Into the Void

Bipolar Disorder Daily News Blog: New South Asian (India) Film on Bipolar Disorder

Hiding Divya is an English-language film about the stigma against the mental ill in New York/North Jersey Philipino-Indian communities.

It’s a must-see.

Whether flying fighter jets or frolicking on the Oprah set, TC has always entertained us to the max.

While looking at disturbing pictures^W^W^W^W doing some follow-up research one of of my previous entries, I revisited a fun article about [tag]Tom Cruise[/tag] on Foreign Dispatches. It’s called What’s Wrong With This Image? and puts forth an interesting theory as to why TC is what he is, whatever that may be.

To remind anyone who doesn’t like to click links from strangers, and rightly so! - holoprosencephaly (NIH link) results from failure of the forebrain to split and rotate in the early embryonic stage. There are genetic forms, however, it is often due psych meds such as lithium or to ethanol abuse. In the most severe cases, the baby has brain and facial deformities that are incompatible with life.

Some of the least severe cases are marked by a single front incisor and mild retardation.

Cruise’s dental oddity (along with his dyslexia, small stature and family history) is an indicator of holoprosencephaly, a genetic disorder which might explain why Nicole Kidman’s pregnancies during their marriage ended in stillbirths.

I suggest that the sensitive reader not google holoprosencephaly or click any links in this paragraph. Especially not this sweet kitten picture on Fox News (where else). I think it’s rather cute in a “there but for the grace of g*d go I” sort of way.

Hey, it’s science.

Update 2/5: In defense of TC, let me state that his odd dental configuration appears to be from having lost an incisor. When you aren’t googling holoprosencephaly, you won’t find pictures of what a single wide incisor looks like.

The newly-released “[tag]Snakes on a Plane[/tag]” DVD finally arrived yesterday. In case you didn’t see the movie in theaters, it is just exactly what you would expect: snakes, snakes, Samuel L. Jackson, and more snakes. There’s a hint of plot, some hot simulated sex, and a bit of dialog, but mostly it’s about the snakes.

The extra features alone were worth the price of the DVD. There’s a short feature on the snake stars of the movie called “Meet the Reptiles.” Jules Sylvester, the snake-handler for the movie, worked on the “Born Free” TV show in the ’60s. The snakes are named in the script - the 17-foot Burmese Python called “Kong” in the movie script is named “Kitty” in real life. You are what you eat, I suppose.

If you’re a hard-core “Snakes” fan, there’s even a puzzle book, “Snakes on a Sudoku.” If you’re a sudoku fan, you have to try these. Instead of squares, the puzzles have snake-shaped areas. You’ll love it.

They’ve done merchandizing out the wazoo. A music CD, a 2007 calendar. Hmmm, I haven’t bought a calendar yet. And don’t miss the official Snakes on a Plane Treo with the genuine snakeskin case.

Technorati Tags: Snakes on a Plane, sex, Jules Sylvester, sudoku, treo

There is a theory of relationships that states that any person on earth is separated from any other person on earth by at most six degrees of separation.

Say that I wanted to get a letter to a friend in Germany but I couldn’t remember her address, only the town she lived in. Obviously I couldn’t mail it to her. I could give it to someone who would pass it on to someone else until someone knew someone else in Germany, who knew someone in my friends town, and within six degrees the letter would have found its way to her. In practice, of course, I probably wouldn’t hand it to the right person immediately, so it might take more than six steps. I’d have to know *everything* about everybody and make a really intelligent - or lucky - guess as to who has the closest ties.

It sounds rather airy-fairy New Age, but a few years ago someone did a social experiment, handing out decks of postcards with a name and town on it and instructions to try to get it to that person through people they knew. To the best of my recollection everyone was able to accomplish the task within 12 postcards. Eh, I don’t remember where I read it. Omni magazine maybe? Well, there are a number of books about it if you’re interested in learning more.

This is where Social Networking is taking us, to a small blue planet where everyone is connected.

There’s even a parody of the concept, a game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” in which people trace their connections to the actor Kevin Bacon. *Everybody* is connected to Kevin Bacon.

I guess the caveat would be that the person has to have social contacts of some sort, people nearby who know their real name, etc. Cave-dwelling hermits are pretty much out of the game.

Oh, right, well, here’s the thing. There are people that you’d rather not be within six degrees of. Drug dealers, terrorists, radical fundamentalists, Tom Cruise. Oh, but you are, and that’s the problem.

At least one of the domestic surveillance programs being conducted by “No Such Agency” is intended to find not just terrorists, but their associates, sympathizers, and anyone who might know who the previous three are. As I hinted at above, you have to gather as much intelligence as you can about *everybody* until you have enough to see patterns and relationships.

Every American is within six degrees of Al Qaeda.

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Oh, what, I have to decipher something to get off the list?

“See, I will send venomous snakes among you, vipers that cannot be charmed, and they will bite you…”
- Jeremiah 8:17

You might remember a few months ago when the ‘Net lit up over the upcoming Samuel L. Jackson film, SNAKES ON A PLANE.

Not to be left out of the fun, I blogged it, too.

Well, kids, it’s almost here. And for your enlightenment and amusement, here are some scenes from the movie.

Get your copy of the player here

You’re out of the woods,
You’re out of the dark,
You’re out of the night.
Step into the sun, Step into the light.

Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place
On the Face of the Earth or the sky.
Hold onto your breath, Hold onto your heart, Hold onto your hope.
March up to the gate and bid it open…………….open.

From The Wizard of Oz,
Optimistic Voices,
lyrics by EH Harburg and music by Harold Arlen

Check it out: Dr. Charles K. Bunch PhD, the author of “Soft Bipolar : Vivid Thoughts, Mood Shifts and Swings, Depression, and Anxiety of the Mild Mood Disorders Affecting Millions of Americans” has put out a new book about cinematherapy, how to use the metaphors in popular cinema as a vehicle for healing.

And what more powerful movie than The Wizard of Oz? Admit it, you saw it every year for the first ten years of your life and can recite it from memory. You undoubtedly have at one time or another used the characters in the movies as metaphor. Never mind the man behind the curtain! Well, Dr. Bunch’s new book, The Wizard of Oz: The Symbolic Quest to Find Your Inner Heroes, Face Your Worst Enemy, and Attain Wholeness, will help you use the archetypes present in any movie to understand yourself and the world around you.

I ordered it from Amazon as soon as I heard about it. I’m sure it will be excellent.

This is an expansion on a comment I left on The Zucchini Patch.

I think they use PET scans for what you want to do. An MRI isn’t capable of telling the difference between a live brain and a dead brain. It can, however, spot a shrunken hippocampus or amygdala or anomalies in the blood vessels.

An fMRI can see more. They can use tagged glucose or neurotransmitters, whatever they want to study. The fMRI shows where the substance concentrates in the brain, where it is used the most. The NIMH has information about this.

It’s all still under investigation, though. The fMRI is not ready to be used to diagnose.

Did you know that in ADHD, the harder the person tries to concentrate, the more the prefrontal cortex shuts down? Oddly enough, motor areas of the brain work harder at the same time. Can’t we just find a way to teach these kids that will fit with that kind of brain response? Running around in circles shouting out calculus problems, perhaps?

Apologies to my friends of the hyperactive persuasion.

Somewhere in this computer I have a letter I wrote to one of the scientists in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know!?” who works down at Penn. I met him at the preview and asked him a few questions to correct some of my assumptions in writing the “Putting the Genie Back Into the Bottle” article. The study I was interested in was over, unfortunately. (Yes, dogs and cats *do* have Broca’s and Wernickes areas - it’s not just defined by function, it’s a physical location.)

I have an MRI of my head hanging on the wall next the the desk to remind me that I have a brain - you can see it, the small pea-sized thing in the center of the glob of mush. Several years ago I made an animation out of the scan through the layers. Where the hell did I put that?

Oh, here. I see that this one is from after I had my sinuses repaired in uhhhhh 1996 or thereabouts. Refresh the page to see the animation. My favorite part is the eye stalks. We must have had crustacean ancestors.

When did they decide that the Rorschacht test and the MMPI diagnose bipolar disorder? Bipolar isn’t a personality disorder, it’s a mood disorder. My last psychologist told me that when they modified the inkblot test, it was not longer useful in diagnosing borderline personality disorder, either. I question the whole thing at this point.

I took one years ago. The psychologist took my money out of pocket twice a week for over a year and wasn’t able to catch the bipolar disorder. When we did the inkblot test, I thought about what I’d been reading in the psychology books and created a mindset before we started. He had seascapes all over the walls so I picked an undersea theme - so that undersea pictures would be the first thing to pop off the paper at me. Dancing crabs, an octopus in a Jester’s cap. That sort of thing. The MMPI and the Thematic Apperception test were similarly transparent. And drawing pictures of my house and my family and myself. It might have been easier if I didn’t read so damn much. I read a lot more then than I do now.

Anyway, that’s what you want, a functional MRI rather than a plain old MRI.

The bipolars were up in arms about Tom Cruise’s comments on psychiatry, UFOs and medications while on Oprah’s show. Since I work full time, I don’t get to watch Oprah and I missed the famous “TC goes apeshit on Oprah” episode.
In case you missed it too, here’s the film clip.

Is he still dating that little girl? There’s a clip on Oprah’s site called “Tom Cruise Engaged.” In it, Oprah asks Katie, “What does this feel like, when you grew up wanting marry Tom Cruise?”

Eeeeeeeeew.

Snakes On A Plane!

What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they’re on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane…This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.

I’ve got to see this movie. Samuel L. Jackson kicks snake butt. Hey, do snakes even have butts? I don’t know.
Picture it… you’re flying in coach wedged between a guy who’s coughing like a tuberculosis patient and an over-dressed woman who wants to engage you for the next three hours with her desperately boring life story. There’s a kid kicking your seat back and a baby howling in the row in front of you. The flight attendants are surly and slow. The in-flight meal was a bag of peanuts and some warm, flat soda, which are synergistically chewing a hole in your stomach. And the plane is in a patch of turbulence. You want to use the rest room, if only the aforementioned over-dressed woman will decide what she’s drinking and let the flight attendants move the damn cart out of the way.
Suddenly, Samuel L. Jackson, followed by a seething mass of venomous vipers, stumbles in from first class, waving his arms wildly and shrieking
Snakes On a Plane!
Where do you go? What do you do? FOR GOD’S SAKE, CAN’T SOMEBODY CATCH THEM AND RETURN THEM TO THEIR NATIVE HABITAT?
Yesssssssss, I definitely will see this movie. In the theater, too, I’m not waiting for the DVD.
And I want to add the title to my lexicon. I’m going to drop the f-word, forget “dang”, and throw away a half-dozen other inane, ineffectual expletives.
Snakes On A Plane!