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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Bleed just to know you're alive
Wednesday. 1.10.07 8:50 pm
I just recently got the new Evanesence CD (as evidenced by the YouTube link below). I really liked the song "Lithium" because it has a lot of really tough stuff in it, a real struggle. It makes you think, you know? A lot of people who are diagnosed with problems and told that they should take drugs to fix them are given a lot of crap if they choose not to (and thus choose to remain depressed/bipolar/mentally disturbed, whatever).

It seems selfish, especially if you have a family, to not take the medicine that could cure you and make you a productive and healthy member of the family again. But it isn't that simple, really. Nobody likes feeling depressed, but I think for a lot of people feeling depressed is preferable to feeling *nothing*. Yes, everyone always wants to feel happy, but I don't think anybody wants to feel happy *always*. It calls to mind Brave New World, or even my favorite movie of all time, Equilibrium. People are afraid of depression, afraid of the darkness... but worse still is the feeling of equilibrium, particularly artificial equilibrium. So in this song lithium, she talks about how she wants to remember how it feels to be without lithium. It's scary to take drugs for something, especially drugs that claim to drastically alter your personality and emotions. Emotions, even bad ones, are part of what goes into making us who we are. She says "Here in the darkness, I know myself."

There are a lot of people in the darkness. I empathize with the death metal rockers and the people who listen to all the really heavy stuff, like Pantera and Deaf Tones and Mudvayne and the like. You feel all of these wild, desperate emotions, and the music is that way too... frustrated, trapped, angry, constantly on the edge of some vast void, wind whipping around your body. You are terrified that the wind might cause you to fall almost as much as you are overwhelmed by the desire to jump. "...swan dive into the asphalt...."

And the drugs, the "cure"... yes, it makes you fit in better. It pulls you away from the edge and into safety, but it is a grey, stagnant safety, like limbo.

How much does the drug "cure" you, and how much does it take away the person you have always been? The creature of darkness you have come to understand as yourself? I think it's possible that the drug returns you to how you should have always been if you had been well... it just doesn't feel like that because for as long as you can remember you've been sick.

I'm definitely not saying to not take the drugs if you need them. They are a gift; they make normal life possible for a lot of people they might've shut away in the old days, they give you a new lease on life and freedom from the dark emotions that can choke a life and prevent it from blossoming. But we must improve the drugs. Because without emotion- that's not a way to live.... So I guess what this song said to me is that you have to be patient with people who need medication and seem obstinate in not taking as often as they should...... maybe they just need to remember how it feels to be without it.... both so that they remember why they're taking it as well as so they remember what it's like to feel- to really feel... to feel in every atom of your being... even if that feeling is pain.
To bleed just to know that you're alive.
4 Comments.


I think we need to go beyond improving the drugs.
We need to improve the medical establishment's feelings towards mental illness overall.

Sometimes, MDs get so wrapped up in placing trust in the bioscientific cure that they overlook the factors in peoples' lives that may contribute to whatever illness they are diagnosed with. To steal an analogy from Dr. Denis Burkitt (and apply it in a different sense than he did): doling out drugs is like setting up an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff when the wiser solution is to block off the cliff in the first place. While we may not be able to set up a wall far enough from the cliff to make the fall impossible--as practically no one's going to seek help from falling off of the cliff if they're a full mile away in Happyville--doctors need to get the ambulances up on the cliff to rush people to safety before they splat on the landscape below.
» ranor on 2007-01-10 11:23:16

it depends on the whys and the hows. if theres a real chemical/biological problem, yeah take the drugs. if its a cognitive problem, drugs wont really help. i was at an elizabeth wurtzel (prozac nation) lecture once and some smartass went "you've been on a lot of medication...do you feel that anti-depressents stifle your creativity". she looked him straight in the eyes and said "no...REAL depression, the physical kind that takes away your life...THAT stifles creativity..it stifles everything" ive been on both sides of the fence. at some pints i needed it because what i was feeling was purely physical, but most of the time its been an emotional problem thats needed cognitive therapy too. t hats where doctors miss the mark. medication, in my opinion, should be used as a temporary relief when there are no other options, but by no means is it a cure. im just lucky my health plan covers my therapy. otherwise id be in trouble.
» invisibleinkling on 2007-01-10 11:38:37

yeah, that's true. I think medication is really important in that sometimes you get stuck in a rut and you can't get out. The medication lifts the cloud, the heavy weight (especially in the case of depression...the completely debilitating physical symptoms) so that you can think clearly and have the energy to jumpstart the healing process. Otherwise it's really difficult to even start thinking about healing. But the drugs seem to address the symptoms, and not the disease, so like you say, there has to be some therapy involved to really get to the root of the issue.
» Zanzibar on 2007-01-10 11:58:57

My mom has been teaching Emotionally Disturbed children in the public school system for years. The stories she can tell you about kids that are under the age of 10 could make your skin crawl. These kids of course come from all walks of life and each situation is different - parents, foster care, sexual molestation, or just a 'chemical imbalance' can all be the root of problems. Most of the time these kids while on medication are able to concentrate, finish their work, and hold conversations. It seems that the medication is a blessing to these kids. However, I've also met kids whom later on in life have become slightly adicted or have found that the drug 'slows them down' preventing them from doing things they otherwise would have been able to do (join sports mostly). So I see your point. I think improving the medications would be incredibly helpful - and they are so far as I know.
However, I'd have to agree with the perseptive people above me. These kids by deffinition are emotionally disturbed, and have usually (not 100% of the time) had something tramatic happen to them. These things need to be addressed, for teh children's sake. My mom has always fought the distrcit to keep the phsychologist on staff for them. She usually meets with 'em once or twice a week on a one-to-one basis. It helps the kids quite a bit.
Only now she's had a small change in career. She's now teaching autistic children under the age of 6. It's been a horse of a diffrent color to say the least.
» Helena on 2007-01-11 09:59:36

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