Friday, December 18, 2009

Creativity or Disaster












    You say that as if there's some sort of litmus test that a trained psychiatrist could administer to confirm that you definitely had depression. But I'm convinced that shrinks are groping through the vast darkness of the human brain just as clumsily as the rest of us; they just have a vocabulary for describing the shapes they encounter there. And many of the psychiatrists I've known are some of the craziest people I've ever met. So my resistance to the very idea of counseling has less to do with masochistic cultural fantasy than with deep skepticism about the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry...

  2. counseling is not the same as getting a diagnosis and maybe some pills. a lot of people grapple with really difficult situations in their lives, and counseling might give them a chance to talk those through, reach a place where they can better cope with and integrate the problems in their own lives.

  3. Why would you hear from a dean about this? Ze admitted it wouldn't be fair.

    I was giving this whole issue of how difficult life is some thought after talking to a Very Conservative Person at a party recently. Her thinking was exactly as you describe -- bootstraps, with no help for legitimately difficult to impossible problems. Her parents were immigrants and she worked hard to get where she is so by God it can be done and leveling the playing field is not necessary. I can intellectually see this mindset, it's one of black and white, but I sure can't understand it with any part of my heart.

    Your students are lucky to have you as a professor, someone who cares and tries to understand, but who does call them to account when they need it.


    *lifts glass*

    I can drink to that.

    Several times, in fact.

  5. I've had a new wrinkle -- the home in foreclosure... My CC students are generally leading complicated lives, but their own job loss/housing insecurity is a new wrinkle -- they have plenty of time to go to school, but their lives are falling apart, so they need to move their kids & spouse back in with a set of parents etc..

  6. I've had two students this year struggling with depression or some other mental illness--it's so hard, to be far from home and with such limited clinic support. My still-feels-new-U is a residential college (Old U was a commuter campus) and I'm still adjusting to the issues the different student bodies present. These residential students are much more economically stable, but the psychological burdens far from home seem particularly difficult.

  7. I suffered depression all through childhood and a large part of adulthood. It only got better with menopause and subsequently ten years on Paxil. I was a University Fellow in English at Penn and in such bad shape I couldn't function at all. Did I go for help? No - this was 1967. I dropped out instead.

    There is an enormous difference between being sad and being depressed. I'm not sure anyone who has not had clinical depression can understand what it feels like. It is a real life-waster, though.

    Good for you to feel responsible enough to help your students get help. They trust you enough to confide in you; that's a huge compliment.

  8. Anonymous10:37 PM

    My students have real problems, too. Yes, there is the real problem of not wanting to study or learn, and finding creative ways of justifying that (my class was too visual, too auditory, too tactile, whatever, for the one learning style that works for them). But mostly their problem is the 40-80 work weeks and the child care. The reason they missed the midterm is that the baby had a fever and therefore was not allowed into daycare. The reason they are going to miss class today is that their boss is on the phone saying they are needed to replace someone with H1N1 and no, he will not respect their course schedule in this case. They need these jobs more than they do good grades, so they miss class.

    Very many of them are on antidepressants and have been for years but I think some R&R would do them better. I really understand people not wanting to be medicalized because once you step into the mental health jungle, you're a playground for different MSWs and GPs to try their very partial knowledge on. It's not necessarily safer than going out to the parking lot and buying illegal drugs. A lot of my students have already learned this and try to stay away from hawkers of Ritalin, Prozac, and so on.

  9. Anonymous10:44 PM

    P.S. And on counseling: once again, it really depends. These MSWs and student health center PhDs are not necessarily very sensitive or very skilled, and they often have a single one size fits all paradigm they want to shove onto the students.
    So I understand when people don't want to go.

    I strongly suspect these students got a lot more good done for themselves by just talking to you, Bardiac.

  10. Very thoughtful post.