SHOCKED TACTICS CELTIC CONNECTIONS: WHEN MICHELLE SHOCKED PLAYS CELTIC CONNECTIONS NEXT MONTH SHE’LL PREACH RELIGION RATHER THAN REVOLUTION ... BUT FAITH HAS NOT DULLED HER ANGER BY ANDREW PURCELL Sunday Herald THERE'S ONLY two things you don't talk about in polite company - one is politics, the other is religion." Michelle Shocked delivers her favourite line with a shrug that signals her intention to talk about faith, politics and little else. No-one has ever called her polite, but that's ... (more...)

Added: Dec 17, 2007 11:16 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

Electroconvulsive Therapy Saves Lives. But 70 Years After It First Gained Currency as a Treatment For Major Depression, ECT Continues to Court Controversy. By Shirley Wang Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, July 24, 2007; HE01 Anthony Mauger woke up at 5 a.m. one morning nearly 10 years ago and heard a message in his head telling him to kill himself. He wrote a goodbye note to his wife, then jumped off the back deck of their Kensington home, ... (more...)

Added: Jul 25, 2007 4:23 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

Our son's condition kept getting worse, and everything we tried to help him failed. Then we discovered there was one final option: Electroshock therapy. By Ann Bauer Salon.com Jun. 19, 2007 At the age of 3, my older son withdrew, becoming sullen and cross-eyed overnight. He stopped speaking and lost the ability to follow directions, vanishing inside a body that only rocked and swayed and arched away from human touch. Together with my then-husband, I coaxed this little boy back: ... (more...)

Added: Jun 20, 2007 4:34 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

BY JOYCE RUSSELL Northwest Indiana Times Feb 3 2007 PORTAGE | Barbara Layton's depression had become so severe she had only the energy to sit in a rocking chair all day and slowly rock back and forth. The Hobart native and Portage resident had suffered from depression since she was a teen. At age 21, she attempted suicide. But it wasn't until she reached 40 that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Like most with the illnesses, she'd been treated ... (more...)

Added: Feb 3, 2007 12:56 pm | 14 Comments |  Email This Post  | Print

The Baseball Player Who Used His Celebrity to Bring Mental Illness Out into the Open Royals and the Reich' Reveals Fateful History of Nazi Princes History News Network Jan 15 2007 By Barron H. Lerner Dr. Lerner is a historian and physician at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. This article draws on his new book, When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine (Johns Hopkins, 2006). In 1952, a major league baseball player ... (more...)

Added: Jan 23, 2007 3:05 pm | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

By Elise Kleeman Staff Writer Pasadena Star-News 01/13/2007 PASADENA - Patricia Wedberg's overwhelming depression arrived quietly and without cause. In April, her family noticed she wasn't herself and seemed tired and run down. In May, she lost her appetite. By the end of July she could no longer function at work. In mid-August she tried to take her own life by suffocation. When September arrived, Wedberg said, "I was down to 90 pounds, skin and bones, and I was pacing ... (more...)

Added: Jan 14, 2007 2:09 pm | 4 Comments |  Email This Post  | Print

San Francisco Chronicle Dec 24 2006 Telling a friend I was starting Kitty Dukakis' new book sparked a disagreement. Was it rubbing alcohol she used to drink? Or vanilla extract? A happy debate: We were both right. One might be tempted to say Dukakis self-medicated by treating her storied long-term depression with booze and pills. But she had plenty of help from some of the country's leading doctors, who enabled decades of her addiction to amphetamines. Dukakis' book, "Shock: ... (more...)

Added: Dec 26, 2006 2:14 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

Dec 7 2006 By Gemma Collins Berkshire Co UK A FRAIL pensioner who battled with manic depression for 60 years, died after undergoing electric shock therapy at Reading's Prospect Park Hospital. Violet Dixon, 81, who suffered from Bipolar affective disorder was given Electroconvulsive Therapy after becoming so depressed and run down that staff feared she would die. Mrs Dixon who lived with husband Victor in Compton near Newbury had been suffering from anxiety and depression since the 1940s and in ... (more...)

Added: Dec 22, 2006 10:20 am | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

Ignored for decades, the twisted genius of Mervyn Peake is finally getting the attention it deserves BY JOEL MEADOWS Time Dec 11, 2006 With a career encompassing 25 years that included five novels, a handful of plays and thousands of drawings, paintings and sketches, why isn't Mervyn Peake a more celebrated English literary and artistic hero? A cult figure today, Peake is best known for Gormenghast, his bleak but compelling gothic fantasy trilogy published in the 1940s and '50s ... (more...)

Added: Dec 11, 2006 4:08 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

'I don't believe in dressing up reality' Bernard Zuel December 8, 2006 Syndey Morning Herald To understand Lou Reed you could begin where he began: the works of American poet and author Delmore Schwartz and the novels of proto-grunge writer Hubert Selby jnr, author of Last Exit To Brooklyn and Requiem For A Dream. By the time the Long Island-raised Reed met him at Syracuse University in the early 1960s, Schwartz was in the last years of his life and ... (more...)

Added: Dec 9, 2006 4:38 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

Nebraska TV Thursday 12/07/06 Electroshock Therapy, now called Electroconvulsive Therapy or ECT, a surge of electricity to the brain, is still being used to treat severe depression. NTV talked to one patient who says he wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for this controversial treatment. "After my third suicide attempt, they mentioned ECT. It almost sounded like a last line of defense, said Kevin Karmazin, an ECT patient. Kevin's depression was serious. He was already on a cocktail ... (more...)

Added: Dec 8, 2006 4:26 pm | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

A beginning to forget Mom writes a happy ending to battle with postpartum depression BY BILL LOHMANN TIMES-DISPATCH Nov 26 2006 The birth of her only child is not even a blur to Carolyn Brink. She doesn't remember it at all. In fact, she doesn't remember the first few months of Zachary's life. She was trapped in the depths of postpartum depression, a perilous condition made even more dangerous by an adverse reaction to the drugs prescribed to help her. She recalls ... (more...)

Added: Nov 26, 2006 3:50 pm | Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

25th April 2006 http://www.oxford.anglican.org Diocese of Oxford Jo Harries says that life has taught her that God is a God of  surprises. ‘I often wonder what he has for me next’, she says. And no wonder - she had early dreams to be a medical missionary in Islamic countries, but instead became the wife of the Bishop of Oxford. Her career as a paediatrician has been halted by her own repeated hospitalisations. But as Rebecca Paveley discovered, her sense ... (more...)

Added: Nov 14, 2006 1:29 pm | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

William Styron, 1925-2006 Unlikely bard of depression. By Nell Casey Slate Nov. 7, 2006 When I first met William Styron, in the summer of 2001, he was frail, barely back on his feet after a brutal bout with depression. I met him and his wife, Rose, at a bookstore where we read from Unholy Ghost, a collection of essays on depression I'd edited, and to which both Styrons had contributed. I was taken aback by Styron's vulnerability. It was his ... (more...)

Added: Nov 12, 2006 2:05 pm | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print

By Clare Raymond Oct. 30, 2006 Daily Mirror I WAS motionless, lying face down on the pavement. There was grit in my mouth and blood dripping from my hands and my bare feet. It was the sight of blood that saved me. I knew then that I needed help - needed a hospital. As I levered myself up from the kerbside, I heard screaming and shrank back, terrified, clapping both my hands over my ears. Then I realised that my ... (more...)

Added: Nov 12, 2006 1:50 pm | 1 Comment |  Email This Post  | Print