The Wall Street Journal has published an informative article A Doctor’s Fight, More Forced Mental Health Care, on new legal and health care delivery trends targeted at those diagnosed with severe mental illness. The man behind the changes is Dr. Torrey, and his main line of argument is that forced treatment keeps those with mental illness from acting out violentally and thus makes for a safer society. The artlice could have given more ample voice to those who oppose these laws. But it does give a sense of the stakes and the ethical problems behind forced drugging.

Since WSJ requires subscription, you can find portions of the article here

If you want to look after the health of your house rodents, do make sure to eat organic food, and leave them lots of crumbs.

So if your eldely parent all of a sudden loses a ton weight, and sh/e is not on some crazy low carb weight loss diet, or has some other medical condition, there is a chance, according to a very preliminary study, that weight loss can presage alzheimers . I know, I know the data looks shaky and weight loss can indicate a panopoly of conditions, but this stikes home because my mom lost massive weight before she got alzheimers and then as it her percpetual disturbances and memory degraded, she lost even more weight.

She went from around 135-140 pounds to 120 and then dropped to 114, 110, and has stablized at 104 for over a year now. She sometimes strikes as a walking corpse at least to those who knew here in the past. I sometimes feel like people look at me like I withold food from her but in fact she eats and can’t seem to put on weight.

She was eating a ton during the first drop in weight while I cannot say what happened during the second. I then also lived with when she reached 104, stuffing her with all sorts of food and lots of fat, but her weight never budged.

I bet such dramatic weight lost over the course of what seemed only like months, cannot be all that good for you. I know that fasts/hunger strikes can lead to brain damage, in part because of near total lack of the vitamin Bs. I wonder if such quick and dramatic weight loss even if spread a bit over timecan act somewhat like a prolonged mini-fast, speeding up the degradation of the brain because of lack of essential vitamins and such. I am sure it indicates some sort of malabsorption but for a doc of the brain to think of digestion is like sunbathing, along the lake, in Chicago, in Feburary, during the middle of an ice-storm.. Not likley.

Anyway, interesting stuff and if anything

So today my order of sinus busterarrived in the mail. When I returned from the humid heat of PR to the dry heat of my apt, which I think has pipes directly connected to hell, my sinuses protested in despair. I think I am over the worst of it but while my sinuses were raging in pain, I first tried rinsing my sinuses with cayanne and water and then I decided to opt for something a *little* less intense, which is where the sinus buster comes in. So far I have nothing to say about it except that it felt much better going up my nostrils than my homemade concoction. If you do a google search on sinus buster there is tons of hype that seems a bit fishy to me so I will report back if the stuff does any good (or damage).

So, I have some pretty strong views about health and nutrition but I keep most views to myself.

But if there is something that I will be preachy about, it is mercury and fish. My suggestion is really look into it, because all reports is that fish is filled to the gills with mercury and if you eat enough fish, the effects are nothing to be jumping for joy about.

Look, if the FDA has warned that pregnant women should limit fish consumption to less than two servings a week, you know that there IS a significant amount of mercury in fish.

Mercury poisoning can cause serious health problems, and now researchers are looking with more seriousness into the connection between mercury and chronic illness

Mad About Mercury

By Pat Hemminger, Common Ground. Posted September 15, 2004.

Last April, at the first federally sponsored symposium on mercury and public health, Dr Jane Hightower of San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center presented some alarming findings: nine out of 10 Bay Area residents who ate fish regularly had elevated blood-mercury levels and associated health complaints.

“People are having symptoms just like the hatters,” says Hightower alluding to the 19th and early 20th century “mad hatters” who were exposed to mercury nitrate used to process fur pelts. “They have weakness, headache, stomach upsets, hair loss, allergy symptoms, and there’s a question of autoimmune disease.”

Hightower is not the only medical professional who is worried about mercury. Recently, many Bay Area physicians have begun questioning their patients about fish intake and measuring blood-mercury levels. Dr. Laurie Green of the Pacific Women’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Medical Group now asks her patients to record not only what fish they eat but how much: “I’ve been astounded at how many patients have high mercury levels and underestimate their fish intake,” she writes. Green was amazed to discover “how much better they feel once they cut out the contaminated food.”

It is good to see that the ill effects of mercury are being addressed outside of the alternative health community. If you are interested in this this site no mercury has great up to date information.

Somehow I find it hard to beleive that if you quit smoking by the time you are 35 (and you don’t have a charred set of lungs/heart when you quit), you won’t suffer any ill effects of smoking… Indeed our bodies can be amazing regenerating machines of miraculous proportions but as someone who sucked on cigarettes pretty consistently for 6 years, I still can’t believe that all that smoke, tar, metals, pesticidies, fillers, and whatever else is in those white sticks has not severely damaged my body…

But I take the news as good and transfer it as a subliminal message (ok not so subliminal) to dmh, you have less than 10 years and you might as well try now

As stunning is that I discovered a brand of chocolate that is so yummy that without disgust, I can actually eat it unswettened.

Since I no longer eat sugar (long story but believe it or not, sugar was much harder to quit than smoking), and since I lust for chocolate, I have been on a quest to find a brand of unsweetened chocolate that I could actually enjoy as is or mix with a little bit of stevia.

These chocolate makers based in Berkeley even made a chocolate perfume!. Hmmm I am not so sure I want to smell like a “walking chocolate bar” (which they think of as: “Lush, rich and primal, CACAO is the ultimate hedonistic gift for men and women”) but you never know, it could smell really divine….

Yet again I am in the throes of quitting caffeine. I have sort of resigned myself to the fact that I will probably never quit for good until at least I have the time to really take the months and months it might need to get my mental sharpness back. I have quit caffeine 2 other times in the recent past and even after like 2 months I felt mentally so much slower and duller. Just one cup can give it all back. For now I just quit to give my liver a short break from what I have decided is a damn powerful drug.

Given the dullness, all I was able to do today was lounge around the house as the rain poured reading what is really a remarkable book, a large portion of which is also about drugs. More specifically it was about the effect of psychiatric drugs on the mind and the murky and downright ethically questionable relationship between the pharmaceutical companies, drug trails, and doctors. The book is Mad in America by Robert Whitaker. Anyone who is on psychiatric drugs, knows someone on them, or is just generally interested in this issue should go and buy a copy of this book that will leave you depressed, angry, and disgusted at the mental health profession even if you are already pretty depressed, angry, and disgusted as I am. I did not think I could get any more upset but alas, that is not the case.

The book catalogues the treatment of the mentally ill in America from the 1800s onwards noting how societal currents and economic and professional interests have shaped a field that has more often than not been one of severediscipline and punishment instead of healing and care. Whether it was fueled by eugenic theories of human beings (which legitimated such practices as electroshock therapy, lobotomies, and forced sterilizations), the sickening hubris of a professional group looking for legitimacy in a field in which “the real and the good” means medication, or the profit seeking of large pharmaceuticals who will skew clinical trails to paint rosy pictures of a “new” schizophrenia medication that reaps enormous profits thanks to patent protections, the psychiatric profession in America has been one of negligence, explicit torture of patients during medical trials, bad science, secrecy, and loathsome practices. Yet this pathetic and dangerous history has been hidden well behind the cloak of “science and medicine.” Whitaker unveils a portion of this history though you get the sense there is a lot more hidden.
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Now I know why there are less women on the web, blogging, and doing other cool shit–> Domestic Labor. I am here in PR helping out my mom who is sick with a rare form of alzheimers called posterior cortical atrophy. We did not know what was wrong with my mom for a long time and it was a New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks who writes about strange and rare neurological conditions that made us realize what was going on with my mom.

PCA is a form of alzheihmers (so they think because really it seems like so little is known about it in the first place) in which your spatial coordination is basically short circuited. She can see functionally but she cannot act and behave as if she can see because her sense of space and spatiality is pretty much warped.

It means that I have to do a lot for her right now although she has developed little tricks to help her get by. She functions a lot through memory, knowing for example that all the forks are in the first drawer. She has to feel around a lot for things and is oriented a lot by color which she already tended to love. It is sad though as my mom was such a spatial visual person especially in the last twenty years when she turned to art during her own mid-life crisis. A real tragedy for someone who already has had a pretty tragic life.

As I care for her (and she is still functional enough to do a lot of things on her own but can’t do some basic things at times, like use a phone), and cook and do some of the cleaning in the house, it has really made me see how hard domestic labor is. It is especially harder when you are supposed to manage the lives of others, usually a mother having to manage a lot of details about the kids, and other things like keeping up the house which is a lot more than cleaning I am discovering.

Frankly, I am wiped from it all and also disturbed from this experience of parenting before being a parent. Domestic labor and parenting are forms of labor that are so under-valued and kept well hidden as significant yet the world would fall to pieces if it were not for it. Wall street could vanish and life would go on. Care giving in whatever form is essential.

It makes me mad to think of of all the women who labored at home and never got much recognition for it all the while money was usually kept in the hands (or at least managed) by the supposed bread winner. One can win bread only if the wife is at home baking the damn bread or at least buying it and doing a lot more.

Also, working mothers who have no hired help at home probably have it way worse. I think that though men more than ever are partaking in the domestic sphere, women, by default take up most of the domestic slack. They just get fed up with having to hound a partner about help or feel at some commonsense cultural level that that is their duty do do the bulk of the work so they end up doing more of the house work.

Doing serious “learning” and “creating” type work, whether it is writing, programming, networking, music, requires chunks of focused time. Domestic labor and duties really take away from that sort of time that is needed to really delve deep into something. I am feeling the brunt of it now, tired after a day of like a million small little errands and cooking. Even blogging feels hard. A lesson learned though, that is for sure.

There are a couple of new beginnings ahead of me. One is technical. I am learning LaTeX, the word along which used to cause me great fear and angst because I have been told by every other geek that I MUST write my dissertation in LaTex. They are right. It rocks and though I have a waysSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS to go, I am seriously contemplating using it. I mean, it makes your work look way better than it is! Like I converted my IRC talk into a pdf using LaTeX and it looks so much better.

Otherwise, my life is rightside up and upside down as I try to get out of SF to get to Puerto Rico. I am anxious to go because my mother has been sick for a long time and I have felt out of sorts being so far not knowing really how she is doing in that in your face sort of way. So I leave SF with both saddness and happiness for PR which I anticipate with the same mixture of heightened, contradictory emotions. I am tired from months of the anticipation of arranging my life so I can go home for a long period of time. I am not sure how I will react to my mother’s illness although I also know that being there is where I am supposed to be.

Illness clarifies so much about the human condition and the social condtion that it is a shame that we tend to hide or privatize illness. I think of it as one of the greatest teachers and humanizers. I feel very lucky that I can go home for a long period of time and think about how constrained most people are to jobs so that when illness befalls a family member, there is not much choice one has but to quit a job if one wants to spend time with a person. There is just very little room to make accomodations for people with illness and those around them in this society.

And as much as I can’t stand utopian rhetoric around the net, I do think that when it comes to the experience of illness, net technologies are a great facilitator in so many dimesions that it scares me to think of a net that is any less accessible and user friendly. That is, my politics to equalize access, support community, to promote user-friendliness, is largely derived from a year when I was sick, nearly home-rideen for 6 of those months. I was glued to the net. It was a place to go when I could literally not go out of the house much and it was one of the most significant factors to help me figure out what was wrong with me. And it was truly amazing to have full fledged, fullfilling interaction all the while I felt that my body was failing me. When you are so sick, it is hard not to feel like you are at war with yourself, engaged in an existential battle trying to figure out, what am I? My body, my mind, my self, my emotions. Abstract philisophical contemplation seems so aburd as you struggle through those questions with fevers and fatigue.

There is a lot of anger that emerges often directed at your failing body, while you struggle to heal it and define the self in relation to the out of roder chaos. Sharing this experience with others is a way to get over the personal war. You see and hear and share the stories of others which makes you realize that your body is not just attacking you but that illness is franlky part of the human condition write large, that there is somehting to learn from it and it is more than just you and your body even if that is a reality that should never be denies And then the experience of interacting with others in ways that are pretty intimate given the bodily details of illness and its emotional counterparts, you realize that even if there are limits placed on you, it is not social death, a very important reminder when you are so ill. It is one case on the net in which denial of the physical body is a good thing and it is a denial that teach you that you really are not just your physical body.

So, I don’t think I have ever written about my thoughts on mental health and psychiatry here on my blog and I won’t tonight because my bed beckons. But I wanted to let local San Franciscans know that there is a very very interesting event, the Alternative Mental Health Conference happening this Saturday on 16th at Church street. They have some really good speakers lined up and it is free (so money is no exuse not to go).. They hold this event to coincide with the American Psychiatric Association yearly meeting being held at the Moscone center this weekend. The mind freedom folks will protest against the APA on Sunday.