Going Public With the Private

In the past week, I've heard Kay Jamison and Judith Werner speak, and yesterday I read the preview of a New York Times Magazine article by Daphne Merkin-- it will be published on Sunday. So I'm trying to figure out what draws these three events together, and all these people talk about there personal feelings in a public forum.

Kay Redfield Jamison is a scholar of bipolar disorder--- she co-authored the textbook on it. She moved from the academic world to the popular world when her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, was published in 1995-- with this she described her personal struggles with bipolar disorder. Dr. Jamison spoke on "Uses of Adversity" and part of her talk included mention of her personal struggles-- the idea that personal suffering can be the fuel for creative endeavors.

Yesterday, I heard New York Times blogger, Judith Warner, speak. Ms. Warner writes Domestic Disturbances, a blog about family life, and is the author of Perfect Madness: Parenting in the Age of Anxiety. Ms. Warner talks about the differences she noted in parenting when she moved from France to the United States, and talks quiet openly about what it's like to be the mother of two pre-teen daughters. She talks about the loneliness and isolation of being an American mom, of the crazy busy lives we struggle with. And she talks about her relationships with her daughters and with her own mother.

Both women are captivating speakers, and there is something very compelling about someone who talks openly about their own struggles.

So I didn't hear Daphne Merkin speak)....but do check out her on-line, to-be-published account of her episode of major depression in A Journey Through Darkness. Everything about Merkin's writing is hard-- she has an edge to her, one I don't always find to be sympathetic, but in this piece she simply oozes pain.

My Three Shrinks Podcast 43: How Doctors Think

[42] . . . [43] . . . [44] . . . [All]

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The Benzo Wars are over now, and podcast #43 is much more dispassionate and level-headed. Later this week, we'll also put out podcast #44, with the head of Johns Hopkins Psychiatry, Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo.

The three of us have been busy with other things, so we apologize for not getting these podcasts our more regularly, but please keep coming back for more.

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March 18, 2008: #43

Topics include:

• My Three Shrinks: The Book. We've been talking about writing a book which explains how psychiatrists go about thinking about approaching problems, such as selecting medications or diagnosing illness. We are debating about how to format the chapters in the book. One option is for each of us to write individual chapters about various topics. Another is to maintain the conversational tone so that we each would have some back-and-forth commentary within each chapter. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or email us.
  
  
• NYT: Time Off From Electronics. Mark Bittman had an article in last week's New York Times called "I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really." The article talks about forgoing today's electronic trappings for one day each week, similar to some business' "email-free Fridays." No cell phone. No voicemail. No Blackberry. No internet. This provoked anxiety for Dinah (and "what's the point" from Clink and me), who speculates further about "internet addiction" and the risk of death by videogame. Addiction vs compulsion.
  
  
• PT: Why Psychiatrists Should Read the Humanities. Clinkshrink discusses a Psychiatric Times article from the Feb 2008 issue by Cynthia M.A. Geppert, suggesting that more humanities should be taught to medical students and residents. Dinah remembers my first blog post about Tom Cruise.
  
  
• Female Sociopaths in Literature. Clink lists a number of female sociopaths portrayed in operas, books, and other literary works.
  
  
• Brain Maturation Delayed in ADHD. Also in the Feb 2008 issue of Psychiatric Times is this article by Arline Kaplan, describing research suggesting that the brains of kids with ADHD mature a little later than others, bringing into question the medication treatment of this disorder, rather than more behavioral and "tincture of time" methods.
  
  
• How Doctors Think, book by Jerome Groopman MD. Dinah is reading this now and notes that Dr Groopman chose not to discuss how psychiatrists think, because this is "beyond [his] abilities." (We really need to get our book written.)
  
  
• How Psychiatrists Think. Once again, we are starting a book and would like some feedback from our listeners and readers. The question is about the style of writing. Option 1 would be for each of us to take on topics and write a short (1-5 pages) chapter on a given topic. Option 2 would be for each of us to chime in within each topic/chapter, thus more resembling a discussion. Option 1 is more traditional. Option 2 would sound more like our podcast, at the risk of confusing the reader about who is "talking" at any given point.
  
  Email us with your thoughts about these options at mythreeshrinksATgmailDOTcom.
  

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Find show notes with links at: http://mythreeshrinks.com/. The address to send us your Q&A's is there, as well (mythreeshrinksATgmailDOTcom). This podcast is available on iTunes (feel free to post a review) or as an RSS feed. You can also listen to or download the .mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. Thank you for listening.

The Villainess

I'm back. This may be the longest I've ever gone without blogging. I spent four hours yesterday scanning and repairing my laptop to I could avoid an endless loop of error dialogues at startup: "Windows Explorer has encountered and error and must close. We apologize for the inconvenience." Nice of Microsoft to apologize, I just wish it would quit showing me that error box over and over again. Ah well, it's gone thanks to a commandline tool and my original system disk. Thank goodness my ten year old Mac still works.

So anyway, one of the podcasts that will eventually be posted has a segment we did about the use of the humanities in medical education. I talked about some of my favorite female sociopaths in classic literature, and then a friend reminded me later about a couple others in literature and opera. So I decided I'd put my money where my mouth is and write a poem about female sociopaths.

Poetry is not new to Shrink Rap. A while back we had a post, The Cats Go Barefoot With Grace, in which I invited readers to submit poems using that line somewhere. (It originated in a comment on Dinah's post, The Secretary Who Couldn't Stop Talking. She had put up a hypothetical problem and asked for input. I got totally distracted by the sentence 'The cats go barefoot with grace.')

So anyway, the type of poem I used is called a villanelle. It's a very structured form that I've heard is the hardest to write. A villanelle uses two rhyming lines alternately in six stanzas, coupling them together at the end. The most well-known example of a villanelle is Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," which uses the lines:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My poem is called "Villanelle For The Villaness". I've included wikipedia links (the source of all definitive Internet knowledge) for those of you who want to read about the references I make in the poem. Here it is:

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Villanelle For The Villainess

For jealousy, ambition, and greed that will not quell
There is a poisoned cup or a tender knife.
The evil that women do, they do well.

Steinbeck loosed a feminine hell
In Cathy's charms with her liquid death, all
For jealousy, ambition, and greed that will not quell

Shakespeare knew, and could foretell
Through witches a lady's persuasive regicide.
The evil that women do, they do well.

Carmen, the fiery gypsy belle,
Once prison-freed she drove men mad
For jealousy, ambition, and greed that will not quell

Milady was destined for hell when
Dumas beheaded her for the musketeers' revenge.
The evil that women do, they do well.

A man may kill and risk a cell,
No clever plots for him, just shoot and drop. But...
For jealousy, ambition, and greed that will not quell
The evil that women do, they do well.

And no, I'm not quitting my day job.

Do Women Talk Too Much?

Contrary to popular myth, it turns out that women and men tend to talk about the same amounts. A soon-to-be-published study described in Science reported that Pennebaker, et al., "equipped 396 college students--210 of them women--for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count."

The results? Average number of words spoken per day:
Women: 16,215 . . . Men: 15,669.
The difference is not statistically significant.

Now, this does not prove or refute the long-held belief that Dinah speaks more than Clink or Roy, as there is a wide variability in how many words one speaks.

In the study, the variation ranged from a low of 700 to a high of 47,000 (that one was a man), according to John Grohol's post in PsychCentral.

While the study, which really only applies to college students and not the general population, failed to confirm the widely-held belief that women talk more than men, it did confirm another stereotype:

“Men talk more about technology, work, money. They also use more numbers,” he said. “Women talk more about fashion and about relationships.”

Here is the histogram showing the spread of spoken daily words among the study participants:

[Roy] Hurried Woman Syndrome??

[Posted by Roy] What's this I read about HWS (Hurried Woman Syndrome)? Sounds like the super-mom's response to burn-out. Of maybe it's depression. Or sleep deprivation.

So, I'm sure there's gotta be a new drug on the horizon. C'mon folks, let's come up with some possible names.

Femulexa?

Relaxahyst?

Eugogirl?