this is just cute and psych related

The Cookie Test from Mark Pearson on Vimeo.

wow.

This is incredible.


http://gizmodo.com/5682758/the-fascinating-story-of-the-twins-who-share-brains-thoughts-and-senses

Being green

I know the It Gets Better Project was created to support the gay community through what was a harrowing number of cases of suicide and bullying. However, I think this project speaks for anyone being bullied and I think that people with mental illness definitely fall in that category as well, young people especially.

So thank you Kermit for your message about being green, we would not have you any other way!

I could not think of a more appropriate message for this blog where I strive to show the common ground we all have, the crazy things we all do and the reality behind a very stigmatized and dramatized population.



Cheers to being green!



To being different and fabulous in whatever beautiful way you are!

Beetlejuice... Beetlejuice... BEETLEJUICE!

Okay so I'm a little late on the mandatory Halloween related post but I can not let this go by. Halloween has always been and will always be my favorite holiday for the one reason that it involves mass communal dress up. Slutty costumes/silly costumes I don't care as long as I get to walk down the street in full out face make up and in character and it is widely accepted I am DOWN!

I don't think I have ever not dressed up, even when it was so not cool in middle school, social standing be damned, I was dressed up. When I was reaaaaally little I was a major girly girl and I remember my costume at age 5 as a Fairy-princess-queen-ballerina-mermaid.... I was seriously ambitious. Then as I got older, age 9-10-11 I got into be scary. I mean I may have thought I was scary, correction, I KNOW I thought I was scary but come on, when you are 70 pounds of tiny blonde freckled child, there is only so much some plastic fangs can do for the cause. Still, kids love being scary and kids love being scared. Now you will be hard pressed to get me into a horror movie but when I was little I was all about it. I remember watching The Shining, when I was 11 from behind my grandfather's big leather chair who didn't know I was there or he would have obviously kicked me out of the room. I know there are exceptions on both sides here, but generally speaking, I wonder why we lose our love of fear?

You may be thinking, oh hell no, when I was little I was SO not into scary stuff but come on, did you ever play light as a feather/stiff as a board? The game where one person is "dead" and you tell a story about how they died and then everyone puts two fingers underneath the person on all sides and start chanting "light as a feather/stuff as aboard," while raising the person up until they allegedly, levitate. I never had the levitation thing happen but come on.. that is kind of creepy shit for a bunch of 8 year old girls in floral pajamas to be into after watching A Little Princess, on VHS... right?

I remember after the first time I saw Beetlejuice I lied in bed at night once the lights were out and I whispered it.. "Beetlejuice"... "Beetlejuice".... (squirm with anticipation) "BEETLEJUICE." I did this many times after that and it was almost a bed time routine. I was always a little afraid he would pop into my room and then I'd be in trouble.

Or Bloody Mary! Did you ever hear that one? That if you look into the mirror at midnight and say "Bloody Mary," three times she (I don't even know who she really is.. I just pictured something like Carrie...) would come through the mirror and kill you and then drag you with her back through the mirror into... I don't know really... but it wouldn't be good. Well I tried it, multiple times, no luck.

When I was in 3rd grade my friend told me that if I said "hell" three times I was going there for SURE. So of course, I said it, waiting to be whisked off the playground by some demon but again no go. Maybe that one only applies after death... so if I end up in some fiery Bosch-like afterlife I will surely curse my daring 3rd grade self.

Kids are often really fascinated with death. As much as I tested the waters with all this superstition, I was also terrified that I would die in my sleep. Children don't really understand the concepts of consciousness and this is a common fear. I had those little Mexican worry dolls and every night I would put one under my bed and tell the doll my worry, that I would die in my sleep, and she would keep me safe.

As we grow older fears like this subside as we begin to understand our conscious existence and the idea that we continue to exist even when not fully conscious. With more life experience we also become aware of the fragility of our existence and grasp the permanence of death that is incomprehensible as a young child. Some researchers have shown that children do not fully grasp the permanence of death until about age 11. As we grow older we try and integrate our lives into something bigger and more lasting than our mortal selves. We strive to leave legacy, have children, develop faith, connect to a god, connect to our communities to become something larger and more lasting and more resistant to our mortality. This is all part of a theory called Terror Management Theory that was actually pioneered by one of my professors. I recommend you look it up if this interests you. The main point is I think there is less of love of fear as we age, because that fear holds more meaning as we become more aware of our own transience.

But let's not get too morbid shall we? I still do the Beetlejuice thing sometimes...

Restraining Order

Just another Tuesday at the office. What did I do at work?
Ya know, went in, checked my e-mail, got strapped to a mattress frame by 18 other employees.

Okay, it was not just another day at the office, it was the mandatory safety and restraint hospital training for anyone who works directly with patients. Restraints are a technique that were used much more frequently in psychiatric hospitals up until about 20 years ago. I know when people picture someone who's "crazy," the image of someone in a solitary padded room or strapped to a bed often comes to mind because that is what has been shown in so many movies. However, this is really an uncommon practice now, and that is mainly because so much paperwork has to be filed for insurance purposes when any kind of restraint (could be just as simple holding someone's arms down and walking them to their room) is performed.


So it is Tuesday around 1:00 and everyone is sleepy from lunch and tired and bored and we have to get up and learn how to use the 4 point (wrists and ankles) cuff restraints and of course they need a body to do this on so after waiting 3 or 4 seconds while everyone avoids eye contact with the instructors, I volunteer. I have to lie down on this "mattress" which is more like a gym mat and the other 18 people in the room alternate holding me down, cuffing me and tying the leather cuffs to the mattress frame with what are basically leather belts. I was listening to them as they all did this and a few comments were "this is so creepy," and "this is like a nightmare." I have to say, as someone who was fully conscious and aware of what was happening and in a training environment that was not remotely high stress, it was freakin creepy. Having people you don't know, hold you down and realizing how little you can do in that situation and being unable to really keep up with who is doing what and where, it made me a little anxious. From that, it's still very hard for me to imagine what it would be like if I was not fully able to understand what was happening and if everyone was totally serious and the tension was high.

There is a lot of negativity towards the mental health practitioners for doing these restraints. They are usually portrayed as cruel and unnecessary and even torturous. Let me just say, as someone who has had to perform a variety of different kinds of holding restraints (not using any sort of stretcher/cuffs) that they can be necessary. For example, when you have a patient who is psychotic and clawing at her face and completely out of touch with reality, if you don't intervene that patient can seriously hurt herself. Usually restraints are done (at least from what I have seen and from how I personally believe they should be used) to intervene when the patient is a harm to him/herself, and on occasion when a patient is a serious threat to another patient or staff. As much as I like to paint a picture that mental health is not as scary as it is made out to be, those movies don't come from nothing and these situations do happen, usually on more acute units. Note: they do NOT happen at every hospital and they do not happen on every unit at every hospital and this should in no way be the predominant image in your mind of what mental illness looks like, I cannot say that enough. Where I work, they are performed on some units and so all staff have to learn them. First, we learn about a million different ways to try to verbally distract the patient or calm him/her down without any kind of touch. But on the occasion that does not work we learn the restraints.

If I had my way I would order everyone who potentially has to do a restraint get restrained. I don't think you can be as good surgeon if you don't know what it is like to go under the knife. I don't think you can be as good a doctor if you don't know what it's like to be really sick. Of course we can't all share the same experiences, and I think for some reason people find mental health issues the hardest to relate to. Actually I believe the reason is because these issues are actually the easiest to relate to and that threatens the idea that people have, that they are in complete control of their bodies, minds and emotions. So convince themselves that mental illness is something bigger and scarier and more overblown that it really is so that they can believe that it could never ever possibly develop within them. I think people have less empathy with mental health and illness than with physical health and illness because of this and so I think as practitioners we have to go the extra mile to try and empathize that much more.

So go ahead and question my sanity, I do often enough, but I was glad I had that experience.

Friday night

photo credit-me


Wooooo Friday night!!

I have always been a social gal, I like hanging out with people. Recently, I switched out my Friday 9-5 research shift for a 3-11 evening shift on the adolescent girls residential program at the hospital. Was I a bit worried that I would regret sacrificing my Friday evenings... hell yes... but I was absolutely positive that gaining some direct patient time and decreasing some quality time with my computer screen would be an upgrade.

The first couple shifts were great. The other staff were all incredibly cool and I was surprised by the girls. I had worked in a more severe unit before and these girls are all transitioning, getting ready to go home but just stopping in for a "tune up," as I heard it often called. My first day I say girls with shoe laces and elastic waist bands and headphones and panicked thinking of all the gruesome ways these things could be used to self harm... I think I visibly jumped when one of the staff handed a girl a pair of scissors for a crafts project. I was on high alert as my previous training had molded me to be, so it took some time for me to relax and get used to this new patient group. I have to say, working with this psych stuff does kind of make you crazy. I mean when you see someone wearing headphones and the first thing you think is "oh my god, she is going to hang herself with those from her closet beam..." that's kinda messed up.

Well, really this is just the tip of the iceberg folks. I called my Mom two weekends ago coming home from work and the conversation went something like this,

"Mom I just had the best night ever!!"
"That's great honey, what happened?"
"I WENT TO AA!"
...pause...
"Ok, I know this is you, and I know there is an explanation here, but this is not exactly the normal tone that accompanies that statement, you do realize this yes?"
"I KNOW BUT IT WAS SO COOL!"
"Ok.. I need to go to bed, but I am glad... you had fun."
"Thanks! "


Truly, I cannot even explain what it was like to you because the actions themselves are simple and everyone knows them. You read from the big blue book and you go around and say what you got out of it or how it related to you and your story. This group was all women and it was so cool to see this little secret community. Mental illness, in all forms, I think can be really isolating and I think group therapy approaches can be a really cool way to break out of that and that is essentially what AA is about.

So I didn't really give up my Friday nights, don't worry, I'm still out being social, just not having any cocktails.

Today's entry was brought to you by the letter Y...

Okay, in case my post Keeping Up with The Jones', bummed you out, and you read that article about the weird twenty-something decade of postponed adulthood and thought, wow... at least I'm not the only one but damn. And in case you are now daydreaming about your childhood days and how simple they were, hanging out and watching Sesame St, long before complex computer animated cartoons came into play... I have found something that might just solve all your problems (well at least the two specific aforementioned problems).

http://jezebel.com/5646999/twentysomethings-need-their-own-sesame-street

Enjoy, YipYip!