linkspam is spammy

Excellent article on how ideas of "mental illness" are far more culturally determined than the arbiters of such things generally acknowledge, and highlighting the unfortunate global influence of American/Western ideas on the rest of the world's evolving health practices. My comment on it is to wonder why there is such a rigid "either/or" in thinking about "mental health" problems and the contribution of BOTH brain/physiology factors AND culture/belief systems/emotions. It seems as if a truly holistic, synergistic understanding of such things is very hard to capture -- that people like their clear, easy causalities, falsely believing it gives them some sort of control.

MAGAZINE | January 10, 2010
The Americanization of Mental Illness
By ETHAN WATTERS
In recent years, American ideas about psychiatric disorders have spread around the globe. Is that really good for the world's mental health?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?emc=eta1


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I sent the happy with it

That soup recipe I posted? I was lamenting to my mother that I had not been able to find parsley root. Two days later I got a box in the mail -- filled with it. I cannot tell you how happy this made me. That evening, I found her on chat (we mostly communicate that way as Mom is deaf and chat is a lot easier than going through a relay operator). I thanked her and told her how happy I was when I opened that box and saw all that parsley root. She said, "I sent the happy with it." *heart*

Also, I made my first poetry sale. A poem I wrote will appear in a book by Karen Lord entitled The Best of All Possible Worlds, which won the Frank Collymore literary prize in Barbados last night. Wheeee! for Karen, and for getting paid for a poem I wrote. This is a good day.

(And now I want an icon with a parsley root that says "I sent the happy with it.")