Five Links Make a Post

[jesse_the_k]

While yet unable to write of myself, or others, or reading or whatever of genuine interest, I have been reading the net like a turtle trapped at the base of a waterfall. So I can still fling links with the best of them:

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Join me in being educated by "Jubilation," a new blog about life as a therapist with mental illness.

Here the blogger meditates on the stereotyped bright, tall wall between "professionals who help" and "those people."

begin quote People tend to act surprised that therapists see other therapists as clients. I think part of it is still because there’s a stigma against mental illness still built into the profession—there are Them, who are mentally ill and lack insight; and then there is Us, who are the sane healthy fixer people who have all the answers.

There’s this idea that if you just had all the answers, if you just knew all the right things, you wouldn’t need therapy, because you’d just figure it all out on your own. Or more generously, the mechanisms for fixing it all would already be built into your life. This is a myth and not based in reality, but it’s a tempting myth, especially among the shrinks that are trying to live it. Find all the answers, and never more experience pain, confusion, and loss! quote ends

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NPR Reports on 'Wishful Science' [which] Plagues Testing Of Drug Candidates

begin quote Many excellent grant proposals get turned down, simply because there's not enough money to go around. So Landis says scientists are tempted to oversell weak results. [... snip ...]
Landis says ALS is not the only example of this type of wishful science. Similar problems emerged in the study of a drug being tested to see if it could protect the brain from the damage of a stroke. She says that test, too, showed the drug to be a dismal failure.
[... snip ...]
In hopes of figuring out why [one ALS drug had little benefit], scientists went back to take a second look at the mouse experiments that were the basis for the human study, and found them to be meager. Additional, more careful tests found no compelling reason to think the experimental drug would have ever worked. quote ends

Argh, that was a particularly rich article and hard to excerpt; if you or anyone you know deals with an "orphan disease," it's useful reading.

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All pet owners know that terrible feeling, when their loved one is laid low and something important is missing. Veterinary Practice News sponsored a send-us-your-radiograph of the remarkable things animals eat.

begin quote What stood out this year was what the animals had eaten and how much, according to Iturri. “One dog had swallowed five duckies and one of our top three winners ate 43.5 socks,” she said. “That broke our socks-eaten record. And a pug ate a package of sewing needles, which previously we saw only cats do. quote ends

All patients featured recovered. Useful cautionary info for pet owners.

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Turns out there are little words which tie us together. NPR: Our Use Of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests

begin quote One of the things that Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations that took place between people on speed dates. He fed these conversations into his program along with information about how the people themselves were perceiving the dates. What he found surprised him.

"We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves," he says.

Specifically, what Pennebaker found was that when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.

"The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now."

This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts." quote ends

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I have learned a lot from reading other people's experience of living with chronic pain. Every one of us develops idiosyncratic coping methods. I've borrowed some, and admired many.
Autostraddle's founder/editor, Riese writes a profound essay on fibromyalgia, "Everything Hurts All The Time"

begin quote 
I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down. Sometimes it seems like the story started when I was 14, or maybe even earlier. It gets mixed up with other vague diagnoses, and other parts of myself I learned to name months or years after I started to feel them, like being gay, like depression, like ADD, like being a “writer.” I know that I am these things, but I don’t know why, and I don’t know if I tell stories like this one to convince you that they’re true, or if I’m the one who needs convincing.

Doctors are not, it turns out, vending machines. You can’t just insert a collection of symptoms and expect them to dispense an accurate diagnosis and its accordant remedy. Doctors are also just people and they don’t know everything because not everything is known, and maybe not everything is meant to be known.

But we want to know. We want to name our pain and desire and we want language that describes what happens to our bodies, and we want that so badly that we’ve come to need it, too.
 quote ends

Content note: Riese delves the decade from her father's death to the fibro diagnosis, including discussions of disordered eating and self-harm.