Virginia Woolf and Octavia Wilberforce

Octavia Wilberforce was a healer, who became one despite great discouragement from her family.  Her father apparently wrote her out of his will because she decided to get medical training.  In 1939, she was Virginia Woolf's doctor.  Despite Wilberforce's effort, Virginia Woolfe wrote a letter to her husband which began, "I feel certain I am going mad again.  I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.  And I shan't recover this time.  I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate."  Her nephew, Quentin Bell, described what happened next:: "She put this on the sitting-room mantelpiece and, at about 11:30, slipped out, taking her walking-stick with her and making her way across the water-meadows to the river.  Leonard believed that she might already have made one attempt to drown herself; if so she had learnt by her failure and was determined to make sure of it now.  Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat.  Then she went to her death, "the one experience," as she had said to Vita, "I shall never describe."  A decade, or so, earlier she had described the treatment of her fictional figure, Orlando, who had (it seems) been catatonic for a week this way.  "But the doctors were hardly wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise, starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with possets of newt's slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock's gall on going to bed, they left him to himself, and gave it as their opinion that he had been asleep for a week."

9/11 Babies and BCBA therapy

I'd love to hear if anyone else has had any experience with these two phenomena.  The first is the cohort of children born in 2001 or 2002 (give or take).  Their prebirth and early experience happened around the time of 9/11.  Whether they externalize or internalize, they seem to have trouble handling stress, and there are a high percentage of them, it seems.  I can remember how unsettled I felt at the time.  I wonder if their early experiences have made it hard for them to cope.  The second phenomenon is the use of a BCBA as a therapist, rather than a traditional therapist or a psychopharmacologist.  In the situation I've encountered, a previous therapist was seen as not giving explicit enough help in how to deal with specific situations, and a medication provider was seen as not considering the whole child.  Getting help for your child has become more complex, if nothing else.  Please leave a comment if you can enlighten me on either of these situations.

The Shape of the Eye

This book is by George Estreich.  It tells about the first dozen years or so of his journey with Laura.  He makes a very good argument for just thinking of her as Laura, as opposed to a child with Down Syndrome, or a Down Syndrome child, or a child with Down's Syndrome, or anything other than Laura.  It would be worth reading if it only told about their lives, but it also has some good food for thought.  He hopes that it will come that we have no more need or desire to mention how she is different in her number of chromosomes than in her hair color.  I couldn't put the book down ( I assume I'm able to say that if I ate supper between the time when it came in the mail and when I finished it).  There is interesting information about Dr. Down, the Special Education process, and what the extra chromosome does (effect how proteins are manufactured in the body).  There was a short passage on the meeting after the School Psychologist tested her.  Here's a quote: "I knew nothing about Down syndrome except that it was bad, and that it meant Laura was different from me. I no longer believe the first - Down syndrome is simply Laura's way of being human.  As for the second: Laura is different, but the differences are superficial.  This may seem an odd assertion, since the extra chromosome pervades her, and its effects texture our days.  And yet these altered forms, eye and face and word, have come to contain and absorb what I know of love.  Or love learned to alter itself, to accommodate the forms.  She is no less my daughter, no less a person, for having an extra chromosome."

DSM Wheel

DSM-5 is here, and praise is a little hard to find.  I would use one of my favorite cartoon lines, spoken by one Eskimo to another with the Northern Lights in the background, "It's not Broadway, but it's what we've got."  I use the framework in my attempts to understand the factors (internal and external) that are leading to problem behaviors for elementary school students and others.  How the students can be helped to minimize the disruptions which accompany the behaviors is a next step; understanding the behaviors is key.  I use my graphic organizer to remind myself of the important possibilities for diagnoses.  Any condition for which the person meets the criteria can be checked (for the diagnoses on the left) or shaded in according to how strongly the diagnosis applies for the diagnoses that "made" the circle on the right.  All diagnoses are not listed, but all categories of diagnoses should be included.  I'd be happy to hear from anyone that believes that a category has been missed, or that an additional specific condition should be named.  For me, the sections that have been most helpful so far are those on Specific Learning Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.  What I don't see is an example of everything that is needed for a "complete" diagnosis.  It can't be listing the five axes, as they no longer exist!  Can anyone point me to a source that tells what you need for a written diagnosis, which covers all the bases?

Healing Yourself

I've just been asked to comment on a list of self-help books I tweeted about.  I pulled a few I've recommended before off the shelf and discovered that none of them were on the list!  Here they are (Goodreads better come through for me):
How to Meditate by Lawrence LeShan
Destructive Emotions by Goleman and the Dalai Lama
the books for kids by Dawn Huebner
Peg Dawson and Richard Guare's books on executive functioning
The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
If Only You Would Change by Luciano and Merris
The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
books about how those medicines work
Finding Flow by Csikszentmihalyi
Darkness Visible by William Styron
Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron
Kay Redfield Jamison's books
The Center Cannot Hold by Saks
In Her Wake by Nancy Rappaport
When Someone You Love is Depressed by Rosen and Amador
Mark Vonnegut's memoirs
imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren
and the classic...
I like the books by individuals who have been through it and relatives because they combine good information and something you want to read.

Healing Relationships

The Spontaneous Gesture is a collection of letters from D.W. Winnicott.  As collections of letters go, it is good but not great.  It is certainly a good enough collection of letters.  Winnicott worked with such ideas as transitional objects and the good enough parent.  He worked with Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.  Along with these letter recipients, there are James Strachy, Edward Glover, Ernest Jones, David Rapaport, Harry Guntrip. Joan Riviere, Jacques Lacan, A.R. Luria and Wilfred Bion.  There aren't letters to Winnicott, which I think makes such a book much more engaging.  Many of the letters are reactions to papers and presentations by the person who got the letter.  There is a little bit of personal information, but not much.  From a letter to B.J. Knopf, who had reacted to a letter of his in the Observer: "Perhaps you will do best to give up trying to work at all this, and just go on naturally enjoying your experiences.  Later you may like to go back over what you experience with a book or two to guide you, but while you are having a child I think you may do best to follow your natural feelings."  Here's a good biography of Winnicott: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791141.Winnicott

Healing the Self

Constructing The Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy deserves to be on your reading list.  In the book, Philip Cushman (on this list of providers) covers a lot of areas.  He advocates a hermeneutic stance in therapy, in which the social/political status quo is given its due.  He gives some examples of his own patients, who he helped to broaden the "clearing" which they could view, and construct their world in ways which were more positive for them.  He also talks about the changing role and nature of healers and healing over time.  Our current situation is seen as one in which consumerism is the response to the empty self.  Several past times and therapies are explained.  One is the social forces present in the 1960s, and the therapies which stemmed from that.  It is, of course, interesting the read history and compare it to what you experienced when you were there (ouch)!  Mesmerism is covered well, as is the controversy surrounding Melanie Klein.  Cushman explains self and object relations theories in ways that help with an overall understanding.  Winnicott and Sullivan are also covered quite extensively.  From the philosophy side, Gadamer gets his say.  This book provides some perspective for anyone who functions as a healer.