations with her, is it feels like I’m tearing at a fabric she’s wrapped herself in — her ‘safe-place cocoon’. But it’s so hard to watch her — an incredibly intelligent and creative woman — get so lost in an endless maze of other people’s lunacy.
This kind of endless loop of crazy my sister is caught in — all of these hoaxes are so old, and only kept alive by people discovering six-year old YouTube videos for the first time, all over again — can easily be as dangerous as the anti-vaccine people who are bringing back measles, mumps and probably polio.
And just as sickening.
Update: this morning she deleted all of my comments, and added me to her ‘conspiracy theory’ group on Facebook.
Speaking of crazy… my wife and I took our two sons on a two-hour ride through the mountains in Quebec, where I spent most of my early summers.
Our kids, three and seven-years old, lasted nearly 1.5-hours before losing their minds to boredom. But being able to stop and take photos of places I haven’t been in two decades — places with so many memories attached to them, was important for me. And worth having the kids freaking out over whose blankie was whose.
Plus, it’s just a beautiful part of the country…
Every ten miles or so there’ll be three miles of freshly paved road.
Wiki: “It contains rocks deposited before the Cambrian Period 540 million years ago. The Laurentians are the central part of the Grenville orogeny dating back to 1100-1000 mya (million years) ago.” Told you it was old.
One of my favourite things to do, is to just drive up these horrible, horrible roads. Back when they were still hauling logs out of the forest, it was nothing to encounter massive big rigs barrelling over 16% grades, generally right down the centre line. …better than most roller coaster rides.
One of Quebec’s asbestos mines. Quebec is still the world’s largest producer, and exporter of asbestos. Because what the people of India don’t know, surely will never give them cancer by the thousands in ten years. And that’s good for business now.
…closeup of one of Quebec’s asbestos mines. I was pretty sure it was decommissioned, but when we drove by there was definitely something still going on.
This lake is at a crossroads, which has the only gas pump, the only phone booth, and the only restaurant run by tiny, old Italian-immigrant grandmothers for thirty miles.
…this is the church where my parents were married.
This is a shortcut… the people ahead of us were out on the side of the road taking apples from the tree.
Generally the highlights of my summer were the visits to this home…
The farm down the road from my family’s farm…
Every time you think you’re at the top, there’s another hump. These are among the oldest mountains on the planet. Seriously, look it up.
The mountain range is 300 million-years old, but the roads don’t look a day over 250 million-years.
This is the view of the Ottawa River, and Ontario as you’re coming out of the mountains.
One of the easiest things in the world is to dismiss the people who insist on believing in fairies, auras, vaccination and “big pharma” conspiracies, indigo children or the gospel of L. Ron Hubbard as being harmless fringe lunatics.
Not that a belief in one necessitates a belief in the others, it’s just that they’re all equally ludicrous. It’s also equally impossible to engage the believer in polite conversation because, after a few minutes, you’re either slapping your head vigorously trying to understand how someone can be taken in by such… lets call it garbage, or you’ve realized the level of zealotry needed to maintain these beliefs is just going to overwhelm you. So you stop, and just let them go on their way and hope they never date your daughter.
It’s also difficult because they all take it so seriously… there is no humour in the anti-vaccination movement. People do not laugh when they talk about how “indigo” their children are. So you have to stand there, with a serious look on your face, while they go on about “mercury in this” and “lithium orotate that”. And it gets boring. Because those conversations are painful, so you stop engaging with them.
But that’s dangerous. Because if enough people believe this crap, and don’t get their kids vaccinated, then the chances of your kid getting the mumps goes up dramatically. Or they end up as followers of Tom Cruise, and are forced to empty their wallets and never get the medical attention they really, really need.
Or they walk around… lets call it ‘infecting’ their peers and children with the idea that speaking with the dead is a very real occurrence — like, that Sylvia Browne only wants the best for you and your missing loved ones.
Or they say incredibly naive and ignorant crap like, “lithium orotate has value because the FDA refuses to blah blah science is bad”.
So… how do you beat back lunacy, without actually becoming lunatic yourself?
If you’re a genius of satire, like say, Tim Minchin, you write a brilliant beat poem, and have a genius of animation create a movie out of it — a love poem, if you will, to the nearly insane.
Then, if you’re like me — and you’re just slightly too stupid to come up with something so brilliant on your own, and you really need something easy to post in the comment sections on the ‘anti-whatever’ blogs and websites, something that eviscerates these ‘anti-science’ philosophies in ten fairly easy-to-follow-along-with funny minutes — then you post the YouTube version everyone you can. Like here.
To be absolutely fair, over the past 600-words or so, I have been extremely rude and insulting to a lot of people. Including some I do respect, and even love. I have definitely been far more rude than Mr. Minchin’s piece of brilliance, which I’ve posted below. At least it might seem that way. But, honestly, if someone stands in front of you, describing in detail the colour of their aura, or how their child is the beginning of a new race of super-humans, or they’re simply the simple Jenny McCarthy, you need to tell them to just wake the fuck up in a way that isn’t going to either a) start a fight, or; b) prevent you from possibly having sex with them at a later date.
And that’s what Mr. Minchin tries to do with his movie / poem / ode to science and reason. Only he does it with an enjoyable accent, and wit that will leave ‘true believers’ wondering how those cuts appeared.
‘Slate Magazine’ called it “the best critique of alternative medicine ever”. Please, enjoy… and pass it along.
“It is in the nature of luxuries to eventually be taken for granted, and some of the greatest underappreciated luxuries are public health and modern medicine. Thanks to massive vaccination drives, almost no children in the developed world die of measles or mumps. And because these diseases are now so rare, anti-vaccination activists have the luxury of indulging in conspiracy theories. Many of us would have died already if it weren’t for routine medical interventions; we are on our second or third lives. And because death is so much more distant than in the past, some people have a romanticized notion of our place in the natural world. We used to be more in harmony with nature, the thinking goes, and our bodies naturally know how to heal themselves. I have a hard time following the logic—something about auras and herbs and energy fields? It’s utter nonsense, of course—what’s natural is to serve as a host and vector for deadly parasitic microbes.” — Slate Magazine (Sept. 11, 2013): ‘The Best Critique of Alternative Medicine Ever’
“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s views based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!
You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”
‘Tim Minchin, ‘Storm: The Movie’… the official site is here: [link]
Monday Mental Movie Night: ‘Mary & Max’ [link here]
“[Mary & Max] deals with themes including childhood neglect, friendship, the obscurity of life, teasing, loneliness, autism (Asperger syndrome in particular), obesity, depression and anxiety.” — Wikipedia
A very odd, very unlikely animated film from Australia that manages to be sickly-cute, alarmingly grotesque, and right-on at the same time – often in the very same scene.
‘Mary & Max’ review; October 2010, The Guardian
“The risk of developing schizophrenia is about one percent – around the globe. But in the northeast of Finland, the mental disorder occurs three times more frequently than in other parts of the world.
The northern regions are home to remote rural communities, which were founded by about 40 families in total, says Aarno Palotie, a geneticist at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland in Helsinki. He says the communities have a very specific genetic background. [snip]
Researchers have discovered several genes and even regions in the genetic material that influence whether a person develops schizophrenia or not.
Some of the genes group together on chromosome 22. The researchers say that the loss of a gene on chromosome 22 as much as doubles the risk of developing schizophrenia, or another form of cognitive impairment. It’s thought that some of the genes may even join forces, making a person more prone to the schizophrenia.
But the biochemical drivers behind a protein’s actions are often unknown. [snip] “We know in which cellular pathway the protein acts in the cell,” says Stoll. “So at least we know where to look.””
‘Risk of developing schizophrenia rises the farther north you go in Finland’
“In a new study, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai were able to correctly distinguish bipolar patients from healthy individuals based on their brain scans alone most, but not all, of the time.
“Bipolar disorder affects patients’ ability to regulate their emotions successfully, which puts them at great disadvantage in their lives,” said Sophia Frangou, professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
“The situation is made worse by unacceptably long delays, sometimes of up to 10 years, in making the correct diagnosis. Bipolar disorder may be easily misdiagnosed for other disorders, such as depression or schizophrenia.”
Frangou said that is why bipolar disorder ranks among the top 10 disorders worldwide in terms of significant disability. Frangou and her team used MRI to scan the brains of people with bipolar disorder and of healthy individuals. Using advanced computational models, they were successful in correctly separating people with bipolar disorder from healthy individuals with 73 percent accuracy using brain imaging scans alone.”
‘Diagnosis of the Future? Brain Scan Shows Promise in Diagnosing Bipolar’
“A mentally ill, cancer-stricken woman who spent more than 200 days in segregation at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre [Ottawa, Ontario, Canada] is seeking a record amount of damages along with systemic changes to how the province’s jails treat the mentally ill.
Christina Jahn, 43, alleges that staff at the Innes Road jail denied her cancer medication, left the lights on in her cell night and day, took away her mattress, forcing her to sleep on the floor, and shut off water to her cell for days at a time during separate stays in the detention centre in 2011 and 2012.
Jahn, who is dying from breast and bone cancer, has filed her complaints with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal alleging jail staff discriminated against her because of her mental illness and gender. The province currently has a secure correctional treatment centre for mentally ill men, but nothing for women.””
‘Mentally ill woman seeks record amount over treatment at Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre’
“Nearly four years after staff at Toronto’s Saint Michael’s Hospital started slipping an anti-psychotic drug into a woman’s orange juice while treating her for lupus, Ontario’s highest court has tossed aside the ruling that allowed her to be drugged against her will, in part because the psychiatrist who diagnosed her with schizophrenia admitted he was “making parts of [her symptoms] up.” In a sharply worded ruling, the Court of Appeal said there was “no evidence” the woman ever agreed to medication, and overturned the Consent and Capacity Board’s “unreasonable” finding that the woman was mentally incapable of doing so.
“It certainly is a forceful ruling,” said Anita Szigeti, lawyer for the woman, Amy Anten. “It’s important for her personally. In my respectful submission, it’s also very important — and the court appears to have agreed by considering the matter on its merits — to give the Consent and Capacity Board, and also the first appellate level of reviewing court, some guidance on how to really weigh the evidence that goes to the heart of the Charter-protected right of the person against forced treatment.” The judgment clarifies what kind of evidence to prove a person’s incapacity will withstand legal scrutiny, and it reinforces a patient’s right to refuse medication, which the Supreme Court of Canada upheld in 2003.”
‘Ruling says hospital can’t force anti-psychotic drug on patient after questionable schizophrenia diagnosis’
“A new test could have enormous implications for the treatment and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, allowing for the disease to be detected 10 years earlier than the earliest symptoms of the disease manifest themselves. The study, published in the Annals of Neurology, described findings from a spinal fluid test taken from 282 subjects, and the discovery was that those who were asymptomatic patients at risk of Alzheimer’s, and those already suffering from symptoms, had lower levels of mitochondrial DNA.
The study, led by Professor Ramon Trullas at the CSIC Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, tested a hypothesis that a reduction in mitochondrial DNA (often referred to as mtDNA) is connected to Alzheimer’s.”
‘Test may reveal Alzheimer’s in patients 10 years before symptoms develop: study’ [study link: here]
“Autism, Denmark and again no link with vaccines”… an interesting article from ‘Left Brain / Right Brain’, an excellent, independent blog whose “core content and interest has always been autism and the news, science – and bad science – associated with it.” These are the studies quoted in their post: ‘Recurrence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Full- and Half-Siblings and Trends Over Time: A Population-Based Cohort Study’ [Aug. 2013]. and ‘A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism’ [Nov. 2002]
I forgot how vivid my dreams can be when I’m not taking the lithium.
I’ve been off for almost four months now. For ten years lithium carbonate kept me sane. It gave me the base on which to build my recovery from nearly 14-years of untreated manic depression. I was one of the lucky ones, for whom lithium just works.
And it did. But now I’m off it and the dreams have come back. They’re hard to explain, I just don’t have the language to do them justice. But, basically, they’re reality. On the lithium — I also still take a mild dose of seroquel — my dreams were soft. Muted. Short. They went away fairly quickly after I woke up. I could also control them. Direct them.
Off the lithium I get lost in my dreams. Almost every night. They’re new, like books I haven’t read. They feel like they’re going on forever. And, in a weird way, they do.
When I was younger… maybe 23-years old, and absolutely untreated, I had a dream that lasted several sleep cycles, over three days. Then, like now to a certain extent, my sleeping pattern was scattered through the day, a few hours at a time. I used to call refer to it in my writing as ‘unemployed, un-medicated time’.
Time meant nothing, because there were no markers. I lived alone, in a dark room, with no phone. I fell to sleep while it was dark, I woke up when it was dark. Sometimes my girlfriend would show up and we’d have sex or eat pizza.
I’m not quite at that point right now. I don’t think I will be. But the dreaming is similar. Back then, I would wake up, eat, go back to sleep and continue the same dream.
I don’t always know the people in my non-lithium dreams. I don’t always know the places. But, at the same time, I do. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes it’s like seeing the world through a surrogates eyes.
But, mostly, it’s people I know in places I’ve been doing things I would have liked to have done with them. Reliving my life the way it should have gone.
I still remember the three-day dream I had when I was 23, because I wrote it down. It was a surrogate dream… at least in the sense that it never happened, and never could happen. But it felt so real. It felt like… my life.
It was as real to me when I woke up as any memory I have of anything I’ve done today while awake. But, at the same time, I understood that it was complete… here’s where I lose the words. It wasn’t nonsense, it was important to me. It was like my brain was teaching me a lesson, asking questions that I needed to answer at the time. It was allegory… or allegorical.
Mostly the dreams are conversations. Just talking. There’s no flying cars, or burning buildings or superheroes. They’re just me and some other people talking. Or me watching people talking. Or a surrogate talking to other people. They’re interesting, they’re something I want to go back to… I want to be asleep, lost in my head, instead of doing anything else.
I’m also sleeping during the day a lot more often. My schedule, since stopping the lithium, has slowly started to revert back to the way it used to be… up until 3am, sleep until 1pm. Only now, with the boys, I have to be up at 8am to make sure they have breakfast and get to school on time. Eventually I’ll slip, be up too late, have to stay up to get the boys up, and then I’ll have reverted completely. It’s coming, I can feel it.
Especially with ‘winter time’ coming (re: dark later in the AM, earlier in the PM).
So my sleep pattern, even though I’m mostly still treated, is back to the broken pattern it used to be. Which is not good. One of the main tools in my recovery was getting decent sleep. The seroquel got me to sleep by shutting off my brain long enough for it to happen, and the lithium kept the dreams less vivid… which was more restful.
See? I’m losing the words here. Which is also a side effect of being off the lithium for the first extended time in a decade. I’m taking a substitute now, in Canada it’s marketed as ‘Epival’, in the UK, US and other places it’s also known as ‘Depakote’.
I’m not at the ‘therapeutic level’ yet, but I am close and dosing fairly high at 1500mgs. Not having a safety net is frustrating and makes me nervous. I am running ‘high’, or manic-lite, I know that. I can feel it. It feels very much like an engine that has been fine tuned but now the RPM needle can’t get out of the red.
And an engine can only run like that for so long before the nuts start falling off…
"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style." ~Maya Angelou
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