Wilson has always been interested in mental aberrations. Indeed, as a child he had a “processing disorder,” as he has called it. He was slow to read and slow to learn, and he had a terrible stutter.
.. So it’s easy to see why Nijinsky’s condition, which is thought to have been schizophrenia, would have attracted him—as would Nijinsky’s profession.
.. Wilson also had the ideal star: Mikhail Baryshnikov. What a trick! To get the foremost male ballet dancer of the late twentieth century to portray the foremost male ballet dancer of the early twentieth century.
.. What it would need is an actor-dancer of extreme subtlety, which is what Baryshnikov, in his late-sixties, had become.
.. the show’s seventy minutes, there are more than three hundred lighting cues.
When the Body Attacks the Mind
A physiological theory of mental illness
Dalmau provided meticulous proof that the immune system could attack the brain. The development of a test for the disorder, and the fact that very sick patients could recover with treatment, prompted a wave of interest in autoimmune conditions of the central nervous system. In total, scientists have identified about two dozen others—including dementia-like conditions, epilepsies, and a Parkinson’s-like “stiff person” syndrome—and many experts suspect that more exist.
.. Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy.
.. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system.
.. Studies suggest that about one-third of people diagnosed with depression have high levels of inflammation markers in their blood. Scientists have posited that the malaise and lethargy of depression may really be a kind of sickness behavior, an instinct to lie low and recover that, in its proper context—infection or illness—aids survival.
.. Other researchers have found that aspirin, perhaps the oldest anti-inflammatory drug around, may be helpful as an add-on therapy for schizophrenia.
.. But “psychosis is like a fever,” she said. “It’s a symptom of a lot of different illnesses.”
Ulysses (novel)
the judge stated that literature should serve the need of the people for “a moral standard”, be “noble and lasting”, and “cheer, console, purify, or enoble the life of people”.[37]
.. That style has been stated to be the finest example of the use of stream-of-consciousness in modern fiction, with the author going deeper and farther than any other novelist in handling interior monologue.[39]This technique has been praised for its faithful representation of the flow of thought, feeling, mental reflection, and shifts of mood
.. Joyce uses metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole work
How to Fix a Broken Mental-Health System
Congress has a chance to overhaul the provision of care, making treatment more available to those who desperately need it.
.. Every day, when I am walking to work, or just walking through the streets of downtown Washington, I encounter homeless people on the street. The homeless cover many categories, but prominent among them are those with serious mental illnesses. They know no boundaries of race or education; there was a prominent story last year in the Washington Post of a homeless man with schizophrenia who told a judge that he didn’t need a lawyer, that he was a lawyer. When the judge reacted with bemused skepticism, the man informed the judge—accurately—that they had been in the same class at Harvard Law School (which also included Chief Justice Roberts!)
.. our focus has been far more on less serious illnesses like anxiety and depression than on the most serious mental illnesses, and our deep and understandable concern about civil liberties has gone too far when it comes to those who either don’t recognize they are ill or have deep psychoses. For them, freedom of choice can mean homelessness, jail, or worse.
.. 90 percent of beds in state hospitals have been eliminated, leaving only the streets, jails, or prisons for those with serious mental illness.
.. But they face another problem—getting adequate reimbursement from insurance companies—including from Medicaid and Medicare. Thanks to the yeoman efforts of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, along with Pete Domenici, the law provides for parity in insurance coverage for mental-health and physical-health services, a provision that was underscored in the Affordable Care Act. But as lots of people who have tried to get reimbursement from their providers for psychiatric care could attest, parity in theory and in practice are two different things. And even where providers cover the services, the reimbursement rates are often well below what is provided for physical health issues.
.. The best hope for the Stabenow-Blunt bill is to incorporate it into the opioid-crisis bill now in a conference committee