Into the Void

Manic-Depressive Illness 2nd Ed.

December 11th, 2007

The long awaited Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, Second Edition, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison is finally in stores.

Hopefully you have the first edition. It is *the* reference book for bipolar disorder. Over the years many of the hypotheses set forth in the first edition have been proven out. It’s all there. Phototherapy, circadian rhythms, bipolar creativity. The effects of lithium on the suicide rate. Why we must avoid unopposed antidepressants. And that’s what I saw just riffling the pages! I can’t wait to sit down and read the medical roadmap that Drs. Goodwin and Jamison set out for the next 15 years.

A sample chapter is available for download from the Oxford University Press.

If you apply for the Amazon.com Visa when you make the purchase you can get a hefty rebate. Yippee!

Tags: Bipolar disorder, Circadian rhythms, Depression, Frederick K. Goodwin, Kay Redfield Jamison, Manic Depression, Manic-Depressive Illness, Phototherapy
Posted in Books and reading, Psychiatry, Psychology | 1 Comment »

Linguistics and the Experience of Emotions

March 20th, 2006

This little excerpt has a couple of very important concepts.

First, it gives some insight into why some folks somatize their illnesses – because they don’t have a word that helps to define the experience so it falls back into the physical realm.

Second, it shows that individual emotions can be lumped together under less specific umbrella words. This makes a good argument for improving your vocabulary in preventing episodes triggered by external events.

“Anthropologists report enormous differences in the ways that different cultures categorize emotions. Some languages, in fact, do not even have a word for emotion.Other languages differ in the number of words they have to name emotions. While English has over 2,000 words to describe emotional categories, there are only 750 such descriptive words in Taiwanese Chinese. One tribal language has only seven words that could be translated into categories of emotion.
The words used to name or describe an emotion can influence what emotion is experienced. For example, Tahitians do not have a word directly equivalent to sadness. Instead, they treat sadness as something like a physical illness. This difference has an impact on how the emotion is experienced by Tahitians. For example, the sadness we feel over the departure of a close friend would be experienced by a Tahitian as exhaustion. Some cultures lack words for anxiety or depression or guilt. Samoans have one word encompassing love, sympathy, pity, and liking – which are very different emotions in our own culture.”
“Psychology – An Introduction” Ninth Edition By: Charles G. Morris, University of Michigan Prentice Hall, 1996