Are You A “Mental Defective”?

Once a year my son gets a letter referring to him as a “mental defective.”  He has schizo-affective disorder and has been court ordered to follow treatment. He once asked me, “How do you think I feel when I get this letter?”

Horrible, I am sure since his IQ is intact.

Because of this letter, however, he is entitled to government benefits, such as monthly disability checks and federal housing. On the other hand, it deprives him of certain rights, such as free access to travel and deciding where to live.

You may have heard the term “mental defective” in the news lately. It has been brought up repeatedly due to the brouhaha over gun ownership. I understand the reasoning behind criminals and people who have been committed not owning lethal weapons. (And I personally don’t see why anyone would want to own a weapon made for the military either.) My main concern is the term “mental defective.” While I’m not a huge fan of political correctness, in his case I think the government could come up with a better phrase when referring to folks with mental illnesses. Picky person that I am, I looked up the definition of the offending word.

Defective: Having a defect or flaw; faulty; imperfect; characterized by subnormal intelligence or behavior.

Okay, my son’s behavior is sometimes odd so I guess “mental defective” is accurate enough, but the connotation is far from nice. When I think of defective, I think of something I have bought at a store, a toaster, for instance. Let’s say I bring that said toaster home and discover that it doesn’t work properly. It is broken. After cursing for ten minutes straight, I get back into my car and return it to the store for another. I can’t return my son. I’d like to cure the illness, but until that day I’ll settle for better, more humane, treatment.

Another problem I have with the term is that it is used as a noun, not an adjective. If you have cancer you are not a “cancer” but a person who has the illness. If you have heart disease you are not a “heart disease.” People with mental illnesses are not the sum total of their illness. They are just people dealing with a condition that life has thrown their way.

Is It Normal?

When your child is born the first sentence out of your mouth is: “Is it normal?” There is relief and gratitude when they tell you yes. Then twenty years later a bomb drops at the time your child is about to begin his or her adult life. You have no time to prepare for this catastrophic disaster because you were told, after all, that your child is normal.

My son has schizo-affective disorder and recently had a conditional discharge (CD) renewed for another four years. Since he doesn’t believe he is ill (anosognosia), he went to court and argued his case before the judge. I wasn’t there, but his guardian said that my son did it respectfully, but I can also picture him telling His/Her Honor that he is no longer ill–in fact never was–and is as healthy as a horse, which is unfortunately not true. He has the classic positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia as well as the cognitive deficits. He only functions in the community thanks to the massive support he gets from the local mental-health center, for which I am grateful.

While I am relieved his CD was continued, I am saddened because his life turned out so differently from how I thought it would. I am also saddened for all the others whose lives are destroyed by mental illness and for families, too. I grieve for the unfulfilled bright futures, careers that never unfolded, marriage that failed to happen, and children they never had. Truly a loss. I wish I had more hope.

They Just Don’t Like Us

Three years ago a clubhouse, Granite Pathways, opened in Manchester, N.H. to help people struggling with mental illnesses deal with the isolation, housing, and work issues that come with the territory, and all this without government funds. Unfortunately, a few families didn’t want such a facility in their beautiful, upscale neighborhood, feeling members would be better served in the poorer section of town. (Sound familiar?) After the clubhouse received a variance from the city’s zoning board allowing it to operate, four families sued the city, and the whole brouhaha went to the state’s Superior Court. When the judge at Superior Court ruled that GP didn’t even need a variance to begin with, these same families next appealed to the state’s Supreme Court who just sent the whole mess back to the zoning board to vote on the tangential issue of the need for a variance. Whatever they decide, it can be appealed back to the Superior Court so this can go round and round. Fortunately, GP is not spending its money. (It doesn’t have any to spare.) It is the city being sued, but I hope these families are spending big bucks on lawyers’ fees, deleting their individual accounts. You’d think they have better things to do. Meanwhile GP continues to operate. (www.granitepathways.org )

New Research

New research links different diagnoses to same genes.

 

Mental illnesses share common DNA roots, study finds

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

The biggest study yet into genetics and mental health has come up with a stunning result: The five most common mental illnesses — autism, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disease, schizophrenia and major depression — all have a common genetic root.

The finding, published in the journal Lancet on Wednesday, may eventually lead to a complete rewrite of the medical understanding of the causes of mental illness.

“We have been able to discover specific genetic variants that seem to overlap among disorders that we think of as very clinically different,” Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

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The study does not explain every case of psychiatric disease, the researchers stress.

“We think this is one tiny fraction of the genetic component of these disorders. They involve hundreds and possibly thousands of genes,” Smoller said.

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And it didn’t show every case was related. But it demonstrated on a genetic level that the five diseases are more like a continuum of dysfunction than five separate and discrete conditions.

Smoller’s international team included dozens of researchers who looked at the genetics of more than 33,000 psychiatric patients and compared them to nearly 28,000 people without mental illness. They did what is called a genome-wide association study — a scan of all the DNA.

“We aimed to identify specific variants underlying genetic effects shared between the five disorders in the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium: autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia,” they wrote in their report.

They linked a considerable number to four places in the genome: a big stretch of chromosome 3; another part of chromsome 10, and two very specific genetic areas known to be involved in controlling cell function called calcium channels.

It wasn’t a complete surprise, Smoller says. Doctors have noted some overlap of symptoms and knew that in families prone to one psychiatric disease, another could also occur. “Autism was once known as childhood schizophrenia and the two disorders were not clearly differentiated until the 1970s,” the team wrote.

This finding could suggest that a genetic weakness upstream in the development of the brain could lead to a variety of psychiatric symptoms, perhaps influenced by other genes, or by the environment as well.

“We didn’t know going in that we would be able to find commonality with such a broad array of disorders,” Smoller said. “The fact that a particular pathway emerged as being relevant was also surprising. We didn’t know about that one before.”

Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, hopes the findings may help dispel some of the stigma that still surrounds psychiatric diseases.

“Ultimately this kind of research will give us a return in terms of social attitudes toward brain-based illness,” Dickworth said in a telephone interview. “If you can understand an illness process, it doesn’t seem so mysterious and terrifying.”

Duckworth said every psychiatrist knows of patients whose symptoms don’t clearly meet the definition of any one disease, and he noted that Sigmund Freud defined schizophrenia as a group of diseases. “This is a corner piece of the jigsaw puzzle,” he said.

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And it might lead to better treatments, said Dr. Bruce Cuthbert, who is director of the National Institute of Mental Health’s division of Adult Translational Research. “We are finally starting to make inroads where we have actual physiological mechanisms that we can target,” he said. “We can really start to understand the biology instead of having to guess at it.”

Weirdo! Weirdo! Weirdo!

We shunned the local retard at our parents’ insistence. “But, Mom, I like him.” “Sorry, sweetie, stay away.” Dumb weirdo.

A neighborhood child, post-polio, walked with a limp. No more friends. Crippled weirdo.

Daddy said I shouldn’t play with my Negro classmate. She had a brother. Dangerous weirdo.

The chronic section of the asylum housed the hopeless ones, masturbating in public. I laughed at them. Crazy weirdos.

My landlady, a nurse, turned down buying a building because a child nearby had Down Syndrome. Must be contagious. Sick weirdo.

A woman coping with residual encephalitis locked herself out of her house. No one helped. Scary weirdo.

My mentally-ill son asked a museum employee if they had sculptures inside. “No,” he lied. My son, the weirdo.

Old fogies, on a park bench, sit with nothing better to do. I’ll never be like them. Guess again. Old weirdo.

Weirdo. Weirdo. Weirdo.

“Researcher Discovers The Genomic Mechanism Behind Schizophrenia”

Link to an article on the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation website: another piece of the puzzle:

http://beforeitsnews.com/science-and-technology/2013/01/researchers-discover-the-genomic-mechanism-behind-schizophrenia-2527808.html

Lance Armstrong: Psychopath?

This question’s been posed on the Internet since people with this personality disorder have egos the size of the sun. Being charming is also in the mix. Lance was capable of lying to the public for years, and then tried to ruin the lives of people who refuted his sainthood, calling them bitter, whores, and worse. And, of course, he made tons of money.

On the positive side psychopaths are able to keep their stress levels low. Besides the charm, they are coolheaded, and also rarely psychotic. On the whole it seems being a psychopath has many advantages. And I should also note that most people with psychopathy do not commit violent crimes.

It’s also common to have psychopathic traits and not the full disorder. In fact, I suppose a case can be made that the disorder itself is not a disorder at all but” normal.” If you think about it, many who have made it to the top of their professions, from business to politics, are capable of ruthless or hardnosed behavior when crossed. (Think Donald Trump or Richard Nixon.)

And the rest of humanity, too, who go about their business, feeding themselves and their families, need to put themselves first to survive so, in essence, we all have a touch of this condition; it’s probably a matter of degree whether it crosses the line to pathology and having more symptoms than few may even earn a medal of commendation for the holder. Too little and you can wind up in a homeless shelter. And as for Lance, whether he’s a psychopath or not, of course, I don’t know. I’m just curious what’s behind the locked door of his mind.