Old Stuff, psychiatry, and a trip to the emergency room

View 717 Thursday, March 22, 2012

Eric was over all day as we Threw Stuff Away, coming down to the layer that accumulated when I was getting my brain burned out with hard X-rays, and all kinds of review stuff accumulated and piled up unopened. Some of it did get reviewed, and some just vanished into the muck, and it was pretty well a Shroedinger’s Cat situation as to which was which. We also discovered some truly historic stuff. There’s the ViewSonic 1024 x 768 flat screen monitor which in its day was the best thing since sliced bread, all boxed up in its original box with nylon thread reinforcing tape in strategic places, and all the original packing plastic mould beds. Niven and I carried that on road trips with the best portable computer we had, a good keyboard, and a good mouse; we’d set it up in a motel, such as the one in Death Valley, and write scenes from our next novel on it. As Eric observed when I asked what ought to replace it, now we just use large screen laptops; but in those days there weren’t any.

We found Ethernet Hubs (not switches); Software from the ages; all kinds of good stuff.

The Secret of Black Ship Island is posted. I yesterday called it the Legend of Black Ship Island. It’s one of those tricky memory things that keeps happening to me now. Nothing really serious, and I catch on fast. It is comforting that my memory today is about the same as Niven’s was when I met him forty years ago.

I’m feeling a lot better and my energy levels go up every day. Getting up the hill yesterday (4.5 miles round trip and 700 foot climb) was an accomplishment but it felt good. And my friend who has brought his severely autistic boy from a professional diagnosis of hopelessly retarded to A’s and B’s and clearly a high understanding of things he is interested in such as Medieval History – and also a polite potential citizen – is writing the case history up, which is terribly important.

I owe you a good essay on the state of psychiatric/psychological theory as it has developed over the years, and why things are in such a sorry state now.

When I was in graduate school in psychology, ADD and ADHD barely existed. The word ‘autistic’ ==

0330 AM

At this point I was called to assist Roberta who had a household accident that looked serious enough that I immediately drove her to the Kaiser Emergency Room. All’s well, we are back home with medications and a big bandage and some follow-ups to do, but I’ll have to do my essay on what has happened to psychiatry since I was in graduate school another time. It’s important. The teaser is that we have far too much theory and far too little data, and my friend’s case history of his son, and the stories of what happened to others he has met – people with severely autistic children tend to meet a lot of others with the same problem – is important.

It started in Vienna not so many years ago

When not enough people were getting sick,

And a starving young physician sought to better his condition

By figuring out what made his patients tick.

That’s the opening of a humorous folk song, but it contains a great deal of truth. Freud, on the basis of some real and some made up cases switched psychiatry from being a branch of medicine to something else, and postulated some physiological structures for which there was absolutely no evidence, nor is there any now. There’s actually more evidence for Hubbard’s theory of the ‘reactive’ mind as opposed to intellectual consciousness, which was the central theory of Dianetics before the AMA forced him to turn it from a science – he thought of himself as a scientist – to a religion. Yet Freud was and for the most part remains intellectually respectable. And psychiatry for a while divorced itself from the standard practice of medicine which collects case histories and looks for groupings of people who respond to certain treatments, and who use raw data – case histories – and have definite criteria for declaring when they know the ‘cause’ of a condition. Psychiatric textbooks of the 1950’s were way different from what you find now – and were also quite different in structure and argument from medical textbooks in other medical specialties.

But it’s late, and I have to get to bed.

I want again to say nice things about Kaiser. Everyone we encountered out there was cheerful, cooperative, and thoroughly professional. That includes the triage nurse who has one of the toughest jobs anywhere, the orderlies, and the checkout nurse, as well as the doctors and nurses in the ER itself.

While we were out at the ER I read an article I probably wouldn’t have read. Andrei Navrozov, Baudelaire in Russia in the current issue of Chronicles (a paleo-conservative magazine). I have searched for something to link to, but I can’t find it; the article is in the April 2012 issue. Navrozov is the poetry editor, and his point is that there was probably more communication among and within the literary community in the 19^th Century than today. “It turns out that news of high culture travelled much faster before the invention of the telephone and the computer.” He gives a number of instances. The article is not one I would normally have read, but it was what I had when waiting, and I got more to think about from it than from anything else I have recently read. More on that another time, but the entire April issue of Chronicles is filled with good stuff including a short disquisition on Green Pastures, the Broadway play made from Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun, a book I encountered in high school and remember to this day. I don’t care for much that I find in Chronicles, but sometimes it’s right on the button. As for instance “When Judicial Supremacists Artrack” by William J. Watkins, Jr., an excellent discussion of constitutional law and judicial supremacy, and perhaps a better exposition of what Newt Gingrich was trying to get at than Newt himself made, also in the April issue.

Note that I had misspelled Navrozov in my first uploading of this. That will teach me to write anything serious at 3:30 AM/