Rerun: A Darwin Appreciation

In light of last week's photo essay on my surreal visit to the Creation Museum just outside San Diego and my follow-up post, I thought it was appropriate to rerun another photo essay from last year, also based on museum visits. Sanity rules ...

On two recent separate visits, I stopped in at two museums in San Diego's magnificent museum-botanical complex at Balboa Park. The permanent displays in both the Museum of Man and the Natural History Museum attest to the genius of Darwin and his theory of evolution, which is the only credible explanation to connect all the apparently random cool stuff in both buildings - from dinosaur skeletons to mysterious fossils to evidence of lost civilizations.

In celebration of the bicentenary of his birth (the same day as Lincoln) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal "On the Origin of the Species," the Natural History Museum is featuring a special Darwin exhibit. 

This photo essay - taken on my iPhone - is drawn from my museum trips.

These guys ruled. You are looking at the fossils of ammonites, which superficially resembled the nautilus but were closer in relation to the octopus and squid. They survived two major earth-shaking catastrophes eons apart only to succumb to apparently the same disaster that did in the dinosaurs.

Speaking of dinosaurs, smile for the camera, and thanks for the memories.

For many thousands of years, mastodons thrived in Southern CA. Then global warming happened. Sayonara, big fellow.

Speaking of disappearances, these reproductions of stellae stand as silent testimony to the lost civilization of the Maya. Their descendants live on, but their society went the way of the mastodon, perhaps for similar climactic reasons, such as drought.

Do you perceive a certain common theme, such as adaptive failure? Sometimes, the slightest genetic tweak can spell the difference between life and death, species-wise.

This is me on a bad hair day. Unfortunately this prototype of modern man failed to make the final cut.

Here's a reproduction of a fossil skull, zinjanthropus, dating back 1.75 million years, found in Tanzania's Olduvai gorge by Mary Leakey. Sadly, when it came to natural selection, the little guy lacked the right stuff.

Out of Africa. Zinjanthropus was not our distant ancestor, but this unmistakable DNA trail shows that everyone of us on the planet is linked to a common male and female ancestor from 60,000 years ago.

Get over it. We're all related.

The letter that started it all: An invitation from JS Henslow to Charles Darwin to serve as naturalist on the HMS Beagle.

Further reading from Knowledge is Necessity:  Darwin and the Psychiatric Advantage

Taking it Personally: The DSM-5 and the Narcissism Controversy

A few weeks ago, the NY Times featured a piece by psychologist Charles Zanor entitled, A Fate Narcissists Will Hate: Being Ignored. The long and short of it is that narcissistic personality disorder will be axed from the DSM when the next edition is published in 2013. Imagine how your average narcissist must feel.

The article mentions that retiring the diagnosis has drawn the wrath of clinicians, who view the various committees of the DSM-5 as dominated by academics out of touch with reality. John Gunderson of Harvard, one of the leading authorities on personality disorders, called the decision “unenlightened.”

Actually, overhauling the entire field of personality disorders is probably the only thing those charged with the DSM-5 did right, though with reservations. A little background:

In this post-Freud era of biological psychiatry, “Axis II” personality disorders have been accorded a lot less respect than “Axis I” disorders such as depression, bipolar, anxiety, or schizophrenia. A cynic would say that is because there are no meds for Axis II disorders and they would be one hundred percent right. The upside to this is there has been no big pharma to call the shots. It is no coincidence that the only major reforms to the next DSM occurred in the one realm where pharma is conspicuously absent.

The first obvious change is no Axis I/Axis II distinction. Personality disorders will get the same billing as mood disorders and anxiety disorders and all the rest. The next obvious change is a new “dimensional” component to complement the “categorical” classification of personality disorders, something that should have been done with mood disorders and arguably the whole rest of the DSM.

In its background papers and rationale, the APA and the DSM-5 group note that separating out personality into discrete illnesses has generated no end of end of clinical confusion. Is someone who abruptly breaks off a friendship, for instance, an “antisocial” with no remorse, a “borderline” who can’t cope, or a “narcissist” who cares only about him or herself?

Clinicians typically hedge their bets by choosing more than one, or by tacking on the NOS (not otherwise specified) qualifier.

The dimensional view acknowledges the complexity and subtlety of personality. Instead of asking “which one?” at the expense of ignoring whatever else may be going on, a clinician would be asking “how much” and “how severe?” In a sense, psychiatry is bringing back neurosis, but with some important refinements.

The personality disorders we are most familiar with are grouped into “Cluster B” in the current DSM. They include borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and histrionic personality disorder. The next edition of the DSM will give narcissistic personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder the boot, and prune out a number of other disorders from clusters A and C as well, leaving us with five “personality disorder types,” including antisocial/psychopathic, borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal.

According to the rationale provided in the draft DSM-5, three of these types have the “most extensive empirical evidence of validity and clinical utility.”

Here’s where the dimensional component would come in. The draft DSM-5 proposes testing for six “trait domains” that would include:

1. Negative Emotionality (such as depression or anxiety).
2. Introversion (such as social withdrawal and intimacy avoidance).
3. Antagonism (such as callousness, manipulativeness, narcissism, histrionism, hostility, aggression, oppositionality, and deceitfulness).
4. Disinhibition (such as impulsivity).
5. Compulsivity (such as risk aversion).
6. Schizotypy (involving odd behaviors and cognitions).

These trait domains are based on well-established personality tests such as the five-factor model and Cloninger’s psychobiological model, and would seek answers (note the plural) to such life mysteries as why an individual would abruptly break off a friendship.

Sounds good in theory, but are clinicians too set in their old ways? As the NY Times notes:

Clinicians like types. The idea of replacing the prototypic diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with a dimensional diagnosis like “personality disorder with narcissistic and manipulative traits” just doesn’t cut it.

Sounds a bit narcissistic to me, wait, I mean - uh - never mind.

Much more to come ...

iPhone Photo of the Day: Afternoon Walk

Loveland Reservoir, just a few miles down the road from me. The temp was in the 70s today here in southern CA.

Creationism vs Evolution: The War Against Reason and Why It's Ruining My Life

A little background to my photo-essay from yesterday: What prompted Tuesday’s visit to the Creation and Earth History Museum just down the road from where I live in San Diego’s East County was Robert Whitaker’s 2002 “Mad in America,” which I have inexcusably only just gotten around to reading. Part Two, “The Darkest Era,” includes a chapter, “Unfit to Breed.” Many others have related this shameful and outrageous story, but Whitaker pulls it together with the eloquence and authority of a Biblical prophet.

The early part of the nineteenth century ushered in the asylum movement, based on enlightened principles of “moral treatment,” namely if you regard those with mental illness as fellow human beings they tend to respond in kind. It’s amazing the outcomes you can produce when you don’t chain them to walls in freezing dungeons on starvation diets.

Fiscal constraints and other pressures squelched that one brief shining moment. The circulation of Darwin’s theory on evolution in the late nineteenth century only made matters worse. A whole new generation of “social Darwinists” came on the scene, eager to latch onto any excuse to justify their positions of power and privilege. Instead of “all men are created equal,” we were now hearing that “some men are created more equal than others.”

This gave rise to all manner of abuses across all of society. One outcome was the rise of the quack science of eugenics that encouraged weeding out from the gene pool those of degenerate stock. You guessed it, those with mental illness were at the top of the list. In the US, in the first decades of the twentieth century, some 30,000 individuals with mental illness were sterilized.

Hitler took eugenics to its tragically unforeseen but totally logical conclusion. The mentally ill were sterilized, then became the first population singled out for the gas chambers. We know the rest of the story all too well. In the aftermath, eugenics disappeared as a science, but Darwin was tainted forever. Those espousing creationism shamefully link Darwin to the Holocaust. I witnessed it yesterday in my museum visit.

Karen Armstrong in “The Case for God” notes that initially Darwin did not meet much resistance from organized religion. Yes, Darwin challenged Genesis, but hardly anyone at the time interpreted Genesis literally. Christianity, which grew up without printed Bibles in circulation, was constantly - excuse the term - evolving its teachings. Religion, she says, has never been about pat answers.

Throughout the ages, science and religion were more or less in accord. The Galileo controversy, Armstrong points out, is overstated and Galileo himself was largely to blame. Newton’s theories were seen as validating a creator God (without having to get into ridiculous arguments about whether it took God six days or six billion years to fashion the universe).

Literal interpretation of the Bible is a fairly new phenomenon, beginning with the Millennialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement may have remained on the fringe had not other Christian groups felt threatened by the scientific revolution around them. This gave rise to fundamentalism, until recently on the outside of the mainstream.

Karen Armstrong makes the very strong point that what we think of Christianity today is not the Christianity our Founding Fathers practiced. Theirs was an Enlightenment-based belief, which (naively) assumed that the mysteries of God would be solved by rigorously applied science and reason. Thus my surprise when on my museum visit I came upon an exhibit asserting that not only the Founding Fathers, but the scientists and philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, all had creationist beliefs.

No, they didn’t. They simply had no reason to quibble with the Genesis story, that’s all. Jefferson rather than accepting the Bible word-for-word, actually decided to improve upon it (see image above).  

Armstrong notes that social change triggers extreme reactions. She got that part right. In her book, she is equally critical of atheists (including proponents of evolution such as Richard Dawkins) as she is of religious fundamentalists. In Armstrong’s view, atheists are as stupid to God as fundamentalists are to science. Both sides are shouting way too loud, leaving no room for reasoned discourse.

And now we are suffering through another extreme reaction in the form of a certain movement with a beverage in the title, again co-opting our Founding Fathers (who have every reason to be spinning in their graves). According to a 2005 Pew Research Center Poll cited in Scientific American, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists and only 11 percent accept evolution. (Forty percent of Democrats accept evolution, which is not good either.)

Obviously, the creationists and their fellow travelers are very successful in getting their word out. Scary, isn’t it?

My Visit to the Local Creationist Museum (Seriously, I'm Not Making This Up)

Believe it or not, this museum is only 10 or 12 miles from my home, outside San Diego.

This journey through time will be a very short one, as the entire universe, earth included, according to creationist belief, is only 6,000 years old.

This works way better than carbon-14 dating.

I missed whether it was a standard day or a metric day.

In support of a worldwide catastrophe, creationism cites the same geological evidence as science, though with some rather significant differences in interpretation.

Noah's sons went their separate ways, assisted by land bridges spanning the oceans, thanks to a Flood-induced ice age. The animals from the Ark dispersed along these same land bridges, perhaps not whales and other sea creatures.

And I thought Neanderthals survived in the form of Tea Party followers.

I wish I had our high school class valedictorian, Karl Van Bibber, to explain this to me.

If I can follow the logic, mutations (which are all bad) get filtered out of the gene pool, keeping creation constant. There is, however, the mother-in-law exception.

That's right, evolution is just a religion, which makes creationism the true science. Why aren't our kids being taught this in school?

The "bad fruits" of evolution. No good can come from allowing people to think for themselves. That's why we need knowledgeable people in authority to do our thinking for us.

Evolution apparently played a part in the Final Solution. Actually, murderous bigots were killing Jews en masse long before Darwin. The Catholic Church even made saints out of some of these medieval pre-Hitlers. (Sorry, I was trying really hard to keep this objective.)

A browse through the museum's book store. No, I didn't Photoshop the book title.

Rerun: Depressed or Thinking Deep - My Take

From Nov, last year. Enjoy ...

Therese Borchard of Beyond Blue always has a way of making me feel that on a planet of six billion strangers I have at least one person I can talk to. Last week, she opened a blog piece this way:

I spent my adolescence and teenage years obsessing about this question: Am I depressed or just deep?

When I was nine, I figured that I was a young Christian mystic because I related much more to the saints who lived centuries ago than to other nine-year-old girls who had crushes on boys. I couldn't understand how my sisters could waste quarters on a stupid video game when there were starving kids in Cambodia. Hello? Give them to UNICEF!

Now I look back with tenderness to the hurting girl I was and wished somebody had been able to recognize that I was very depressed.

See what I mean? I just know that had we been in the same class at grade school, while the other kids played ball during recess, Therese and I would have found a quiet spot to sit under a shade tree, sharing cookies our moms packed and discussing how Augustine of Hippo must have felt after Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome in 410 AD.

So, what was it? Were Therese and I two sensitive souls waxing philosophical, or two depressives acting strange? Therese cites both Paula Bloom PsyD (from a blog on PBS) and Peter Kramer MD, author of "Against Depression" (from a NY Times piece) in support of the proposition that depression and thinking deep are clearly distinct. Says Dr Kramer:

"We idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues. Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal." First the ancient Greeks, then Renaissance thinkers, and later the Romantic movement assigned spiritual and artistic and even heroic virtues to melancholy. Nonsense, Dr Kramer responds. "Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease."

If I interpret Therese correctly in her blog piece, she found comfort in this. It came as a great relief to her to realize that her capacity to think deep, even at a young age, although unusual, was not pathological.

I, on the other hand, have an entirely different reaction. "Wait!" I want to scream at Dr Kramer. "You mean my depressions have all been for nothing?" My lost hours, lost days, entire lost years, a lost life practically, served no useful purpose whatsoever?

Screw you, Kramer! I want to keep screaming for no logical reason, whatsoever. Something that took so much from me, so much out of my life, I demand some kind of return - Jedi powers, a mystical third eye, roll-over phone minutes, whatever.

Yes, Dr Kramer is right, but so is everyone else. When it comes to the enduring question - Who the hell am I? - we are all struggling to find the truth. Here's what I'm looking at right now:

Proposition One: Any depression that is not part of my temperament sucks - whether mild or severe. Take my depression - please. They throw me off my game, ruin my day, wreck my life. Whether it's a depression that is the equivalent of a mild cold or one that is psychic double pneumonia I seriously don't want to be inside my brain on this planet when my neurons have gone on strike. If this is the disease that Peter Kramer is talking about, I'm behind him one hundred percent.

Proposition Two: At the same time, mild to moderate depression is part of my temperament, my personality (as is hypomania). As opposed to my disease depressions, I'm very comfortable in this state. It is a part of who I am. My energy is down, my thoughts tend to be very dark, but - here's the key difference - I thrive in this state. My neurons are working with me, or perhaps me with my neurons. It's as if I'm calmly sifting through the ideas I rounded up in my hypomanic frenzies, whether I'm lying in bed, at my desk, or taking a walk. If this is Dr Kramer's version of just thinking deep, I would have to respectfully disagree.

What we are talking about is the classic distinction between "state" and "trait." Trait is who we are. State is invasion of the brain snatchers. But no distinctions are ever as clear-cut as they seem.

We tend to get hung up on DSM-IV check lists while ignoring a key DSM injunction - namely that we are only in a state of mental illness when the symptoms interfere with our ability to function (as in work or relationships). So - from my personal perspective - if I am comfortable and not struggling while depressed, then I hardly have an illness that needs treatment.

Now let's flip it. I also get hypomanic, and I've written a lot about this. Here's the test: For Marilyn Monroe to act like Marilyn Monroe (at least when she's up) - that's normal, for Marilyn, anyway. For someone else to act like Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand - that's probably a sign that very bad things are about to happen.

So, back to depression. For me to act like me (when I am down), under most situations that is normal for me. I can handle it, it is healthy. For someone else to act like me, trust me, that is cause to get one's personal affairs in order.

Here's where it gets complicated. When does my productive depression start becoming a nuisance and when does this nuisance seriously start messing me up? Similarly, when does my upbeat hypomania cross over into social embarrassment and in turn morph into something that causes me to make very bad decisions?

It's as if we're turning up the heat. When, in effect, instead of a nice warm soak in the tub, do we find ourselves in hot water? Everyone has different tolerance thresholds, and you can make a good case that we can expand the range of these thresholds to lead healthier lives. Of course, every time I congratulate myself on doing this, God just laughs and throws a psychic lightning bolt in my direction.

So - my normal would probably cause most people to stay in bed for six months, or (in the other direction) have neighbors dialing 911.

One more twist. In her blog, Dr Bloom reported on this confused reaction from a patient: "When I reflected to her that she sounded depressed she said 'I don’t think so, that is just my personality.' So many people confuse depression with just being a lazy, unmotivated person."

So our depressed state tends to give us a wrong read on our baseline traits. Who the hell are we? It's a question I'm still trying to figure out.

***
Therese is my fellow terminal deep thinker and favorite blogger. Please check her out at Beyond Blue.

To Madness and Back

Following is a reworked version of a piece I wrote 11 years ago. Enjoy ...

"Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep." - Paul baring his soul in Second Corinthians.

Early 1988. I awoke from a drunken stupor in a strange city in a strange country, jobless and friendless and nearly penniless. You don't really want to be sober, for aside from the unwelcome intrusion of reality, you also find your psyche playing host to the type of cold fusion nuclear reaction that demands instant release.

Rage - Goddess, sing the rage - a line from Homer. The shrinks have no adequate description for it - agitated depression, dysphoric mania, a mixed state, mania and depression fused into an explosive kinetic ball of emotional kilotonnage, one that makes the very act of living totally unbearable. It was simply a matter of following through.

Meanwhile, as I lay sprawled on the floor of an apartment that I could ill afford to pay the rent on, it was a beautiful summer day in Melbourne, Australia. Outside my window the eucalyptus trees that lined my street created the impression of an urbanized Eden, while the kookaburras' shrill laughter in the distance sounded forth a Midsummer Night's Dreamscape of fairyland gaiety.

But the rumbling of the tramways around the corner represented my one-way ticket out this life, out of my private little hell. I only had to change trams maybe once or twice to put me within walking distance of the suspension bridge that spanned the harbor.

Only seven months before I had been on a plane from Wellington, New Zealand bound for a bright new life. I had sent out my resume to the major Australian newspapers and business magazines, and four editors had made me an offer. Oddly enough, I snapped at the one that offered the least money.

Fifteen-hour days were par for the course as a business editor in New Zealand. It took me a month or two to find my rhythm in Australia, but soon I was treating the airline as my bus service, up to Sydney and back again the same day, perhaps Brisbane, over to Perth for a longer stay, not to mention New Zealand, always on short notice, usually not knowing for sure when I would return.

Often I literally composed the stories in my head, dictating them over the phone to someone at the other end in hopes of making it into the next edition. On one occasion, I actually found myself reviewing a Frank Sinatra concert, which got major play on the paper's entertainment pages, together with about three or four pieces of mine that appeared on the business pages that same day.

An acquaintance called me up and commented on my output, for which I had a ready answer: "Yeh, well it was my turn to write the paper that day."

Oh, I had the one-liners coming. I was floating on air.

But the high was beginning to turn on me. Sometimes I found myself snapping at people, which was very uncharacteristic of me. Once, on the tram, on my way to work in the early morning, I found myself on the brink of physically attacking some wise-assed teenager. I actually got up out of my seat and went for his neck before I caught myself.

Then came the issue of my six-month salary review. When the editor failed to acknowledge me as the Second Coming of Thucydices, I quit in a huff, bitterly resentful over his treatment of me. Furious, in fact, in a blind rage. I told my colleagues what had happened and they looked at me like I was crazy. Didn't anyone understand?
  
I'M NORMAL! I wanted to shout. I've always been normal.

And now there was the small matter of me on the floor emerging from a drunken stupor in a strange new country with no job, no friends, almost no money, and no hope of finding work.  I'll write a book, I thought. I grabbed hold of a typewriter and began pounding on the keys:

"A stock market crash has no setting," I wrote. "It occurs in people's minds, a collective will that determines what is valuable and what is worthless, from day to day, minute to minute. To understand finance has nothing to do with economics or accounting. Instead, it is a philosophical discipline, of the mind determining reality, the natural territory of Kant and Plato and the rest."

I managed to find a publisher, but never steady employment. Ever again. "Thrice I have suffered shipwreck. A night and a day I have been in the deep." Who am I to complain?

Mental Health Quiz: Test Your Knowledge

Every year, NAMI San Diego hosts a holiday pot luck dinner and annual meeting. For last night's gathering, I put together a quiz night and acted as quiz master. I compiled questions in eight categories. These are the questions I read out in the mental health category. Let's see how you do. Answers and commentary further below ...

1 What did John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and LBJ have in common?

2 The Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, founded in 1247, later to become Bethlehem Royal Hospital for treating lunatics, is more commonly known by this name.

3 Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks referred to “the four humors” or "temperaments". One of them literally means "black bile." Name the temperament.

4 What did Christopher Columbus, Michelangelo, and Isaac Newton have in common?

5 Emil Kraepelin back in the early 20th century described a condition he called “dementia praecox." Today, we know dementia praecox by this name.

6 Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 individuals with mental illness in the US were subjected to this procedure.

7 The 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to António Egas Moniz for developing this treatment for the mentally ill.

8 NAMI was founded by parents who got sick of being blamed for their kids' mental illness. Psychiatry even had a label for these horrible parents. Name the label.

9 Robert Spitzer, the most influential psychiatrist you never heard of, is the man responsible for the modern version of this text, which we quote from all the time.

10 Eric Kandel, Arvid Carlsson, and Paul Greengard shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries concerning "signal transduction in the nervous system." This is a fancy name for brain cells talking to each other. What's the scientific name for brain cell?

Answers

1 US Presidents with mood disorders. (A Duke University study reports that nearly half of the US Presidents had something diagnosable.)

2 Bedlam.

3 Melancholia. (The other three: Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Sanguine.)

4 Bipolar. (That's right, world. We give you the gift of civilization and how do you thank us? You marginalize us. Sorry we couldn't find America sooner for you, by the way.)

5 Schizophrenia. (Dementia praecox suggested a steadily deteriorating brain, but we know recovery is possible.)

6 Sterilization. (Those with mental illness were deemed a menace to the gene pool.)

7. The prefrontal lobotomy. (Some 40,000 lobotomies were performed in the US.)

8. Schizophrenogenic. (The label is as stupid as the reasoning behind it.)

9. DSM - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. (A piece of fiction put out by the American Psychiatric Association.)

10. Neuron. (I have a theory that neurons only work with coffee. I hope I don't have to share my Nobel Prize money with anybody.)

Rerun: Coming to Terms

Yesterday, I posted a rerun piece to mark my four years living in Southern CA. To pick up where we left off ...

A thought-provoking Zen parable goes like this:

A man encountered a tiger in a field. He attempted to escape by lowering himself down a precipice. He looked down and, to his horror, saw more tigers looking up, anticipating their next meal. He looked up and spotted two mice above gnawing on the vine he was clinging to.

Oh, crap.

Then, looking to his right, he sighted a strawberry growing from the cliff face. Reaching over, he grabbed the morsel and popped it into his mouth.

“Mmmm!” he thought. “Delicious!”

***

My own translation: Enjoy the peanut butter.

By now I had all my stuff out of its boxes, and McMan International back up and running, which is my way of saying I had my desktop computer all plugged in and wired for internet. I had an email newsletter to get out, my first from my new world headquarters. I anticipated going full blast into the evening, but things went off without a hitch and I was unexpectedly through at about 2:30 in the afternoon.

Time to unwind with a walk. The winter sun was already low over the peaks behind me, and I was in the shadows, but the valley below me and the peaks in the distance were bathed in brilliant light.

I stopped in at the local coffee shop for a coffee and muffin to go. Shelley the proprietor heated my muffin for me and sliced it into tasty morsels. Soon, I was in the sun on the valley floor. The open space before me allowed my mind to breathe. Not too far off, peaks and rock formations rose from the valley like great cathedrals. I sipped my coffee, and munched on my muffin morsels, savoring the moment.

On my way back, I stopped at the general store, which adjoins the post office. Yes, we even have our own zip code. It was to be a dogs and beans night for me. Back outside, the sun had set behind the peaks and the temperature was dropping fast. I was back into my own shit now, still reeling from recent events, facing financial ruin, uncertain about my future, wondering how the hell I would ever get my life back together.

I hurried my pace, anxious to get home - home? - only to stop dead in my tracks. I looked right. The entire valley below was now in the shadows, as were the peaks and rock formations. But in the distance, a steep summit caught what was left of the sun full broadside. The mountain appeared to be radiating from the inside, a lustrous rosy glow that sharply contrasted with the cool hues of the darkened landscape.

Delicious!

Thank you, God, I found myself saying. I was experiencing the perfect moment, in the moment, what they call a Zen moment, fully aware, in the present. Tomorrow I could very well fall to pieces. But right now was a gift. Life happens here, right now. If you're second-guessing your past or fretting about your future, you're missing out.

The moment lasted maybe five seconds. Then I was back inside my own head, my own shit. But it wasn't the exact same shit inside the same head I returned to. I was back in my past, but it was one I could come to terms with. I was back in my future, but it was one I could face with hope.

Something similar occurred to me more than 30 years before, only back then it happened with the throttle wide open headed over the edge of a cliff.

We can all recall our exceptionally aware moments. Unfortunately, they tend to occur in highly-stressful and often life-threatening situations, such as skidding on glare ice at 60 MPH. This is when our fight or flight response takes over. The frontal lobes go off-line. We literally stop thinking as the faster-processing and more primitive regions of the brain (think amygdala) assume executive control.

Fight or flight is normally associated with an over-reaction, but here we are talking about a rare mental state that can only be described as calm awareness. If we had time to think about the dire straights we were in, we would probably panic. Instead, barring bad luck, we successfully avoid wrapping our vehicle around a tree. On one hand, the crisis is over in a micro-second. On the other, it’s as if time were slowed down.

There is a stretch of the Route 101 Coastal Highway in Marin County north of San Francisco that has probably washed into the Pacific by now. Gerald Ford was President and I had hair. I leaned my bike into the curves of the road, first one way, then the other, speeding up on the straightaways and gearing down on the hairpins perched high above the Pacific, my ears ringing with the roar of the waves crashing against the rocks below.

I was just leaning in for another sharp turn when I came upon some rocks that had worked their way loose from the hills above. There was no time to think. I swerved to avoid the obstacle and brought the bike around 180 degrees, but it was going backward toward the ocean on its own momentum. I felt the sickening sensation of the back wheel leaving the shoulder and losing traction in the soft earth behind. For a brief fleeting instant I had the sensation of being suspended in midair, like Wile E Coyote in those Roadrunner cartoons. Then the bike found purchase, jerked forward, and stalled on the shoulder.

I turned off the ignition, wheeled my bike to a safe place, and took stock. Something had shifted in me in those two or three seconds. Whatever had been holding me back before was holding me back no longer.

Within days, my life was on a new trajectory that would find me in New Zealand, attending law school, married, with a kid on the way. Now, here I was, decades later, in rural southern California. Healing happens, but don't expect to stay in the same place. There was no going back, not to New Jersey, not to my old sense of self. At the same time, I felt a sense of home. I was no longer on the run. I was here to stay. The land had heard my request. It was talking to me.

Rerun: Flying Home

Four years ago today, I found myself in Southern CA. I'm still here (though living in a different place). This piece from last year explains ...

October and November tend to be weird months for me. Early October, 2006 saw the publication of my book: "Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder: What Your Doctor Doesn't Tell You That You Need to Know."

The book represented a major personal triumph for me, but life is seldom simple. It's amazing, in hindsight, how I didn't see it coming, but we never do. One day I was winding down from a round of book-related speaking engagements and radio interviews, making a mental note to pick up a Thanksgiving turkey, the next my marriage broke up.

I had been married (for the second time) for nearly three years, living in central New Jersey. On December 1, ten days after my break-up, I boarded a one-way flight to San Diego, wanting to sleep and never wake up.

I collected my bags and stepped outside the terminal. In the dark, I made out cruise boats in the brightly lit harbor and the silhouettes of palms. Under the circumstances, I could be forgiven for thinking I had set down in the middle of a holiday resort rather than waiting for my ride in an ugly airport. The balmy temperature lent to the illusion.

Paul drove up and I got in. San Diego Airport is located in the heart of the city. If this were New York, you would literally have planes taking off and landing in Central Park. I recall thinking how convenient this would be for me, that is until Paul got driving.

We got onto Interstate 8 going east and kept going. And going. Then civilization literally ceased. No lights no buildings, nothing. Surely, this had to be some kind of anomaly, I thought. Surely, some kind of satellite city would materialize, a St Paul, a Fort Worth, a Newark, even.

Meanwhile, I had the strange sensation of being airborne. Our wheels were on the ground, but we had gone from sea level to above 2,000 feet in the space of 30 minutes. Oh crap, I could only think, what have I gotten myself into?

At 3,500 feet we got off at an exit that could have featured in a slasher movie. Then we were in total darkness. My worst fears were realized. We were in the country. The country! Probably completely off the grid in a void where zip codes don't exist.

We got out of the car and I gazed up at the unfamiliar sight of stars in the sky, unbelievably bright stars, pristine in the mountain air, with nothing standing in the way of me and something billions of light years away, maybe only millions.

I woke up the next morning to a searing Van Gogh sun against a brilliant cobalt blue sky. Where there should have been a Walmart was a valley surrounded by 4,000-foot peaks. Time to check out my new neighborhood.

All the houses appeared to have be built out of box kite material, only not nearly so sturdy, seemingly wind-tossed at crazy angles. Oddly, though, the overall effect was harmonious, blending in with the rocky and hilly terrain. A straight line or level surface would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

A short walk and the houses gave way to horse farms. In contrast to the sky, the hues of the landscape were muted. The trees and vegetation here are testimonies to perseverance rather than abundance. Water is scarce, exceedingly so. Only the rocks flourish – boulders, outcrops, summits. The wind was blowing in from the desert and had a decidedly flinty tang.

Back in the old days, a wrong turn on a mule wagon spelled certain death. The Mexican border is about 10 or 15 miles away. These days, those seeking the American Dream are prepared to risk everything negotiating this treacherous northern passage.

I rounded a curve and suddenly I was the only person on this planet. Just me and splendid desolation. Any second, I expected to come across Buddhist prayer flags fluttering in the stiff breeze. Perhaps a wise Indian shaman who could tell me why the hell I was here.

Talk to me, land, I found myself saying. I felt a spiritual tug, but I was confused and out of sorts. I was badly missing the life I had just left behind, but I knew in my heart this was the place I needed to be. If any healing were to occur, it would happen here, in these mountains, where I could clear my head, establish a sense of perspective, and slowly come to terms.

But I had a major shock in store when I came back from my walk and inspected the pantry.

Hmm. Cans of refried beans (is there an air raid shelter out back?). Soup in packets (desiccated chemical nodules that no amount of super-heated water could ever satisfactorily dissolve). I mopped some beaded sweat from my brow. Rice-a-Roni, I read on one box. Something salty that claimed to be food on another. The type of cans you only see in food drives.

I already knew what was coming next. I’ve seen grown men cry over the sight, but my reaction is always one of anger and disbelief. How is such a thing possible in a world that gave us Shakespeare and Sophia Loren? I could only think. Why? But there is no logical answer to explain man’s inhumanity to man. Just the inscrutable wording on the box:

Ramen noodles!

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

But I’m a highly-trained professional and it was time to take charge. In a calm and authoritative voice I told Paul and my other housemate: “Put your hands to your sides and slowly step back from the pantry.”

Don’t worry, I assured them, demonstrating to them that the skillet I had in my hand would be used for cooking real food, assuming I could locate some. But hey, I love a challenge. It's the one thing I have in common with Jesus - I've got the loaves and fishes thing down pat.

Life is about the little things. Several days later, seven FedEx cartons containing my life arrived at my door. By now, I had the food situation under control and was preparing a chili. Priorities are priorities. I ripped open the carton containing my kitchen gear and dived in for my zester. A minute later, I was in business. Zest-zest-zest – one peel to a lime into the pot, plus the juice. Now my chili had the missing zing and zap. Now I had a real chili going. A simple kitchen implement and suddenly I felt at home. My non-zester possessions could wait for later.

To be continued ...