I'm totally confused... Not even the husband realized that this woman was not his wife? (And that his wife wasn't leaving the house with him to come to church?) that seems totally implausible. But then, if he knew, why did he bust her? (After two years?) Something doesn't add up.
So I guess the thread will just be a downer about chronic depression.
4: It wasn't satire -- it was just funny. Lighten up people!
Also looking on the bright side -- the woman in the chronic depression article had her breakdowns in some fabulous places!
I think it's a funny pro-Jesus site.
it was just funny.
Really? Huh.
I hope Ms. Pohlig is able to derive some comfort from the fact that she's an insightful and witty writer. It seems inappropriate to smile at parts of an account like this, but that's what I did.
A very good piece; fit to stand next to George Scialabba's on the same subject.
So much worse than anything I've ever experienced, yet even a little D helps to understand a great deal about the world and people's behavior you might otherwise have missed, or misinterpreted.
I found this story about Ms. Hodges car to be pretty funny.
Oh hey I kind of enjoy harrowing accounts of chronic depression. I don't know why! Hopefully it's not that I'm just dysthymic most of the time so it's like reading about the bullet that has been dodged. Anyway, harrowing account of chronic depression, here I come!
I think it's a funny pro-Jesus site.
Now that's satire.
If you want a real mental illness downer the NYT has it covered.
But when her baby was a few months old, she became obsessed with the idea that she had caused him irrevocable brain damage. Nothing could shake her from that certainty, not even repeated assurances from doctors that he was normal...On March 13, 2013, Ms. Wachenheim, 44, strapped her 10-month-old son to her chest in a baby carrier and leapt to her death from the eighth-floor window of her Harlem apartment.
Fortunately her body cushioned the fall for the kid and it sounds like he's fine.
16: I read that story yesterday. T-r-a-g-i-c. It was a roller coaster of an article and ending.
16: Seems odd that the whole story is pegged to post-partum psychosis. Why not just "psychosis." Maybe she hit her head.
The family made it sound like it came out of nowhere but this makes me think her fixation on medical issues wasn't new.
When her siblings or their children had medical checkups, Cindy jotted the dates in notebooks, and called the night before to remind them to fill her in."I think she even kept all those books too, in a shoe box," said her brother, Ron. "People collect stamps; she collected that stuff."
It is. I've had episodic bouts of depression since I was a teenager, have gone through about a half dozen antidepressants with varying degrees of success and side effects, and manage to be functional most of the time. Fortunately, I'm very high functioning when I'm "healthy", so usually I manage to get by even on days when I'm dragging myself out of bed. Like the writer, I've never really been suicidal because, well, the "too lethargic to actually do it" bit rings true, and because I would hate to fail and leave my family to deal with it. I have often thought, though, that things would be better if I were dead. It's not a comfortable thought.
"Last week I had a dream that I had a number of large blisters on my....well, I guess that vagina is as good a word as any. I popped the blisters and out of them came a number of very tiny embroidered sheep. My mom loves sheep, so I collected them all into a little pile and was pleased that I had this nice gift to send to her.
"I'm pretty sure that's not good. Right? I don't see how that can be good."
Actually that dream sounds kind of intriguingly weird. It must have been much more disturbing in the execution than it sounds.
I've always wondered what it's like to be clinically insane.
I mean...nobody has ever said, at least not in a very long time, "in my opinion as a psychiatrist, this man/woman is INSANE." So I wonder what this means. Either the writer is already what she's wondering about, i.e. mentally ill, or...I guess maybe she means psychotic?
...and other comments that are rendered nonsensical by reading a few more sentences before commenting. Never mind.
If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.
This is a thing I have felt.
Trudy is certainly no Martin Guerre.
If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.
Made me think of this
What I completely recognise are Taylor's descriptions of the bin, her stays in Friern and her time at the Pine Street Day Centre and halfway houses. ... When Taylor got to Friern Hospital, the apotheosis of the Victorian asylum, it was already slated for closure. It knew it was dying and had been the subject of public scandals in the late 1960s and the 1970s when patient coercion and abuse were revealed to have been regular occurrences. Taylor got there three years after I'd been for my overnight trip. I remember the famous corridor she describes, the longest madhouse corridor in the country. (I only got halfway down it before I found a linen cupboard with a window to hide in.) Some of the patients who walked up and down its length, very slowly - there were no collisions - looked as if they had been doing it and getting nowhere without anyone noticing for many years.
The other side of all that is the warmth and camaraderie of the bin, which Taylor describes so well. It was a place, she says, where people looked out for each other, and often knew each other's needs better than the staff. In the Maudsley, we played a game after lights out in which we held a nightly 'staff meeting', voices in the dark as we lay in bed, assessing the progress of our experimental treatment of staff who we pretended were patients pretending to be staff. How well had they done that day, what setbacks had we noticed, should we alter our pretend-patient behaviour to improve their treatment? It was a kind of joking, knowing inmate conversation you only find in 24-hour institutions. Taylor describes nurses coming to patients to ask them to help out with someone in a crisis. I remember that, too. People protected each other, for the most part, and laughed a lot in a spirit of embattled camaraderie. It's the only time I've experienced such a powerful feeling of community, however fraught and fragile our relationships might have been. Taylor confirms this without neglecting the other truth: that being an inmate could also be scary, chaotic and threatening.
If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.
Yeah. I was faintly disappointed all the recent GI probings and biopsies came out negative. Now I have to wait for another shoe to drop. Meanwhile, the depression is far more boring than painful; existence is a drag.
You're just like the main guy in this interminable Heinlein novel.
Now I have to wait for another shoe to drop.
Well, you don't have to wait here. Why don't you go out and have some fun? We've got your number, and we'll call you if there's any news.
29: Bizarrely, I'm outraged that you're still reading that book. In a just world, if someone recommended Time Enough for Love for a book club, that person would go to jail.
I'm disappointed to think you could have ever thought it was anyone else.
I mean think about it. I had means -- you could buy that kind of rifle at any department store. I had motive -- I'm easily bored. I had opportunity -- NASA invents time travel in 2045 while trying to perfect the Alcubierre warp drive.