Illustrating Depression and Bipolar

As most of you who follow this blog know, at the beginning of this year I essentially blew up mcmanweb and started over. The site was in serious need of an updating, plus a facelift. My first phase involved a complete redesign, together with rewrites and reorganization of a lot of old articles. This consumed most of my time well into spring.

Throughout the rest of the year, I made incremental changes and additions.

I began mcmanweb around this time in 2000, with a small collection of articles on depression and bipolar. My goal was to create a comprehensive resource exploring mood disorders from every conceivable angle. Over time, I built up a collection of more than 300 artlcles (later pruned down to about 250), most written by myself, but with some personal accounts from contributors.

As the years went on, I essentially turned over just about all my content, save the pieces on famous people and personal stories. But by this time last year, it was clear to me that I had fallen way behind. I’ll just mention one of the matters I had to deal with, which involves design and the organization of my content.

The key to a successful website is making it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for, fast, and to facilitate their going deeper and wider. My basic navigation since the beginning has been successful -with content organized under categories such as Mood, Treatment, Science, Stories, and so on - and I stuck with what worked.

Thus, from my home page - as well as every page on the site - you can click on a category, which will take you to a landing page with the articles containing the information you are looking for.

But how do you bind a site together? At the same time, how do you differentiate between categories? How, in essence, do you lend coherence to the reader’s experience?

This time, I decided that a collection of old (and a couple of new) master’s paintings would define the look and feel to mcmanweb. A different old master would illustrate each category. Moreover, I carried forward these same old masters into every article. Thus, a Rembrandt for all my DSM articles, a Vermeer for my Treatment articles, and so on.

So here I am - today - nearly a year after I started the project when it occurred to me that I never explained my choice of illustrations to my readers. I just remedied that a few minutes ago, with short explanations on all my landing pages, which I have reproduced here. So without further ado ...

The pic to illustrate Mood is a close-up of La Tour’s “Magdalen at Night.” The woman seems to question her very existence. We have all been there.

The pic to illustrate Behavior is a close-up of Holbein’s “Henry VIII.” The monarch’s defying the Pope and killing off half his serial wives takes care of the seriously disturbed side of the personality equation. His sixteenth century rock star status - he was an accomplished lutenist, singer, organist, and composer, and a generous patron of the arts - captures the creative and positive side. Mind you, Henry’s way of resolving personal domestic quarrels can also be regarded as creative.

The pic to illustrate The DSM-5 is a close-up of Rembrandt’s “Moses.” Was there any other choice?

The pic to illustrate Treatment is a close-up of Vermeer’s “Cavalier with Young Woman.” I also use Vermeer to illustrate “Recovery.” The Treatment pic has two people in it, suggesting the wisdom of seeking expert help. The Recovery pic has a solitary woman actively engaged in a pursuit, reinforcing the notion that we are in charge.

The pic to illustrate Recovery is Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker.” Same explanation as above.

The pic to illustrate Science is a close-up of Dali’s “Exploding Raphaelist Head.” Dali was equally fascinated with Freud and the quantum building blocks of existence. This painting says it all.

The pic to illustrate Issues is a close-up of Raphael’s “The School of Athens.” Here we see Socrates engaging in a dialogue with a student. Socrates always challenged our cherished beliefs, strongly suggesting that anyone who claims to know the answers is a fraud. Indeed, if there is an absolute truth, there is no way of knowing it, much less knowing we know it.

The pic to illustrate Famous is a section from one of Warhol’s “Marilyn” prints. Marilyn’s iconic status made her a no-brainer to lead the parade of notables chronicled here. Warhol’s recasting of the same image in different shades suggests that what you see is not necessarily what you get.

The pic to illustrate Stories is Fragonard’s “A Young Girl Reading.” We all have stories in us. What the woman in the illustration does after reading one of them is up to her. Who knows, once she gets out of that chair.

The pic to illustrate Populations is a close-up of Bruegel’s “The Wedding Dance.” We may be one, but each one of us is also unique.

The pic to illustrate Relationships is a close-up of Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Ah, the possibilities. Alas, the ambiguities.

***

I cordially invite you to check out mcmanweb.

I'm Back!

Yes, I'm still here. Since before Christmas, I have been totally immersed in overhauling my mcmanweb site. New design, fresh content, everything. Way back, I had a vision of a website that would be the leading resource on depression and bipolar and related stuff. My website has undergone numerous changes since it first went public in early Dec, 2000 - and so have I and so have you.

The one thing that has remained constant is my three-word mission, "Knowledge is Necessity." My job then - and now - was to present information and viewpoints in a way that helped you - patients and loved ones - make up your own mind. I debuted the site with about 70 articles, divided into various diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and science categories, plus personal stories, mental health issues and famous people. The categories have largely stayed intact, but the only articles that remain from eleven years ago are some of the personal stories and the ones on famous people.

Over the next several years, mcmanweb expanded to some 300 articles, most of them my work but also featuring other contributors. By the end of 2007, the site was showing its age. I ditched my ancient FrontPage program, invested in Dreamweaver, learned how to write CSS code along with the HTML I also knew, and brought mcmanweb into a new era. New design, leaner and meaner - half my articles were pruned, the others updated. The new mcmanweb went public in the spring of 2008.

Soon after, I bought a video cam and next thing I was making my own short YouTube videos, which I embedded in mcmanweb. Then, at the end of 2008, I launched this blog, Knowledge is Necessity, intended as a companion to mcmanweb.

By 2009, it became apparent that my new mcmanweb too much resembled my old mcmanweb in approach and outlook. Plus there were numerous design flaws and technical glitches that made the site look like a train wreck in some browsers. But who has time to fix things?

Then about a month ago, I made an executive decision - tear the whole thing down and start over. I invested in an update to Dreamweaver, brushed up on my code, and got cracking. I organized my schedule so I came on duty at nine in the morning and punched out at around midnight, with plenty of breaks, seven days a week.

The good news is I programmed practicing my didgeridoo as one of my break routines, and improved my level of play exponentially. The bad news is I'm feeling inclined to show off my new didge virtuosity on anyone unfortunate enough to occupy my same time zone.

By early January, I was confident enough in my new design to start uploading articles. Things went fairly smoothly until I came to my Treatment section. I had to put a match to just about everything and start from scratch. My ten new articles on meds treatment add up to about 20,000 words (who's counting?), a third of a book. Plus another 10,000 words of fresh content elsewhere - a half a book. Plus edits and rewrites of other pieces, plus stuff originally published here, reworked into articles.

In all, more than 150 articles with a very different look and feel to my previous 150 or so articles, representing more than three, possibly four, books.

At about midnight Monday, I experienced the pleasure of crossing the finish line. My last upload to my last batch of pages. A visitor could now go to mcmanweb, click on any link, and come up with a fresh page.

I still have more work to do, stuff to rewrite, new articles to work on, technical things to iron out, but I can do all that during normal work hours while I tend to other priorities - like getting a life.

Beware - I'm John McManamy and I'm dying to show off my didgeridoo.

Check out the new mcmanweb ...

My DSM-5 Commentaries: In Search of Elephant, Willing to Settle for Hippopotamus

A quick update. In early February, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 Task Force issued its Proposed Revisions to the next DSM, due out in 2013. Soon after, on this blog, I began writing some review pieces, which developed into Report Cards highly critical of the draft DSM-5's treatment of depression and bipolar.

This in turn led to my "People's DSM" with its own Alternative Depression Diagnosis and Alternative Bipolar Diagnosis.

The point of both exercises was to get us thinking about issues we tend to take for granted, but which have a profound impact on our well-being.

Needless to say, these are issues with a long shelf life. A blog, on the other hand, tends to be very ephemeral, based on what people do with yesterday's newspaper - namely, you wrap fish in it.

Consequently, I went over my DSM-5 pieces, worked them into article shape, then assembled them in a manner that allowed for coherent reading and review. Last night, I uploaded the effort to my website, McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web. My website is based on the concept of a reference library - information is stored there, in easy-to-find places, there when you need it.

Clicking on a link in the navigation bar on all 200 or so pages of the site takes you to a band new DSM-5 section with eight articles.

The Draft DSM-5: Rip it Up and Start Over is based on two or three blog pieces that first appeared here. The article gives historical background into mood disorders and how Freud and Kraepelin and their followers set the tone for DSMs I through IV. The article also details what went wrong with the draft DSM-5.

My Report Cards set out the issues the various DSM-5 working groups needed to consider, but failed to do, such as clarifying the relationship between unipolar depression and bipolar, rethinking bipolar as a cycling illness, doing something about the schizoaffective diagnosis, making symptom criteria gender-neutral, and so on. Thus:

Grading Depression
Grading Bipolar - Part I
Grading Bipolar - Part II

Think of my Report Cards as the background commentary to my People's DSM, in which I offer an alternative reality to the one imposed on us by the official DSM. Thus:

My Alternative Depression Diagnosis - Part I
My Alternative Depression Diagnosis - Part II
My Alternative Bipolar (Cycling) Diagnosis - Part I
My Alternative Bipolar (Cycling) Diagnosis - Part II

I make no claims to having a better view of reality. Reality is far too vast and elusive to stand still for our own convenience. Basically, we're the six blind men in search of the concept of "elephant." We're never going to achieve "elephant," but perhaps if we keep poking around long enough in the dark, we may come up with something that reasonably approximates elephant, such as "hippopotamus."

Anyway, I encourage you to visit my website, have a new look at points of view you first read about here, leave your comments, and come back here for who knows what we'll stumble upon next.