 | I have watched and read your reviews for years with great honor. I disagree so strongly with your review of “Eat Pray Love” that it makes me sick. You just don’t get it, and many others like you don’t get it. You do not know at all what it is like being a woman in this day and age (or previously) who did not want to be defined by a man or married off to one. If you think Stephen in the movie was an OK husband, you are out to lunch. He was horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (except on paper to people who do not need emotional sustenance). David was the narcissist from hell that many of us have fallen for… do you not get that??????????? Many of the males of the species are frankly overrated and the women’s movement has proven this (or frankly not sufficiently). I hope your wife will bring you up to speed. (Jeanine Carlson, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist) |
The quote is from a woman complaining to Roger Ebert about his review of Eat, Pray, Love. Somehow, I found interesting the fact that she’s a “Licensed Clinical Psychologist”.
| Undoubtedly gambling, like other addictions, depends on a complicated mixture of brain chemistry, environment and socialisation. Howard Shaffer, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, notes that the rate of pathological gambling in America has remained relatively constant for the past 35 years, despite a huge expansion in the opportunities on offer. There was a spike in the late 1990s but levels have dropped since then. Dr Shaffer draws a parallel with a classic virus-infection curve: high at the beginning as those most susceptible fall ill, but gradually tailing off as people adapt. |
| Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ». |
| We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair. |
As quoted in the third installment of Errol Morris’ essay on anosognosia (published in The New York Times). Part 3 is all about the debilitating stroke President Woodrow Wilson suffered on October 1919 and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge that there was something wrong with him. Morris tells the story:
For Levin, Wilson’s inability to perceive his own incapacity had truly devastating consequences for the nation and world he helped to lead. Perhaps even more troublingly, the reaction to Wilson’s anosognosia on the part of his close associates raises the possibility of an even more problematic impairment — a social anosognosia. Can a group of people, perhaps even society at large, devolve into a state of destructive cluelessness?
Wilson expressed it best of all. On hearing the news of the Senate vote — essentially, the end of the League fight — Wilson asked Grayson to read a verse from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8:We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair.Wilson then said, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out his plan through human perversity and mistakes.”[52]
Amen. (more)
Explanations from the Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887:
“We reproduce the picture of Mr. Andre Brouillet, which was in the Salon of 1887; and that the subject may be better understood, we give the accompanying sketch and description. This picture is very interesting, not only from an artistic point of view, but also as a representation of students and spectators of all ages admirably grouped around a great master of science when most interested in his work. We borrow from Matin-Salon Mr. Goetschy’s explanation of the picture:
“The hall in which the lesson is given is lighted by two large windows opening on one of the courts of the hospital. The Professor stands at the right of the picture, his head uncovered, one hand close to his body and the other extended slightly in a gesture which is familiar to him, his audience being before him. At his side is Mr. Babinski, chief of the clinic, supporting a person afflicted with hysteria. Near the latter stands a nurse and assistant who watches every movement of the patient. This is Mother Bottard, a good, intelligent, and devoted woman, who is well known to all those present.
“The auditors have arranged themselves at the students’ tables, some seated on the chairs and stools which furnish the room, and others standing, but all following closely the teaching of the master, and at the same time watching the subject. The picture is full of life and motion, and yet is very exact. The head and shoulders of the subject are beautifully and correctly drawn. The artist has brought together many men who are well known in literature and science.”—Le Monde Illustre.
Previously on Skandalon : Jean-Martin Charcot
| Widespread throughout Latin America, susto is a folk illness associated with a broad array of symptoms. It is considered by susceptible populations to be a sickness caused by the separation of soul and body which is precipitated by a supernatural force. Most studies of culture-bound diseases have relied on descriptive approaches that focus on pathologies derived from medical textbooks. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, looking for explanations of susto in the interaction of social, physiological, and psychological factors. |
Previously on Skandalon : Hwabyeong, yet another culture-bound somatization disorder.
Both hwabyung and susto are quoted by the same character in Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis.
| The maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves. |
| Not content with the merely weird, the DSM-IV also attempts to claim dominion over the mundane. Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and something that probably has something to do with coffee, though the therapist can’t put his finger on it (292.9); shyness (299.80), (also known as Asperger’s Disorder); sleepwalking (307.46); jet lag (307.45); snobbery (301.7, a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder); and insomnia (307.42); to say nothing of tobacco smoking, which includes both getting hooked (305.10) and going cold turkey (292.0). You were out of your mind the last time you have a nightmare (307.47). Clumsiness is now a mental illness (315.4). So is playing video games (Malingering, V65.2). So is doing just about anything “vigorously.” So, under certain circumstances, is falling asleep at night. The foregoing list is neither random nor trivial, nor does it represent the sort of editorial oversight that occurs when, say, an otherwise reputable zoology text contains the claim that goats breathe through their ears. We are here confronted with a worldview where everything is a symptom and the predominant color is a shade of therapeutic gray. This has the advantage of making the therapist’s job both remarkably simple and remarkably lucrative. |
L.J. Davies is the author of A Meaningful Life (1971). Read more about it over at The New York Times.
