So, many years ago my mother subscribed to Woman's Day

[conuly]

Which was very useful when we had to make collages for school, let me tell you. I don't know how kids do it when they don't get magazines. Print stuff off the internet?

Anyway, every issue they'd print sample dinner recipes for the entire month. They seem to have stopped doing this last year and, more annoyingly, their archives only go back a few years anyway.

I don't care if the recipes are any good or not, as a completionist, I want to see all of them!

This is a periodic frustration in the back of my mind. I don't particularly want to cook any of their recipes. I don't want to look at them and laugh of the trends of the whatever-ies decade. I just want to know that they're available. Or that they're not available. I don't want some of them there and some of them not.

: (

***********

The Miss Subways Pageant Charted the Highs and Lows of 20th-Century Feminism in New York

Bumblebees shed light on why some individuals are smarter than others

Wait a second: What came before the big bang?

A Rare Collection of Bronze Age Chinese Bells Tells a Story of Ancient Innovation

Senators used to relax in the nearly forgotten marble tubs now hidden in the U.S. Capitol Building's basement.

What a Forgotten Kids' Book Reveals About U.S. Publishing

A novel textile material that keeps itself germ-free

Drowning in grain - How Big Ag sowed seeds of a profit-slashing glut

Culture profoundly shapes our ideas about mental illness (And you'll want to read this one too)

How Syrian Zoo Animals Escaped a War-Ravaged City

Here is how the Republican Party has conned America for over 30 years

When it comes to political ads, it's time for Facebook and Google to be held to the same standards as ABC and CBS

DOJ releases overruled memos finding it illegal for presidents to appoint relatives

Chaos and hackers stalk investors on cryptocurrency exchanges

America’s deadliest shooting incidents are getting much more deadly

The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked

Over the past two decades, hundreds of Minnesota law enforcement officers have been convicted of criminal offenses. Most were never disciplined by the state.

A Judge Halted This ‘Unconstitutional’ Cash Bail System. The Status Quo Fought Back.

Investigation: Drug Court Rehabs Survive on Forced Labor (Surprise!)

Venezuela's unrest, food scarcity take psychological toll on children

The Untold Story of Kim Jong-nam’s Assassination

Inside North Korea, and Feeling the Drums of War

Comments

[siderea]

Culture profoundly shapes our ideas about mental illness

This is not terrible!

It does, however, proceed on a thesis that is somewhat unfortunate, which it gets right from mainstream psychiatry: the assumption that the reason traditionalist societies have better outcomes for schizophrenics has to be something like not excluding people from regular life.

Exclusion – abjection – is terribly harmful. But there's reason to believe that absence of abjection is not the cause of the difference in developing nations' (some of them!) superior results with schizophrenia.

The underlying the abjection hypothesis is an actually quite colonialist assumption: that what traditionalist societies do to treat or otherwise deliberately address schizophrenic symptoms couldn't possibly work. That's – literal – shamanism and medicine men and spiritual/faith/religious practices. Modern, allopathic, psychiatry is deeply invested in deprecating those cultural practices, so has to find some other explanatory hypothesis for why those cultures have better results. "Maybe their cultures are just better for people with schizophrenia, maybe they're just nicer to schizophrenics" is what they like to go with.

That conference I went to in August? One of its big gospels was basically that as important as non-exclusion is, it's the psychological effect of traditional healing practices which is so beneficial.

In particular, what various different people who had been treated in various different traditionalist approaches (Native American, South African, etc) reported was that those traditions treated perceptual irregularities as interpretable and meaningful, and that was what was key.

In other words, traditionalist-spiritual healing traditions were doing the same sort of thing as Freud and Jung.

One of the keynotes was given by a woman who was living in New York when she started hearing voices and seeing visions. Multiple hospitalization, absolutely debilitated. But reasonably educated, Western woman: she knew results for schizophrenia were better in traditionalist societies. And she's black. So she got on an airplane and went to South Africa. She sought out treatment from sangomas (traditional healers), who informed her (and this is common in many traditionalist healing traditions) that her symptoms marked her as a candidate healer herself. So she underwent treatment/training and became a sangoma herself, and has come back to the US where she practices as a sangoma.

What's awesome about her story is that it has none of the proposed healing components Western psychology likes to project on traditionalist societies: she had no extended family there – no family at all, apparently; she was not engaged in any sort of agricultural enterprise, where she was "included" despite her presumably debilitating symptoms – in fact I don't think she did any paid work there at all, but was a full-time ngoma student/apprentice; no pre-existing tight-knit community looking out for her – she was a stranger paying for treatment/training. And it still worked.

I heard over and over and over again at the conference that the key seems to be approaches to "extreme perceptions" (hearing voices, seeing visions) that treat them as symbolic and full of meaning. There are a whole list of reasons why this may be beneficial, but if nothing else, it reduces panic, which is often the most debilitating part – not hallucinations themselves, but the freak-out at them – and encourages people not to take their extraordinary perceptual experiences literally/concretely, which improves day-to-day functioning.

There is an entire movement of alternative treatment substantially based on and affirming this understanding, mostly arising out of the Netherlands and other countries in the EU, but now taking off in the US. (I'm a supporter, but untrained as of yet.)

[conuly]

I am so glad to hear it isn't absolutely terrible. I read the whole article and then thought at the end "If this is good, Siderea will want to read it. And if it's awful, she'll want to read it and then tell me how awful it is and why."

Either way, I was banking that your comment would be worth posting the link. I'm gonna go process it and reply to that later, if I have the energy. (I've had a bad case of congestion this week, I'm only just now able to smell things and bend over without suffering a debilitating headache. I'm still a bit tired, though.)

[siderea]

Okay, onto the next: And you'll want to read this one too

That one has some argh in it. From the perspective of one person trying to suss out her biculturalism, it's kinda cool; as a record of a particular form of white supremacy/colonialism in psychiatry, it's fine.

Problematic: her notion of the "real", and the assumption that psychosomatically caused medical conditions aren't really happening. Hahaha: google "pseudocyesis".

Missing: the fact that, right now, in US (and I think Canadian) psychotherapy, somatics is one of the cool new therapeutic approaches. It's not new, but suddenly it's cool like it's never been. It's predicated on the notion that "people" – meaning Westerners – are bad at noticing their somaticizations, and need help becoming conscious of them; the therapeutic approach (I think there's at least two therapies that do this if not more) uses somatic symptoms to get leverage on the condition. Or may consider (not sure) addressing the somatic as a precondition of any successful treatment.

In other words, there's a large swath of psychotherapists in the US right now for whom the proposition that maybe Chinese patients are just more developed in their bodily awareness, and the difference is that Americans suck at attending their bodies, hence the mindfulness craze, and are actually just as somaticizing as the Chinese but can't tell – utterly uncontroversial.

ETA: That's actually one of the less interesting things I've read on cross-cultural psychopathology. I'm admittedly biased, in that my grad school was hardcore on cross-cultural issues, but it's a huge topic that's not at all that controversial. The last DSM (IV) had an appendix of psychiatric conditions from traditions other than the Western allopathic one, from amok (Malaysian) to zar (various North Eastern African and Middle Eastern regions).

[archangelbeth]

Control over something that has been uncontrollable -- if only control-by-interpretation -- is probably huge. Plus a big dose of "Yup, you aren't broken. Actually, you're probably talented in something pertaining to this. Let's get you some training."

Simple to say, huge in life.

...um... *clicks the virtual Like button on the comment*
*sheepish smile*

[conuly]

*pokepokepoke*

What about this one, do you think?

[siderea]

Old news. Research psychiatrists confronted with this went, Hey, if there's all these people with "positive", undismaying voices elsewhere.... maybe there's also a population of "positive voice" hearers in the US who simply never present for treatment because it's not a problem for them, and they never get diagnosed.

They went looking for them. Found 'em.

[conuly]

Old news for you, but not always old news for the rest of us!

[wpadmirer]

Read the Good Guy with a Gun article. Too bad most people who should read it won't.

[conuly]

Sigh. I know : (

[cloudsinvenice]

"What A Forgotten Kids' Book Reveals About US Publishing" is great!

[conuly]

: )

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The world is full of used magazines, though, and people often prefer passing them on to throwing them out. Used to be, the schools were glad to get old Nat Geo and Life mags, and also old calendars and Christmas cards, to use for cut-and-paste projects - don't they still take them?

Alas, completionism, like all forms of perfectionism, is doomed to inevitable disappointment.