Venturing out of my area of expertise and into eating disorders

As some of you know, my first overt, head-on confrontation with mental illness was not with my own bipolar disorder or inattention, but with the eating disorder of a high school classmate who anorexia nervosa. My friend, Erin, had been hospitalized at Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children, but her insurance company was refusing to pay for the more than 30 days of treatment recommended by her doctors there. She was a skeleton. She looked like she was going to die. Talking with her in her hospital bed was one of my earliest lessons in the fact that there are things more powerful than our own desire to live - Erin wanted to live, she knew she was dying, she knew why she was dying and, yet, she couldn't stop. Being the passive guy I am, I, of course, decide to coordinate some fundraisers for treatment, give some interviews to The Washington Post and paint that insurance company's transgressions on every figurative billboard I could find. Erin got here treatment. I was thinking of Erin today because the office manager at a practice where I worked convinced me to listen in to a teleconference course yesterday held by the Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders called "Transitions in Eating Disorder Recovery for the College Student." I don't treat eating disorders, per se, but many of the clients who come into my office have or are struggling with them, so it was nice to get some tips on identifying the signs of eating disorders and how to give those clients appropriate referrals. It fits with my philosophy of knowing a little about everything, but especially knowing what I don't know and how to get people to the right types of help.

The Truthfully Maddening Dilemna of John Nash's Story

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...

The Gift of Fear (or the Gift of Intution in Protecting Yourself and Lie Detecting)

A friend was recently on the phone with me walking down a New York street and she noticed a man starring at a street pole, and it didn't make her comfortable. Now, as the boys at Matchbox Twenty would put it, this is from a woman who makes friends with shadows on her wall, hears voices telling her that she should get some sleep, takes to herself in public and dodges glances on the train. What, on Earth, could bug this woman out? After first she dismissed her reaction. Could it be because the man was black and she racial stereotyping was making it worse? No. She lives in New York, and sees blacks all of all ethical and moral stripes and sizes every day. Could it be the neighborhood? Nah. It was familiar too her. Maybe something was different about the street lights? That could be it. Eventually, I said, "Who cares, why? If it doesn't feel right, just move, move." Gavin de Becker, a personal security professional, received acclaim for his book "The Gift of Fear...

Down the Road from McLean

My fascination with the sprawling 240 acre campus of McLean Hospital , in Belmont, Mass., and what was done there, began in 2003, the year I lost my job at The New York Times and days later found myself 270 miles south, at Silver Hill Hospital , in New Canaan, Conn., a premiere hospital that rivals, and in some estimations, is stronger than McLean . There, I was treated to my first experience in an acute, inpatient locked ward where I was evaluated for the first time by a psychiatrist and quickly diagnosed with a mood d isorder that later turned out to be bipolar disorder. Over more recent years, especially when I struggle to maintain my stability, I think back to that place and wish, for a minute, that I could come up with some reason to return to its 60 acres, complete with a social worker who spends the day checking in on you, the constant psychiatric care, the intense medication management, the priest who comes, if you so choose, to pray with you and the buildings full of fellow ...

Jayson Blair

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