Am I Crazy? A New Mental Health Direction for The Blog

[ned_vizzini]

Since it started... I don't know when... in 2004?... I've had this blog be about two things:

1. self-promotion
2. funny stories from my life

But for the last six months, I've been building up to a switch. I have to start writing about mental health.





Can't be helped. Going to the psych hospital and coming out and writing It's Kind of A Funny Story has been the most important experience of my life. And since then I've come in contact with so many suffering people that I think it would be, frankly, irresponsible of me not use my (very small) soapbox to help as many folks as I can. Besides which, there are simply fascinating things happening in--

• science
• culture
• medicine

--that will, in the next decade, have a profound effect on those of us who are certifiably just a little bit crazy. I truly believe that in the 2010s, we can:

1. get the stigma out of mental illness
2. get society at large to understand its enormous costs
3. take real steps toward keeping people from contracting it (and yes, that's the right word).

And shit, that'd be a big deal. Would it be like curing polio? No. I recognize that. But would it be like the successes of the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement?

Absolutely.

So, if you don't care about mental health--if you're here because you read Teen Angst? Naaah... or Be More Chill and you want to hear the funny stories (I can't imagine you came for the self-promotion)--I hope you can warm up to it. But don't worry, I can't keep from telling funny stories too (like the one that starts below). I haven't been able to stop since I did it in grade school to keep people from making fun of me. So that's always going to be a MAJOR part of things. My goal, ultimately, is to combine the two--funny stories about mental health with a purpose.



Last night, when I started writing this entry, I just couldn't get into it. I was all distracted reading about David Icke, the immensely popular "Illuminati" and "New World Order" author of such books as:

1. Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expose of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free
2. Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster
3. Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race has Controlled the World for Thousands of Years-and Still Does


Icke's bio is fascinating: he went from a sportscaster in Britain to a Gaea-oriented speaker for the Green Party to one of the world's leading conspiracy theorists, right up there with the Prison Planet guy (Alex Jones' Prison Planet.com: The Earth Is Being Turned Into A Prison). Here's what really puts him over the top, though: he believes that the enforcers of the Global Elite that naturally controls the world are called the Prison Warders, and, in 1999, he...

"...identified the extraterrestrial Prison Warders as reptilians from the constellation Draco. They walk erect and appear to be human... They have cross-bred with humans, which has created 'hybrids' who are 'possessed' by the full-blooded reptilians..."

And so, of course, there's a whole reptilian subculture, which holds that pictures like this--



--prove that world leaders are reptilian shape-shifters. (I admit that's some strange coloring on Bubba's neck.)

But what I like most about Icke is that he's articulate and passionate about his views. In this video, on British TV, he makes the guy who doesn't believe in shape-shifting reptiles look like a fool. You have to respect that--same way I respect Mike Huckabee for voicing his honest, if wrong, views on creationism. I think you have to respect honesty and conviction no matter how crazy somebody seems. (Although that brings up some interesting questions when you get to, say, Hitler.) Besides, Icke is making tons of money selling out his speeches around the world.

And he's given me a huge gift for when I get depressed. No matter how down I ever get, there is no way that text like this will not make me laugh:

Icke is the author of several books that (in a nutshell) essentially maintain that an elite cabal of shape-shifting, child molesting, human sacrificing, Satan worshipping, lizard-aliens are currently engaged in a conspiracy to centralize power and enslave the human race.

But Icke isn't a mental health issue. Not really. And so when I started writing about him I wondered if I was really going to be able to do this. I just couldn't get motivated to write about any of the genuinely fascinating things I've found on mental health lately.

Then I read this:



I Know What You Did Last Math Class

"A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children."
-- NYTimes, May 4, 2008

This article from the Times Magazine is a somewhat cursory report on a slew of new software programs that allow parents to monitor their children's performance in school IN REAL TIME. As their children receive grades throughout the day--not just quiz and test results, but daily fluctuations in class ranking--they get the results sent to them on their cell phones, Blackberries, and, if they're hopelessly slow, their computers. Then, when the kids come home, they can have their DAILY school performances shoved in their faces, marked up in red for wherever they've underperformed.

This is sick and it is going to send many young people into mental hospitals.

Let's take a look at some of the quotes from the article:


• "[At the end of the school day,] Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation [of her children]: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test? Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: 'Tell me about this grade,' she will say."
• "Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred. 'I tell my son, "What you do as a freshman will matter to you as a senior,"' Mrs. Dobbins said. '"It will haunt you or applaud you."'"
• "[O]ne Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market."

We already have tremendous stress in this country on our high school students due to what the Times correctly identifies as a "devastatingly competitive" college admissions environment. (Which is a whole nother issue: that admissions environment has been created in large part by a college prep industry that preys on fear.) Now we need this? Let's just talk about depression here. There are myriad things that we don't know clinical depression, but among the things we do now...

Stress causes depression.

It's not the only thing that causes it, but it has been shown by study after study to be a major factor. Take a 2007 experiment that was done by Rosanne M. Thomas, Gregory Hotsenpiller, and Daniel A. Peterson. (I think it's important to bold these people's names, and not to immediately follow their names with "...at So-And-So University." When you do that, you draw attention immediately away from them and to their school. ["Wow, this one was done at Harvard?"] We should focus on the people themselves. Thomas, Hotsenpiller, and Peterson are important. They, along with all the folks in the lab who helped them, are helping us try and stop people from contracting mental illnesses. Think of them as important writers. Where do they work? They work at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago, just like I work in Brooklyn.)

Anyway, this experiment is incredible and sad. The authors took young Sprague Dawley rats--



--and put them in situations where they were threatened and stressed by older rats. They discovered that the young rats' brain cells in the hippocampus began to die. They generated just fine in the immediate term but died shortly after. The hippocampus has been shown to play a major role in depression, most likely not as a coincident effect, or a result, but as a cause.

The correspondence here is what I find so sick.


= parents
+
= children
= brain damage

That really how it's supposed to be?

The companies that provide the real-time child-monitoring grade-reporting services mentioned in the Times article are:

1. Edline
2. ParentConnect, owned by Pearson
3. Pinnacle Internet Viewer, by Excelsior Software -- recently purchased by GlobalScholar.com.
4. PowerSchool
I encourage you to email or call these organizations and tell them that their businesses are damaging American children (and yes, children, not high school kids--the Times mentions 4th graders being monitored by these programs).

Here are relevant contact numbers and emails:

Edline
312.346.9900 (Corporate)
email form

Pearson, owners of ParentConnect
general contact

Global Scholar (new owners of Pinnacle Internet Viewer)
877-824-4040 (appears to be a sales number, so...
GlobalScholar.com
10900 NE 4th Street, #900
Bellevue, WA 98004)
email form
list of management team

PowerSchool
(916) 288-1600

Do I sound like a nut? I probably sound like a nut. But you know what nuts do? They start their own ORGANIZATIONS. Maybe it's time to do that. And you have to remember--if David Icke can do it, there's really no limit to where nuttiness can take you.



[David Icke's forums - as of 3:09:19pm EST, May 5, 2008, 1052 users logged in and viewing]

Thanks for reading.