She built a toy empire while hiding a lifetime of existential depression
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Strangely, there was no mention of it, aside from “relentless anxiety and depression, eating disorders, exercise addiction, obsessive-compulsive tendencies.” All of these are common comorbidities in bipolar individuals.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/news/20100601/bipolar...
Viewed differently, this speaks to the extreme dangers of psychiatric drugs. They should be a tool (vital!) of last resort but are often used as a frontline therapy.
Fundamentally, anything that modulates the brain should be used with extreme caution. Although the brain is remarkably resilient, sometimes drug-induced changes or side effects can be permanent.
For some, this may come as relief, yet for others, they may find that the solution was worse than the problem. As they say, caveat emptor.
Had major brain fog problems. But was generally happy and good natured.
Spent years seeking help, at every stage was told it was depression.
Turned out it was a horrible disease that was slowing killing me.
I imagine a lot of “depressed” people have an underlying chronic condition that isn’t being addressed.
Make a list every symptom, and what affects your symptoms. Take it to every kind of specialist. Then keep repeating. Take an advocate. I would explain stuff, could see they had mentally written me off. The wife would start bawling. This would wake them up, and they would dig further.
A neuro-ophthalmologist was reading my list. Looked up and declared I had Sjogrens. He was right. Now he missed the clotting disorder.
Then have a clot in your lungs. Then you get taken seriously. That’s when they found factor 5 Leiden.
So between the two my body and mind were trashed.
That theory has largely failed as we can't even really agree which groups of symptoms make which diseases. Hence the constant changes to systems like the DSM.
Full disclosure, I may be bias and I'm also an example: I have Major Mood Disorder. I used to have Severe Clinical Depression. Before that, I had Treatment Resistant Depression. Before that it was just Clinical Monopolar Depression (It's still called monopolar sometimes to differentiate it from Bipolar). My symptoms haven't changed. Nor has the treatments offered. But in the last 10y we've repeatedly renamed, recategorised, reshuffled etc just common depression. God knows what it's like in more complex, less common symptom sets...
The BBCs Life Scientific podcast discusses this very question in this episode if you're interested:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c
The wider series is also very good imho.
I think we’ve been incredibly lucky to have the fields of psychology and psychiatry to fill the medical role, especially when the quantitative gaps in our understanding of the brain seem to be widening.
[1] https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dime...
Modern fluid dynamics cannot adequately explain turbulence. Richard Feynman has described turbulence as the most important unsolved problem in classical physics.[1] We don’t dismiss fluid dynamics because turbulence is ill-defined, and we also don’t deny that turbulence exists just because we lack a thorough mathematical understanding of it.
This is analogous to psychology/psychiatry and mental illnesses. If we had magical brain oscilloscopes that we could hook up to visualize every mental disorder, we’d use them. Until those exist, we must rely on qualitative and statistical approaches to provide treatment.
A unipolar depression is very different from a bipolar depression in many regards. E.g. likeliness to eat less vs. likeliness to eat more.
And a unipolar depression can possibly be treated and then be gone. (If the treatment works out.) If one has bipolar disorder, it won’t go away. One has to live with it the the whole life.
The model is not reality especially so for the DSM, which was built in a medically theraputic context. And should be taken as such.
Hard disagree, the experience of somone with bipolar is a lot different than somone who's schizophrenic or only has major depression or generalized anxiety. Mania and the specific difficulties it causes for psychosis are radically different than what the others have to deal with and so is the general unpredictability of life (for planning and commitment purposes) and especially the types of effects it has on relationships. Each of the disorders have totally different profiles subjectively and objectively and different things they have to deal with. It's definitely not just a "statistical artefact" dispite the possibility of multiple diseases causing the same symptom clusters.
I havent finished reading the article yet but this really struck me as narcissism with some othee commorbidities that you mention.
What makes you think of BD?
The burden of myself
Has grown impossible to bear
Although rather than slip further
Down this mountain of despair
I will simply cry for help
And hope an angel hears my plea
Or I’ll not survive much longer
And succumb to misery.
If you haven't dealt with what Plath or this woman has, or are some credentialed authority on early childhood development of exceptional children (or poetry), I can't understand why your speculation on this is worth listening to.
For comparison, here is the "complex poetry" Plath had published at age 8 (titled simply, "Poem"):
"Hear the crickets chirping
In the dewy grass.
Bright little fireflies
Twinkle as they pass."
Even with Bernstein achieving the ever-elusive “American dream”, conversation surrounding this particular article’s topic is wearisome to some and even warrantless to others.
We need to do better. Publishing and discussing stories like this is just a start.
Mental health is real, and if you are struggling, please know that you are not alone, never will be, and should seek help to make you as happy as you deserve. There is nothing wrong with this, just like the maintenance necessary for anything utilized routinely.
I think the big danger in trying to put a medical diagnosis on everything is that it gives a false sense of what is normal and abnormal. When I hear statements like xx% of people have issues with depression, one thought is, what if depression isn’t an illness, but just a variant of normal.
Throughout history many, many of the great people, especially creatives struggled with depression. The Greeks actually had melancholy as one of the 4 humors and accepted that a certain percentage of people would be melancholic.
Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness. See for example back when the DSM classified same sex attraction as a mental illness. Now we realize that it is just a normal variant of human sexuality and not an illness to be treated. Similar thing with ADHD. We are seeing 3 and 4 year olds put on medication. If you look at the life of Thomas Edison it seems he may have had what we would today call ADHD. If he had been medicated to be “normal”, would he have been able to do all those prodigious accomplishments?
Sometimes, there can be great benefit in seeing something not as a disease but just a variant of normal with some advantages and disadvantages compared to the typical, and accepting it.
Form the article, it seems she has a happy relationship with her husband and 6 children.
She is able to do something that she truly loves and is good it (designing toys, which the article mentions gives her euphoria).
She has brought joy to thousands ( if not millions) of children through her work.
Herb toys are actually beneficial to children in terms of stimulating their imagination and creativity unlike a lot of other things that are marketed to children.
Even apart from the money, she has had a good life. And it seems, from the article, that she has embraced the way she is (both the good and the bad) and has found peace with it.
> She battled eating disorders, exercise addiction, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a nagging sense of worthlessness, doubts that life had any meaning or purpose, and the routine emergence of suicidal thoughts. [...] By junior high she’d learned how to starve herself. [...] suffered a mental breakdown and seriously considered suicide
That happy marriage and kids were heavily affected too. Yes she loved them. Read this:
> It was imperative for them to be the very best athletes, brightest students and most popular of their peer group to ensure my sense of wholeness,” she writes, rather than — as she puts it — “choosing to be average.”
She was not happy nor in peace with herself. She was deeply unhappy, using activity and perfectionism to prevent mental descent into darkness.
If this sounds crazy or spurious, then you'll probably agree that fixing abnormal psychology is actually as complicated as debugging the world's most complex software system.
As an example, the average gay person may not be distressed about being gay. However, the average trans person may feel uneasy about their physical body. This is why the DSM-V describes gender dysphoria, previously known as gender identity disorder. [1]
Feelings be damned, I think that anything that causes a person to feel bad, particularly bad feelings that stem from internal causes, should be considered a disorder. This is not a bad thing, since recognizing a problem is usually the first step to fixing it.
The lecturer pointed out this made no sense because in other contexts doctors would not say if they can't treat it, it's not a disease.
I'm guessing the patients thought they were going to hell, or thought society was going to abuse them, or they wanted to be heterosexual so they could have kids or whatever and said "please make me not gay, doc". So they were suffering.
If "treating the gay" worked it might still be considered an illness today I guess.
My point is only the disease labels are arbitrary. And there's a downside to labeling things, especially thing you cannot effectively treat. Also, trusting Doctors without a dose of skepticism can be a mistake.
What if someone feels bad when they hurt someone else?
Should that be considered a disorder?
This is not just a theoretical question, as I've read that the military has been funding research in to whether drugs can be used to assuage feelings of guilt and distress some of their trained killers suffer from when they hurt/kill other people.
The military wants their soldiers to be more efficient killers and pesky feelings of guilt or suffering when they hurt/kill others gets in the way of that.
So should every source of negative feelings be extinguished, and should we all try to live life with a smile on our faces even when we engage in unethical or hurtful actions?
This isn't it. The diagnoses usually have criteria for the symptoms being a problem for the persons functioning. People don't seek help because they're a bit diffeent but because they're suffering to the point of having difficulty living.