Thoughts about Bipolar disorder, Addiction, and Tucker Max

The NYTimes Sunday Magazine article covers the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children.

Much of it is terrible and awful: kids breaking down in Walmart, holding weapons over parents and siblings asleep in bed, banging into walls and hurting themselves in bouts of mania. I feel sick thinking of a person's lack of control over mood and behavior. I have seen this type of behavior before, not necessarily from someone that was bipolar, and watching a "self" perform in ways contrary to its personality and dignity is miserable and frightening.

At the same time, I find the personality of people with bipolar disorder or bipolar tendencies (those N.O.S. or "not otherwise specified" folks) absolutely compelling. These are people who violate social boundaries with confidence, unaware that they are crossing lines. Their uninhibited behavior would take other people mountains of alcohol and drugs to achieve. I love being the sidekick while a friend makes someone else totally uncomfortable with their audacity and boundary-pushing. Then there's the oversharing. With lives more dramatic than a soap opera, their lack of inhibition gives them a roster of compelling, play-by-play stories: willing to do anything, willing to tell anything.

Obviously I am making generalizations, I am one-sided, and reporting only on mania, but I truly feel that bipolar disorder actually benefits society at a whole: it concentrates feelings and creativity and makes others questions the norms they so willingly follow. Van Gogh always gets cited as bipolar, but what about Mary Kay LeTourneau? Not only has her life inspired Lifetime movies, she's also, seriously, become a lightning rod in the debate over age differences in relationships. I also suspect that people like "Slut Machine" over at Jezebel have bipolar tendencies, particularly when she wrote about a crazy April several years ago in which she went out every single night, slept with twenty men, and never missed a day of work. Purely gleaning from the writing (isn't that what the historians did with Van Gogh?) this type of behavior deviates from normal. Similarly, I am convinced that Tucker Max is bipolar. He's narcissistic slash overconfident, oversteps boundaries without realizing they have been crossed, cannot exercise restraint in sex or alcohol, overshares, is terribly mean towards women...the list goes on. While I find his life compelling, it is in a train wreck kind of way--I would not want to be anywhere near it, feel powerless to stop it, but nevertheless am swept up in watching such an extreme malfunction with catastrophic consequences. ARGH, he really riles me up. His behavior is just beyond offensive.

When you are dealing with psychiatric problems, how do you tell what is personality and what is a 'disorder'? I guess what I am really asking is that biology/environment question: to what extent are these disorders caused by hormonal imbalances in the brain, to what extent is it the result of environmental factors, and to what extent are these people culpable and responsibly for the poor choices they make? These are difficult questions, and I know the die-hard left position on this issue would omit the third one altogether. In defense of my inclusion of personal choice, I cite an essay I read recently in the NYTimes:

"Imagine two people trying cocaine, just to see what it is like. Both are 32-year-old men with jobs and families. One snorts a line, loves it and asks for more. The other also loves it but pushes it away, leaves the party and never touches it again. Different values? Different tolerance for risk? Many factors may distinguish the two cocaine lovers, but only one is at risk for a problem.

Asking for more drug is no guarantee of being seduced into routine use. But what if it happens? Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has interviewed many users who became aware that they were sliding down the path to addiction.

“It undermined their sense of themselves as individuals in control of their own destinies,” Mr. Sullum wrote in his 2003 book, “Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.” “And so they stopped.”

Personally, I can totally identify with the bold statement, and think it is entirely true. I think one attribute this article leaves out, however, is that an individual's desire to gain or lose control is not only dictated by their genes, but also their situation. People who find themselves depressed or not caring enough about themselves to think that they are worth more than pursuit of transient, chemical-induced happiness could say "yes" in those situations where years before the same situation would have elicited a "no." Even week-to-week, it's considered within the realm of normal to medicate a rough week with a rough night of drinking/drugs. Then, at some point, the behavior crosses a line.

So a rather heady post for a Friday night, but I stayed in (no way I am taking a train to New Jersey to see a boy! I only do Manhattan :). I guess that might also mean "she's just not that into you")

Hygiene Hypothesis

The Times Magazine had two good articles this weekend about health.

Here's one supporting the "hygiene hypothesis," reintroducing intestinal worms into the body to cure Crohn's, hay fever, and M.S.:
"The Worm Turns"

Another one talking about the illusion that we can have control over our health by controlling "stress," and how cultural ideas of what makes a person "well" or "unwell" are used to explain cancer:
"Stress Test" by Peggy Orenstein (I've read one of her books in a sociology class before, so I'm rather biased towards her work)

Sweet Sixteen Suspicions Finally Validated

I always suspected that the families on My Super Sweet Sixteen were money launderers. As far as I could tell, there are only two reasons people throw parties like that:
1. This is the lifestyle in which they're accustomed. Strike that. Even when the royals arrive in helicopter, they don't make everyone come out and scream, nor do they make showy displays of their assets.
The new #1:

1. Pathological need to show off
2. Excess of funds due to shady business practices.

The answer is #2. ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Some guy sold oil securities to oil wells that had no oil in them, then used the investment money to buy cars, purses, etc., for his daughter whose hicksville friends probably didn't even realize they weren't looking at canal street knockoffs.

Gawker wrote about it here.
The video to watch "how many Vuitton purses would this oil well buy, Daddy?" here.
NYTimes article here.

Web Roundup

So in light of the Chinese New Year, I decided to look up my sign - I'm a rat, but a WOOD rat specifically, and it fits me with a surprising degree of accuracy. I've never bought into most of that astrology bullshit, as I'm decidedly not a Scorpio, but a rat I am!

(Maybe this explains why I like to stare at the train tracks late at night and watch the rats come out. Seriously, folks, it's better than the zoo. Sickening.)

Here's a googled profile, if you're interested. Let me know if you want to set me up on any blind dates with Water Monkeys.

Other cool articles about my new favorite subject, Class in America:

"A New Way of Looking at Race and Conspicuous Consumption"

This article basically says that if you feel you are ridiculously poorer than those around you, you won't even try to compete with that community's forms of conspicuous consumption. The author links this racially, noting that blacks are more likely than whites to be surrounded by those of similar (and smaller) incomes, which in turn provides an incentive for these "poor" people to acquire visible goods like sneakers, etc., that in turn gets them lambasted in outside communities for being frivolous and petty. God knows those sneakers ain't fooling ze rich peeps (that's what couture is for). Oh conspicuous consumption! According to my horoscope, my fascination with this subject is very rat-like. Do I smell an Anthropology PhD coming on?

"You Are What You Spend"

I'm inclined to disagree with this article on principle because of how its implications can be misconstrued as a way to revoke aid from the poor. These authors basically restack statistics of wealth to show that consumptions patterns do not vary drastically between the wealthy and the poor. I don't know how they got a $69,000 living expense average for the top bracket - they must have had to rule out a ton of those few-mil-a-year outliers to get to that conclusion. While I do think it is true that to be poor in the United States is a relative position, and does come with many benefits in terms of material comforts, what I don't like about this article is how it hides the assets of the wealthy. In particular the "financial flows" column has negative $10k for the bottom bracket and $55k for the top bracket. While the rich are saving, the poor are getting deeper into debt. Worse, the authors misattribute this outflow of wealth, implying that those dipping into their home equity are temporarily unemployed or on hard times, as opposed to being one of those families on daytime talk shows that has hundreds of thousands of well-concealed credit card debt (my first thought).

More on the weekend and drinking and books I read later...