This Week’s Posts
Monday, March 28th - Psychosis is Not the Absence of Consciousness
Against a popular misunderstanding of psychosis.
Tuesday, March 29th - A Broken Model of Brokenness
We’re teaching a generation to understand mental illness in a toxic way.
Thursday, March 31st - Review: Thomas Insel's "Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health"
My review of a major new book on the mental health system.
Friday, April 1st - Suavecito at 10
My cat is a mythic figure who will one day prowl the world as an adventurer of legend.
And we had the latest post in our lively, fun Book Club of A Confederacy of Dunces.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Book Recommendation
Glory Road, Robert Heinlein, 1963
If you’re interested in a book with a lot of fantasy elements but which takes them at a bent angle, and sometimes a satirical one, Glory Road is for you. It was a favorite of my youth. The protagonist, a soldier from a long lineage of warriors, is convalescing from a war wound when he discovers a (very charming) ad in the personals section, seeking an adventurer. He answers the ad, and soon finds himself on a quest for the mystical Egg (a classic Macguffin) with a beautiful empress named Star and her older guide and companion. There’s dragons and elves and swords and sorcery, but Heinlein also constantly pokes fun at the whole genre, and in tone the book is as much sci-fi as conventional fantasy. Some elements of the book are, in a sense, deeply outdated - the protagonist’s attitude towards women and violence does not offend me, but it just gets more crass and annoying and over-the-top as the book goes on. But then again I suppose that’s appropriate to a soldier and mercenary of his vintage. In any case, the core adventure story is fun, and there’s enough variation from traditional fantasy plot and themes to make it feel like a breath of fresh air. There’s also an unexpected sadness to the book, which you might like or not.
Comment of the Week
For anyone interested in the de-institutionalization era of the 60s and 70s, I recommended The Great Pretender by Susan Cahalan. She set out to write about a famous study (published in Science Magazine as On Being Sane in Insane Places) where a psychologist, David Rosenhan, and some other students he recruited, got themselves admitted to mental institutions although they had no existing or documented mental health problems. The results of the study showed that after having to “prove themselves sane” in a Kafkaesque nightmare to be able to leave, they came out with more mental health issues than they went in with and horrific stories of their treatment. The problem? As she researched, she found out the whole thing, a study that greatly influenced the move to deinstitutionalize, was almost certainly faked and that most of the pseudo patients it was based on never even existed. - RC
That’s it! See you tomorrow.
Oh, man -- the link is broken in that archived story, and I'm dying to know -- what was the worst scene in the history of cinema, of which Han Solo was the protagonist?
I love that painting, it’s my favorite Close.