On second thought, we have a family member who perceives things that cannot be seen, so #7 may be more indicative of mental illness than enlightenment . . .

Slate has some advice.

Here’s how it’s done at USC.

Fight On!

More details are emerging on the crazy naked woman with a gun case . . .

Not surprisingly, despite a neighbor’s assertion that Kevin and Joni Park “were not violent or crazy,” it turns out that they were in fact violent and crazy.

Continue reading OK, So They Were Violent and Crazy

A friend of a friend has started dating a guy with a history of mental problems, including an in-patient hospitalization.

That should be exciting.

Some guys are boring. Me, for example. My wife tells me all the time how boring I am . . .

I remember a few years ago, a woman came over to clean our house — a white woman, which is unusual in Southern California. She was telling my wife that her alcoholic ex-husband was in jail, as a result of which, she wasn’t getting any financial support from him and had to take up house cleaning to make some money.

Now that’s excitement! You hook up with a guy who you don’t know if or when he’s going to be home, how drunk he’s going to be when he gets there . . . maybe he’ll end up in jail and you can spend your life cleaning other people’s toilets to keep your head and your kids’ heads above water.

Me on the other hand — like I said, I’m boring. I roll my ass out of bed every morning in a very predictable manner and head off to work. I come home directly afterwards without stopping off at any of the local watering holes. I provide a predictable income stream. On evenings and weekends, I’m available for family activities.

So I’m boring, but I like to think of myself as boring in a good way. Boring is not always bad, and exciting is not always good, particularly if it involves being institutionalized in some fashion . . .

Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On the surface it is an innocent world, but on closer examination by our group of experts we find a forest where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated.

— “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne”

The authors recommend, for example, that Winnie-the-Pooh be medicated for ADHD, inattentive subtype:

I take a
PILL-tiddley pom
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom,
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom
Not
fiddling.

Additional diagnoses and treatments are offered for Pooh’s fellow forest denizens, most of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for serious mental disorders.

My son’s on spring break and my wife — a moderately functional paranoid schizophrenic — is taking a day off to spend some time with him.

Continue reading Notes from the Asylum

1. Is it thrilling?
2. Is it a game I can win?
3. Does it hurt others?

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . .

— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness.

Continue reading Sports Parents Are Ruining the World

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.

— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 95

Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy.

— Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, chap. v. 2

My wife is schizophrenic. She’s mostly functional, but she’s crazy.

I always feel like someday things are going to get better, even though they never do.

Does that make me an optimist?

My boy is doing a school report on Patrick Henry. Something I didn’t know about Patrick Henry is that his wife went insane in 1771 and was subsequently kept in a straitjacket in the basement of the family home.

Continue reading Patrick Henry’s Crazy Wife in the Basement

‘There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science.’

‘Which?’

‘Ignorance and madness.’

— Anatole France, Thaïs

Abandoned buildings give me a weird feeling. Where are the people? Where’d they go?

• Dark Passage
• Modern Ruins Photographic Essays
• New England Ruins

Continue reading Abandoned

Depression occurs in up to 10 percent of youth, and 1,883 10- to 19-year-olds killed themselves in 2001. Some 1.8 million teenagers attempted suicide that year, a quarter of them requiring medical attention, according to Columbia University scientists . . .

— CNN.com, “FDA issues suicide caution for antidepressants”

Out of 1.8 million attempts, only 1,883 successes?! What methods are they employing to get a success rate of 1 in 1,000?

That’s not very good . . .

More whittling away at logic and critical thinking . . .

WASHINGTON (AP) — Patients on some popular antidepressants should be closely monitored for warning signs of suicide, the government warned Monday in asking the makers of 10 drugs to add the caution to their labels.

— CNN.com, “FDA issues suicide caution for antidepressants”

Continue reading Less Than Zero

From a company newsletter:

[Insert woman's name here] is quite a rescuer. She started with animals and now has six dogs, 13 cats and a rabbit. Last fall, she decided to extend her caretaking talents to children by becoming a foster parent. She and her partner, [Insert another woman's name here], are foster parents to 7- and 9-year-old children and expect to take in several more soon. In fact, the two recently added on to their house to accomodate the growing family.

Continue reading Lesbian Rescue Fantasies

IRVINE — A mentally disturbed man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two workers and slashed three other people at an Albertsons before police shot and killed him Sunday.

— Orange County Register, June 30, 2003

Banzai!

Continue reading Another Reason I Let My Wife Handle the Grocery Shopping

“Healing power of sports” nonsense thoughtfully refuted:

If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die . . .

— Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”

According to Slate, if NRA president Charlton Heston does in fact develop full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, California state law would compel him to surrender his firearms.

Continue reading Ironic Twist of the Year Award

“Poor people! They had tried to keep their ignorance of the world from themselves by calling it the pursuit of heavenly things, and then shutting their eyes to anything that might give them trouble.”

— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Related Links

• Transcript of Andrea Yates’ confession
  This is very, very sad and hard to forget. You may want to just skip it.

Entertainment for mental patients

I was a student at Cal State Fullerton in 1976 when Ed Allaway went berserk, shooting nine of his co-workers in the university library, killing seven.

Continue reading Crazy Eddie’s Movie Reviews