Jayson Blair

The last two weeks have had me repeating a phrase that I learned many years ago from my high school journalism teacher, the astute and sapient Anne Sharp, when we either came across or created an image to represent the dangers of school administrators attempting to spin us, the student newspaper. The final image was of upright tiger wearing a brim hand with a card on it reading "press." The tiger was sitting in front of a picnic basket on a blanket and a person was sitting across from them. The caption read something like (and I'm sure we got the quote from somewhere; I just can't remember), "Doing business with the press is a bit like having lunch with a tiger, you don't know whether you are having lunch or you are the lunch." For those disinclined to my wrapping, winding, wreathing stories, I simplified the principle behind why I don't like doing media interviews, "Once you've been bitten by a tiger, you are a little hesitant to stick you...

Quotations are the last refuge of the intellectually lazy -- but they beat trying to think of something pithy of your own -- and this one is one of those classic quotes that I share with my high school and college students who are struggling with becoming more mature. Clichés have resonance because they reflect underlying truth, and when it comes to the fulfilling, fraught, fun-filled, fertile, formative and fluctuating, world of growing up you can't say it much better. "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and B acon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this in an essay I have on my shelf at home, where he eviscerates those who would become bookworms, instead of using and abusing books, as they learn and in life, and as an ode to the power of creation and its link to action. In the last thre...

Someone came to me this week to discuss school, her career and her moods. She talked about how her father had been diagnosed years ago with bipolar disorder and toward the end of our conversation mentioned that a psychiatrist had diagnosed her with "bipolar lite" soon after she stopped using cocaine and ecstasy. I found it curious. She was not closed to the idea of having bipolar, but added that she stopped treatment because of the mood stablizing medications she was on just seemed to flatten her and numb her emotions. I went through the symptoms of mania -- rapid speech, racing thoughts, decreased need for sleep, hyper-sexuality, impulse-control, grandiosity and increased interest in goal-directed activities. She said "no" to virtually everyone of them, outside of the context of times when she was abusing substances. What about psychotic symptoms, which can occur in mania and deep depressions, and can lessen the likelihood of other disorders? Not a one of them, n...

Our office manager is playing the lead role in a local production by the Sterling Playmakers ' of " Thoroughy Modern Millie ," a Tony-award winning musical comedy that was on Broadway in the early 2000s. I went to see it on Sunday with a client and saw several others there, a testament to our office manager's loyal following, which I attribute to her ability to relate to our unique population of clients. You can take that wherever you want. I see no need to complete the thought and connect the dots, but, in the best ways, they broke the mold when they made her. The cast and crew of the play did a wonderful job and this morning I was talking to our office manager, who did an exceptional job playing Millie, about the behind-the-scenes romances, conflict and otherwise general insanity related to the cast and crew. As I told her, "there is a reason they call it drama." Anyway, the entire conversation made me think of the link between mental illness and creati...

Oh, yeah ... swan divers always go mad - my friend, Liz Kelley, on those of us who love and live to the point of madness and seem to believe that it is the only sensible way to either love or live. Sitting across from one of my most creativity, thoughtful, helpful, self-aware and troubled clients last week, I thought of this quotation. She's a swam diver. In everything in life -- the beauty, the ball, the gray -- she swan dives, sometimes in her own best interest and for her own thrill. Sometimes between that's what swans do. That's how they eat. Those who they get their nourishment. As like swans dive because that is where we the door dive, swan divers like her and me do it because that's where we find our nourishment. Its in healthy? I don't know, but it seems, sometimes, the only way for us to live.

I've tried to do my best to rest during the weekend's over the summer, taking trips along the Potomac, going to New York City twice, to the islands off of Charleston, S.C. and Duck, N.C. Feeling a bit tired this weekend, I mused a bit about what the last few Sundays have been like. I went to my camera to see if I had pictures (see above) that would jog my memory, an assessment of my attempt of summer mental health self-help and the results for me. They reach look nice, comfortable, inviting. Well, pictures don't always tell the story. As one particularly well-expressed friend once described her feelings as she sat her in her bikini, a glass of red wine next to her and her father outside by the pool while weekending at palatial mansion on the eastern coast of Florida, "Here I go again. I'm crying hysterically in paradise." There's been a lot of that going on lately. Each picture, in its own way, is beautiful, but each hides underlying sadness. Or perhaps e...

Someone sent me this video and it made me think of how helpful it is is for people who have been depressed -- I mean everything from a touch of a sad mood to I mean Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -depressed -- to use art to heal. Dancing, painting, writing, drawing, composing, playing, choreographing, videographing, filming, shooting and acting your feelings is an immensely powerful tool. We get so used to words -- using what comes out of our mouths to express ourselves when we are depressed or sad -- that we sometimes miss the power of our other gifts. This YouTube video includes pictures and other images to the Blue October song "Black Orchird" - an effort that probably helped the artist, and hundreds of thousands more.

University of Virginia researchers have published a piece in the Archives of Journal of General Psychiatry that examined an Internet-based behavioral intervention for adults with insomnia. They found that insomnia severity, wake after sleep onset and sleep efficiency all significantly improved for two thirds of those receiving the Web-based program while none of the individuals in the control group changed over time. The idea behind the research was straightforward: insomnia is a major problem, cognitive behavioral therapy is the best known treatment for insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy is neither not available, because of cost or the location of practitioners to many people and that the Internet could be used as a conduit to deliver the treatment. The question was really only whether the treatment would work over the Internet and whether the Internet-based programs could be tailored to the individual client. One of the researchers, Lee M. Ritterband, Ph.D, speaks about it in the...