Jayson Blair

Detective Robert Goren said it to Nichole Wallace on Law & Order: Criminal Intent . Sara Sidle said a version of it Gil Grissom on C.S.I. And Herman Meville probably would have said it to Sigmund Freud. "Sometimes, a whale is just a whale." I am as big a fan as anyone of tough regulation of pharmaceutical companies, but it seems in recent months that the Food and Drug Administration has continue the drive off the cliff of logic that they leap a few weeks back and have landed in the gorge of patient destruction - at least when it comes to mental health medications. In May 2007, the F.D.A. ordered a "black box warning" be placed on the packaging of all antidepressants to warn people of an increased risk of suicide related to the medications. Earlier this year, the F.D.A. reversed itself and ordered a "black box warning" be placed on anticonvulants, including those used to treat depression and mania in bipolar disorder and mood swings in other psychiatr...

Sitting here waiting for my dinner date, I was thumbing through a copy of the latest edition of Vanity Fair when I came across an article about The Washington Post called " Post Modern." While thumbing through the well-written could-this-be-the-one-newspaper-that-survives stories because of my interest in journalism, I stumbled across this passage that made me think that Michael Wolff, the author, at least sort of got the tempo and the upsides and downside of the days untreated bipolar disorder ( née manic depressive illness). Unparrelled productivity, energy, ideas and risk-taking that pays off, followed by psychotic paranoia and sad consequences: He’s also seriously bipolar. He turns the paper into a powerhouse, consolidating its position by buying the morning competitor, the Washington Times-Herald, in 1954, trouncing the afternoon Washington Star, and adding Newsweek to the stable in 1961, as well as a group of high-profit TV stations, before turning on his father-...

Several clients have benefited from two recent books I've tripped across for students with attention deficit disorder who are headed off to or back to college. The first book is " M aki ng the Grade with A+DD: A Student's Guide to Succeeding in College with Attention Defici t D isorder " and " Survival Guide for Colleg e Students with ADHD and ADD. " "Survival" confirms some good tips for selecting colleges, living arrangements and other issues for students with attention deficit disorder, while I would list "Making the Grade" as a must-read - I've already given away five copies in the last two months to client's who are college students, and recommended it to two others - akin to how Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness" is a must read for anyone with or who knows someone with bipolar disorder and how Brooke Shield's "Down Came the Rain" is a must-read for anyone wh...

Re-reading Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind" and was struck by how this description of mania was absolutely accurate and pitch-perfect, as if Dr. Jamison had conjured up the ghost of manic episode past as she wrote this passage: "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces...

Many scientists, notably Kay Redfield Jamison in her book Touched with Fire , see a link between creativity and bipolar disorder, but I just came across a study where researchers at Stanford University's School of Medicine have found that having bipolar parents can pay dividends in creativity . It suggests what anyone whose hung out with many children of people with bipolar disorder already seem to believe: they tend to be super creative, like their bipolar parents. The small study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, said offspring of parents with bipolar -- even those who did not suffer the condition themselves -- scored higher on creativity tests than those with mentally sound parents. Dr. Kiki Chang, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, told the United Press International, that "there is a reason that many people who have bipolar disorder become very successful, and these findings address the positive aspects of having ...

Just came back from Politics and Prose bookstore in Northwest Washington where I attended a talk and question and answer sessions by Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD, the noted researcher and author of a memoir of her struggles with bipolar disorder, and her partner in the definitive book on bipolar disorder, "Manic Depresssive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, " the former National Institute of Mental Health director, Frederick Goodwin, MD. Two women who are close friends of mine from the Depression Bipolar Support Alliance-Northern Virginia came along and we had a blast being able to ask specific questions of Drs. Jamison and Goodwin. I thought the discussion of recurrent depression -- a sort of bipolar-like depression that goes up and down often but never gets above quote-unquote normal -- was particularly illuminating. Got a copy of the book and plan to use it in treatment (mine and my clients).