Showing 11 - 20 of 157 annotations tagged with the keyword "Psychotherapy"

The Center Cannot Hold

Wells, Kenneth

Last Updated: Jul-31-2018
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Theater

Genre: Theater

Summary:

This is an opera based on Elyn R. Saks’s best-selling book The Center Cannot Hold.  Subtitled “My Journey Through Madness,” the memoir recounts the author’s struggle with schizophrenia.  Here, Saks has collaborated with composer/psychiatrist Kenneth B. Wells on the opera’s libretto.  

The librettists utilize the device of having three different singers portray Elyn.  One manifestation, the “Lady of the Charts,” represents her when psychotic.  The others are Elyn as a law student and the present day Professor Saks as a law professor.  Another dramatic device involves the use of a chorus to embody the protagonist’s schizophrenic delusions.  At the height of her paranoia, as Elyn sings Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in an effort to keep herself together, the chorus recalls the Symphony’s opening notes by singing “Elyn must die.”  

The opera opens with Elyn as Professor Saks reflecting on her childhood. Even then there were signs of the illness that, to quote a famous poem by William Butler Yeats, ensures “the center cannot hold” in Elyn’s life. During the first act, Elyn, a Yale law student, becomes psychotic in front of her friends and is hospitalized. In a Connecticut hospital she is put in restraints and treated by various mental health professionals. She imagines she hears demons threatening to kill her.  Elyn’s diagnosis and condition overwhelm her parents, who have been called by the hospital.  

In the second act, Elyn works to reintegrate her fragmented mind.  She is determined to get back to law school.  She is released from the hospital. She finds an antipsychotic medication, with fewer side effects, that she can live with. She resolves to devote her career to mental health law.  At the conclusion of the opera, Elyn anticipates graduation.  She has been instrumental in winning a class action suit against the use of restraints in psychiatric patients.  Her parents, friends and doctors proclaim their pride in her accomplishments.

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Stitches

Small, David

Last Updated: Dec-28-2017
Annotated by:
Natter, Michael

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Stitches is a beautifully crafted graphic novel by award winning writer and illustrator David Small. The memoir chronicles Smalls’ life with chronic illness, focusing on his experience as a child and adolescent with cancer in the setting of an abusive upbringing. We learn through the eyes of a child what being a patient is like, and how, despite all odds Small was able to use art as a way to make a normal life for himself. 

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Hope and Grace: Spiritual Experiences in Severe Distress, Illness, and Dying

Renz, Monika

Last Updated: Dec-14-2017
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Dr. Monika Renz’s work with dying patients is unusual if not unique in the way she appropriates and applies insights from Jungian depth psychology, practices available in patients’ faith traditions, and musically guided meditation to invite and support the spiritual experiences that so often come, bidden or unbidden, near the end of life.  An experienced oncologist, Dr. Renz offers carefully amassed data to support her advocacy of focused practices of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care, but is also quite comfortable with the fact that “neither the frequency nor the visible effects of experiences of the transcendent prove that such experience is an expression of grace” because “unverifiability is intrinsic to grace.”  Still, her long experience leads her to assert not only that “grace” can be a useful, practical, operative word for what professional caregivers may witness and mediate but also that affirmation and support of patients’ spiritual, religious, or transcendent experiences in the course of dying can amplify and multiply moments of grace, which manifest as sudden, deep peace in the very midst of pain, profound acceptance, openness to reconciliations, or significant awakenings from torpor that allow needed moments of closure with loved ones.  Describing herself as “an open-minded religious person and a practicing Christian,” she reminds readers that God is a loanword, whose basic form in Germanic was gaudam, a neutral participle.  Depending on the Indo-Germanic root, the word means “the called upon” or “the one sacrificed to . . . .”  Openness to the divine in both patients and caregivers, Dr. Renz argues, can and does make end-of-life care a shared journey of discovery and offer everyone involved a valuable reminder that medicine is practiced, always, at the threshold of mystery.

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This Way Madness Lies

Jay, Mike

Last Updated: Oct-17-2017
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction — Secondary Category: Visual Arts / Visual Arts

Genre: History

Summary:

This Way Madness Lies was published in partnership with London’s Wellcome Collection for the exhibition “Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond,” which ran from September 2016 - January 2017 and was curated by Mike Jay and Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz. It is a book that was meant to accompany the exhibition, yet which, by virtue of the substantial text and reproductions, can stand alone.  

The book traces the history of treatment of the mentally ill by following the colorful story of Bethlem Royal Hospital from its antecedents in the Middle Ages up to the present.  Its sway over the public imagination evidenced by its appearance in everything from Jacobean Drama to “Sweeney Todd,” Bedlam has truly attained archetypal status.  An archetype, yet also a real functioning hospital.  Sections of the book entitled “Madhouse,” Lunatic Asylum,” and “Mental Hospital” chronicle the facilities designed respectively during the 17th/18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and explain how they reflect changing notions of madness in each era.   

The first structure was visually grand but lacked a foundation, a metaphor for what was going on inside: “a façade of care concealing a black hole of neglect” (p. 39).  It became a tourist attraction along the lines of the zoo, with nothing preventing the public from gawking at and taunting the inmates.  While its replacement gave the impression of being more functional, conditions proved equally squalid.  On the other hand, 19th-century Europe and the United States saw asylum reforms, as well as the medicalization of madness as an “illness” and the ascent of psychiatry as a branch of medicine.  Finally, in 1930, the buildings still in use in Monks Orchard, a suburb of London, were constructed.

By contrast, we learn about treatments elsewhere, most notably Geel, Belgium.  There, for centuries, as an alternative to being warehoused in psychiatric hospitals, the mentally ill have been successfully boarding with townspeople.   

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Songs from the Black Chair

Barber, Charles

Last Updated: Sep-08-2017
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Subtitled "A Memoir of Mental Interiors," this book is both an exploration of self and a search for reasons that led to the suicide of the author's friend, Henry, when both were of college age. But there is more. As the memoir unfolds, we learn that since childhood, the author experienced episodes of inexplicable, preoccupying, repetitive thoughts and behavior patterns--much later diagnosed as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). And finally, Barber discusses being drawn to work with mentally retarded people in a group home, and the mentally ill homeless at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.Growing up in an intellectual New England family with a tradition of sending its sons to Andover (a prestigious prep school) and Harvard, Barber was expected to continue the tradition, and so he did. At Harvard, however, Barber found himself disintegrating into obsessive thinking, unable to concentrate, near suicidal. He withdrew from Harvard, went back to his small town, hung out with his friends Henry and Nick, washed dishes in a local restaurant, took courses at the local college. Obsessive thinking continued to torment him.In desperation, he dropped out of college again, quickly finding a position as a "childcare worker" in a local group home. The author believes this step was the turning point that led eventually to effective treatment of his OCD (psychotherapy and Prozac), completion of his education, a fulfilling "career" in mental health recovery, and a happy family life. He is currently an associate of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health at Yale University School of Medicine.

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The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review

Ofri, D., et al., eds.

Last Updated: Sep-08-2017
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Literature

Genre: Anthology (Mixed Genres)

Summary:

This anthology of poems, short stories, and essays derives from the literary magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, which began publication in 2001. The editor of the magazine and her staff have selected what they consider to be the best literary pieces from the Review's first 6-7 years of publication. Like its parent magazine, the anthology focuses on work that addresses the illness experience, health, healing, and the experiences of health care professionals and other caregivers. The anthology is divided into three parts, each of which has several subsections. Part I, "Initiation," looks at patients' introduction to illness and introduction of doctors to medical education and medical practice. Part II, "Conflict: Grappling with Illness," divides into sections on disability, coping, madness, connections, and family. Part III: "Denouement," addresses mortality, death, loss, and aftermath.

Among the 81 authors represented, seven are physicians, and another half dozen or so are in other caregiving professions such as nursing, social work, counseling. Some writers are well recognized in the literary world (for example James Tate, Amy Hempel, Alicia Ostriker, Rachel Hadas, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Floyd Skloot, Julia Alvarez, David Lehman, Rafael Campo, and Abraham Verghese -- the latter two are physicians); most of the less well-known others have published in a variety of venues.

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Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire

Jamison, Kay Redfield

Last Updated: Jun-14-2017
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Biography

Summary:

Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire is “a study of genius, mania, and character” of American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977).  It is meant to be neither an autobiography nor a critical study of Lowell’s literary output, but a study of an artist and his lifelong battle with Bipolar I Disorder, and an appreciation of how his art and illness were inseparably linked. The author, Kay Redfield Jamison, is a distinguished psychologist who has been quite open about her own struggles with the same disease, and whose lifework consists of exploring the link between Bipolar Disorder and creativity.     

Eschewing a purely chronological approach, Jamison divides her work into sections entitled “Origins,” “Illness,” “Character,” “Illness and Art,” and “Mortality.” In the first, she traces the history of mental illness within the poet’s illustrious Boston family.  We learn that Lowell’s great-great-grandmother was institutionalized at McLean Asylum for the Insane, which was to be the site of several of the poet’s own hospitalizations.  “Illness” is a clinical case study in prodromal childhood symptoms that progress to full-blown manic episodes. We follow the progress made by 20th century psychiatry from psychotherapy and ECT to Thorazine, and, finally, with the introduction of Lithium, to the possibility of prophylaxis against recurrences. Later, in “Illness and Art,” Jamison brings her thoughts about creativity and art to full fruition by discussing what her research reveals about writers and artists.    

Appendices include diagnostic criteria for Bipolar Disorder, and an explanation of how Lowell’s psychiatric and medical records were made available by his daughter for the benefit of this volume.  

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Dear Evan Hansen

Paul, Justin; Pasek, Benj ; Levenson, Steven

Last Updated: Apr-24-2017
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

Evan Hansen, an awkward, lonely high school senior, struggles with Social Anxiety Disorder. On the advice of his therapist, he pens supportive letters to himself: “Dear Evan Hansen, Today is going to be an amazing day, and here’s why.  Because today all you have to do is be yourself. But also confident.”   

Connor, another loner student, picks up one of Evan’s letters and, several days later, commits suicide.  When Connor’s parents find the letter, they take it to be their son’s suicide note.  Instead of dissuading them, Evan concocts an account of a close friendship with the classmate he barely knew, creating an email trail. Connor’s family swallows the story.  

As Evan gains the attention he has always craved and comes out of his shell, he finds that he cannot stop himself.   He founds the “Connor Project,” an organization dedicated to preserving his “friend’s” memory where he shares his musings on social media:  “Have you ever felt like nobody was there?  Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?  Have you ever felt like you could disappear?  Like you could fall, and no one would hear? ...Well, let that lonely feeling wash away…Lift your head and look around.  You will be found.  You will be found.”  Once Evan’s postings go viral, the Connor Project becomes a veritable industry, with a budget, and fans who look to it for inspiration.  As the stakes rise, the Project can flourish only by being fed more lies. 

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Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering

Stump, Eleonore

Last Updated: Mar-10-2017
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Criticism

Summary:

Wandering in Darkness is an intricate philosophical defense for the problem of suffering as it is presented by medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas.The work addresses the philosophical / theological problem of evil, which might be expressed as follows:  if one posits an all-good, all-powerful God as creator, yet suffering exists in the world, then (a) God must be evil, since he created it; (b) God is less than all-powerful, since suffering came to be in his creation, and he could not stop it; (c) God is evil and weak, since suffering came to be in his creation, and he did not want to stop it; or (d) suffering is an illusion.  No alternative is, of course, very satisfying. In her book,   Eleanore Stump augments Thomas Aquinas’s theodicy by reflecting upon what she calls “the desires of the heart,” a dimension of human experience that Aquinas leaves largely untreated in his consideration.  Stump explores this dimension by breathtaking exegeses of Biblical narratives as narratives: the stories of Job, Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany.  “Understood in the contexts of [these] narratives,” Stump argues, “Aquinas’s theodicy explains in a consistent and cogent way why God would allow suffering" (22).

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Psychobook

Rothenstein, Julian

Last Updated: Nov-30-2016
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Literature — Secondary Category: Visual Arts /

Genre: Photographs with Commentary

Summary:

The subject of Psychobook is psychological tests, both classic tests and newly created ones. Oversized, with more pictures than text, it is truly an art book.    

Psychobook begins with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, a journalist and novelist, which proves to be a very personal indictment of psychological testing.  There follows a more even-handed historical essay by Oisin Wall, a curator at the Science Museum in London.    

The bulk of Psychobook is comprised of photographs of tests and archival material related to tests.  For example, along with intelligence tests designed to screen potential immigrants, we find images of new arrivals being tested at Ellis Island.  Likewise, we see beautifully reproduced Rorshach inkblots along with pictures of Rorshach and older inkblots that may have inspired him. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective test in which subjects respond to images with their fantasies.  Here we see the 1930s originals cut out of magazines alongside updated images especially commissioned for this volume. Each is provocative in its own way.  As an added bonus, a series of photographs of psychotherapists in their offices from the 1930s to the present is interspersed with the content on psychological testing.     

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