Living Well ...

This is a clip from my appearance on "San Diego Living," XETV, Channel 6, shot live this morning.

Doesn't This Always Happen?

God and irony are one and the same. Really.

Two years ago, I bought some camping gear just in time to break up with my girlfriend. The two of us, of course, had anticipated many overnights together under the stars. 

For two years, the gear sat unopened in the basement. Obviously, camping wasn't in my future. In June, I donated the gear to our local NAMI, which was staging a yard sale. Doesn't this always happen? I joked to the NAMI people. I serve on our NAMI board, and we all had a good laugh.

A few weeks ago, I met a very wonderful woman. She is into the outdoors. This weekend, we are going camping.

Gotta love it.

Biblemania: Madness, Dysfunction, and Reconciliation

Let us start on a low note:

"All things are wearisome," writes the speaker. "What has happened will happen again, and what is done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun."

Speaker, of course, is Jewish for Koheleth, which is Greek for Ecclesiastes. I am not sure what the proper Biblical word is for clinically depressed: "To what purpose have I been wise," our serotonin-deprived author laments. "Alas, wise man and fool die the same death."

Ecclesiastes is the nearest thing in the Jewish Bible to Buddhist literature, but without the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Readers are simply advised to place a vague sort of trust in God and to enjoy life to the best of their abilities. The Book was written sometime after the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and there is a lot to be depressed and disillusioned about:

"How solitary lies the city" we hear in another Book of the Bible, "once so full of people!...Bitterly she weeps in the night..." (Lam 1).

Then there is Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me," later echoed by Jesus on Golgotha.

In the meantime, there is the matter of life's cruel injustices: "Perish the day I was born and the night which said, 'A man is conceived.'" (Job 3.3).

Indeed, looking upon slab after textual slab of unremitting despair and depression, one wonders how any sane person can regard the Bible as inspirational reading. Yet we have all come across soaring lifting quotes (the 800 "glad" passages, according to Pollyanna), plucked out of context, and served up for our easy enjoyment. To me, all this "lift up our voices" talk has all the resonance of the top string of a chord. The challenge as I see it is to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, and to come out a better person in the process.

Which leads me to my next topic:

Madness

Try this on for size:

King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon eating grass among the oxen (Dan 4.33), a frazzled King Saul needing to be soothed by a youthful David's lyre, hurling his spear at David, presumably right in the middle of a psalm (Sam 1.11). And of course Jesus driving the evil spirits out of the two madmen of the Gadarenes (Mat 8.28), as well as from Mary Magdalene (Lk 8.2).

But the Bible adds an extra dimension to the meaning of mad. If anything, mad is a positive character attribute. The great prophets transposed to our era would be prime candidates for five-point restraints, electro-convulsive therapy, and industrial strength Thorazine. But in ancient Israel, someone actually wrote down what they said and preserved it for the next generation to read.

Consider: A hypermanic Elijah outrunning King Ahab's chariot (1 Kings 18.45-46), Isaiah and Jeremiah railing against the corrupt authority of the day, Isaiah naked and barefoot, Jeremiah with a yoke around his neck, a starry-eyed Ezekiel and his wild visions, and Daniel, the inventor of apocalypse fever.

All but Elijah have Books of the Bible named after them.

Then there is John the Baptist virtually guaranteeing his head would be served up on a platter.

We can almost coin the term, "holy madness", and Christ was a proud descendant of this tradition, or, if you like, we can say he brought it to its completion. Contemplate this bizarre incident:

"Next morning on his way to the city he felt hungry; and seeing a fig tree at the road he went up to it, and but found nothing on it but leaves. He said to the tree, 'You shall never bear fruit any more!'; and the tree withered away at once." (Mat 21.18)

Hey, whatever happened to turn the other cheek?

Make no mistake about it, an enraged Christ bullying a defenseless fig tree represents the most perplexing passage in all the Gospels, but it's probably the sort of thing we are not meant to understand. Jesus is about to drive the money changers from the Temple. He will condemn the corrupt practices of the religious establishment with allusions to Isaiah and Jeremiah. He is predicting the fall of Jerusalem with references to Daniel. He knows human nature all too well. He sees the future with a clarity of one with the courage to look. He knows what is coming, including his own execution, and he is distressed and disillusioned.

He is a prophet, on one hand the sanest man in the world. On the other, he is far too sane for his own good, sane to the point of mad. Even his own family fails to understand him. Mad, here, is not a clinical condition. It is society's obdurate refusal to recognize a special son in their midst.

Dysfunction

We can start right from the very beginning, at the very first sibling rivalry in history, between Cain and Abel. Soon after, we have Noah waking from a drunken stupor and cursing the descendants of his son Ham. Then we have Abraham, the father of his people. Yes, we all know about the would-be sacrifice of his son, Isaac, but ponder this disturbing passage in relation to his other son Ishmael, whose mother was Hagar the slave girl:

"Abraham rose early in the morning, took some food and a waterskin full of water and gave it to Hagar; he set the child on her shoulder and sent her away, and she went and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba." (Gen 21.14)

Just to set the record straight, we're taking 110 in the shade here in a part of the world where they kill for water. We do not hear Ishmael's or Hagar's side of the story - or Isaac's for that matter - but I'm sure, had they been given a chance, they would have leaped at the opportunity to air a few "issues."

Abraham's nephew, Lot, apparently was a good fit for this family. When the evil rabble of Sodom banged on his door, demanding their civic right to bugger his guests, Lot cried out: "No my friends, do not be so wicked. Look, I have two daughters, both virgins; let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them ..." (Gen 19.6).

Later, Lot entered a cave with his virgin daughters and emerged with his, um, daughters.

Then we have the matter of Jephthah and his only child, a virgin daughter who doesn't even rate a name. On his way to face the Ammonites in battle, Jephthah promised that, if victorious, he would make God a sacrifice of the first creature he met coming out of his house. Well, you guessed it, it wasn't the mother-in-law. And unlike Abraham and Isaac, there was no angel to put a stay to the proceedings. As the Bible records it, "she died a virgin." (Judges 11.39).

Of course, the ultimate dysfunctional family has to be King David's: "I will bring trouble upon you from within your own family," said the Lord through the prophet Nathan (2 Sam 12.13). Considering the source, you just know that David's domestic relations are going to take a severe turn for the worse.

To bring the reader up to date, there's all his wives and concubines, and not content to leave well enough alone he gets someone else's wife pregnant, Bathsheba, and sends the husband off on a suicide mission. A Babylonian or Egyptian king might have got away with something like that, but the God of Abraham and Isaac and Moses was more of a hands-on kind of God.

So it happened that one of David's sons, Amnon, forced himself on his half-sister Tamar. When David would not discipline the son, another son, Absalom, took matters into his own hands, lured Amnon into a trap, and killed him. This episode set the stage for a direct challenge to David's throne, with the unfortunate result of his father's retainers having to kill Absalom.

"O my son!" David wept. "Absalom my son, my son Absalom!" (2 Sam 18.33)

The saga finally concludes with David's son by Bathsheba, Solomon, killing his half-brother Adonijah in order to secure his claim to the throne.

Reconciliation

To bring all this to a close, perhaps all Bibles should come with this warning: "Keep out of reach of children." Maybe in those motels where kids stay free, you should slip the Gideon Bible up above the ceiling tiles.

Then again, perhaps the Bible is like a puzzle or a Rubik's cube. We have to make all the pieces fit, not just the ones we want. Human nature is simply too complicated and God more complicated still to expect easy answers. Often it is only the seventh or eighth time after we have read a particular passage that a light goes off in our heads.

It's as if the authors of the Bible deliberately set out to confound and confuse our overworked minds into enlightenment. In trying to reconcile the depressed, the mad, and the dysfunctional, we perhaps become a little more understanding of our own shortcomings, not to mention our possibilities, and in the process come just that much closer to God.

This piece was written about 10 years ago, from mcmanweb.

Cutest Grandbaby in the Whole Wide World

I rest my case.

Thinking With Our Emotions - It's Vital

We use our reason to keep our emotions in check. That way we don't do stupid things. We become masters of our domain. Plato believed that. So did the Enlightenment philosophers. So did our Founding Fathers, as did Freud. It stands to reason, right?

Not so fast, says science writer Jonah Lehrer. In his eye-opening (and highly recommended) book, "How We Decide" (published last year), Lehrer cites no end of brain science studies that show that emotion is very much involved in not only making decisions, but in making the right decisions. Not only that, the pre-frontal cortices - those parts of the brain associated with higher reasoning - are very easily tricked into making bad choices.

Lehrer begins his book with the closing seconds of the 2002 Super Bowl (click on YouTube video above). The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17 yard line, and the Rams defense is expecting quarterback Tom Brady to pass. As Lehrer tells us, "each pass is really a guess, a hypothesis launched into the air." The best quarterbacks make the best guesses.

In the split-seconds he has at his disposal, there is no time for Brady to make a considered decision. Instead, it is his feelings that guide him. Brady starts moving the ball downfield. Then it's now-or-never time. Lehrer picks up on the action:

The primary target, a tight end running a short crossing pattern, is tightly covered. As a result, when Brady glances at the tight end, he automatically feels a slight twinge of fear, the sure sign of a risky pass.

His secondary target is also covered. Again, a negative feeling. Brady needs to get rid of the ball in a hurry. Otherwise, bad things will happen. He proceeds to his third target ...

Troy Brown is sneaking across the center of the field, threading the seam between the linebackers and the cornerbacks. When Brady looks at the target, his usual fear is replaced by a subtle burst of positive emotion, the allure of a receiver without a nearby defender. He has found an open man. He lets the ball fly. ...

As Lehrer explains later in the book, a lot of our decision-making has to do with the dopamine system, most commonly associated with the emotions of pleasure and fear. But dopamine is also involved in the process of anticipation - a lot of it driven by past experience. Thus in a gambling game, if a player drew from a bad deck, the dopamine neurons immediately stopped firing. "The player experienced a negative emotion and learned not to draw from that deck again."

This is a crucial cognitive talent, Lehrer tells us. "Dopamine neurons automatically detect the subtle patterns that we would otherwise fail to notice; they assimilate all the data that we can't consciously comprehend. And then, once they come up with a set of refined predictions about how the world works, they translate these predictions into emotions."

Oddly enough, Lehrer says later on, psychopathic behavior appears to result from lack of emotion rather than a breakdown in reason. Psychopaths tend to have above average intelligence. The problem is they are not guided by their emotions. They never feel bad when others feel bad. As a result, they show no remorse. "This emotional void means psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences. ... The absence of emotion makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible."

Yes, our emotions can lead us astray, but the skilled decision-maker knows when to pay attention:

Brady yells out a snap count, sends a man in motion, then the ball is in his hands. He drops back and notices three defensive linemen are rushing him. The fourth is trying to cut off the short pass. Brady looks to his right. The receiver is covered. He looks to his left. Nobody's open. He looks to the center of the field. Troy Brown, a Patriots wide receiver, is trying to find a plane of unoccupied space ...

Something feels right to Brady. He fires a bullet 14 yards downfield. Brown runs with the ball another nine yards, then steps out of bounds. One more quick pass, then the kicking unit comes onto the field. Adam Vinatieri sends the ball 48 yards through the uprights. Zero seconds on the clock. Game over.

Much more to come ...

Jonah Lehrer authors the outstanding brain science blog, The Frontal Cortex.

Aloysius and Me

Following is an edited version from an article on mcmanweb ...

I transferred to an all-boys Catholic school, and there, on the bus that also dropped the girls at their school, I met the girl who should have been my wife. I'd shot up some ten inches in one summer, so I was almost able to blend in. But my quality of being different sent out some invisible signal, and perhaps this is what she was responding to.

She was a cancer survivor and had the kinds of insights fifteen year olds shouldn't have, together with a beauty that ran far deeper than her amazing good looks. I would come home from dates feeling I'd been dropped onto a balance beam with my legs spread apart. I was innocent. I didn't realize she might have helped me out had I asked.

She was from a professional Catholic family - one that took their religious obligations seriously - but that wouldn't have stopped her, I am sure. Sure, there would have been a few religious technicalities to overcome, such as burning in Hell forever, but these could easily be resolved by other religious technicalities, such as getting to Confession before a truck ran either of us over while in a state of mortal sin.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about being Catholic.

My grandfather on my father's side came from a large Irish family in Quebec. Like most families of this type back then, there was a designated priest-to-be while all the other kids labored to put food on the table and maybe subsidize a lucky brother or sister's upward mobility. My Grandpa Joe was not one of the lucky ones. Out into the workforce he went, a kid who loved Shakespeare chopping wood in the cold at age fourteen.

Nevertheless, it seems you couldn't keep a good Shakespearean down, for my grandfather eventually brought his charm and eloquence to bear on my Grandma Alice - thirty years old at the time - and together they found their way to Springfield Massachusetts.

Now we jump ahead to when my father was a boy and his parents sent him by train to spend the summer with a rich uncle in Quebec. How this rich uncle fits into the picture and where his wealth came from I will never know, particularly when I could never get a word out of my father. In fact it is only through an aunt I found out in the first place.

It seems this uncle wanted to adopt my father. He had no son. Anyway, he put the question to my grandfather, who said yes. Just like that. Who knows what was going through my grandfather's mind? This was the depression, after all. They were poor. This was a good deal for his son, a dream come true, in fact. What struggling father wouldn't want the best for his boy?

That is, until my Grandma Alice found out what was going on. She was on that train to Quebec in a flash, and when she returned it was with her son.

But now the mystery deepens. Let's backtrack ten or fifteen years and consider: Out of the woods of Canada comes a Shakespearean woodcutter who by now is in uniform and sweeps a gardener's daughter off her feet, a daughter, I am told, who passed a piano exam by nailing a Mozart sonata.

But now it is years later and Shakespeare and Mozart are trapped in what I am told was a loveless marriage, poor with four kids, my father the oldest. My Grandpa Joe is now some kind of religious fanatic, always going to church and praying and making a great show of his faith. Who knows? Maybe his religious excesses did bring him closer to God. 

My mother has this little story to tell:

When my older sister was born, in which my mother nearly died from an infection, my Grandpa Joe paid a visit, and the first thing he said to my mother was too bad it wasn't a boy to carry on the family name. My mother was too shaken to reply.

Wait, there's more. When I was born, my Grandpa Joe said John, that's not a family name. This time my mother was ready. He is named after his OTHER grandfather, she let him know.

Ah, my other grandparents. No Shakespeare or Mozart here, but there was a piano in the house. That's the one thing, apparently, both sets of grandparents had in common, the piano in the house. My Grandpa John had a secure job driving a truck for Railroad Express, which made my mother's family well-off by depression standards.

I have fond memories of both these grandparents. But anytime we went for a visit my younger brother and I couldn't help but notice that neither he nor my Nana Tess ever attended mass, which, of course, was a mortal sin. Then my grandfather explained: He took church pills. Not just him. Nana Tess, too. The two of them, church pills.

I gathered this worked something like holy water or a communion wafer, but to a slightly different end. The net result of taking one was you didn't have to go to church. Now I was old enough and smart enough to figure out that church pills weren't available to kids, and that in all probability they were very difficult for even adults to obtain. Otherwise, no one would be going to church, now would they?

Except for my Grandpa Joe, of course.

All which goes to explain the rather lax attitude we had to Catholicism in our own house. Between my mother's parents and my father's reaction to his own father's displays of religion - especially a father who was all too willing to give him away - church and religious instruction were regarded as a sort of family obligation, like getting your kids vaccinated.

But back to the mystery of my grandfather the religious fanatic. The other day, I suddenly recalled this vital piece of the puzzle: You see, when my father was born he wasn't supposed to live more than a few hours. A nun in the hospital suggested that since the day on which he happened to be born was the feast day of Saint Aloysius, he may as well be given that name. My Grandma Alice, hedging her bets, decided that Aloysius would be his middle, rather than first, name.

Now whether it was because of a medical miracle or because Aloysius up there was so grateful to have someone named after him, even though it was only a middle name, my father pulled through. Luckily it was my younger brother - to my infinite relief - who wound up the dubious recipient of the family middle name.

But lately I can't help but wonder: Suppose Aloysius did pull off the miracle. If so, wouldn't this be the logical person to pray to in times of need? In fact, owing to his relative anonymity, it would be like having one's own personal family saint. No waiting, no queues.

Maybe that's what happened to my Grandpa Joe. Maybe, when faced with the prospect of losing his son - the son he would later almost give away - he found God. Maybe he recognized a true miracle for what it was. Maybe when he returned home with a healthy boy in his arms he knew he would never be the same.

Funny thing, I got along really well with Grandpa Joe. Perhaps because he was different, different like me. That's all that counted. There was something in both of us that belonged in another world. I know that because of my father, of all people. He wouldn't say it, but I could see it in his eyes.

When I stopped going to church as a teenager my father immediately followed suit, relieved of his obligation to set an example. Perhaps he thought when you died the lights simply went out. At any rate, I never heard him reflect on it. His Christianity was more of this earth - Chairman of the local Human Rights Commission, director of the local United Fund, involved in more charities than you can name.

On a cold evening in 1994, he fell asleep in the hospital, and never came out of it. We called in a priest for last rites, then they unplugged the life support. His kidneys went. Then his other organs. I stood there with a Bible reading Ecclesiates.

A time to ...

Perhaps there was a part of him that heard it, that managed to reconcile the many complicated parts of his own self before moving on to the next phase of his life. Or perhaps the lights really did just go out. Perhaps he really was ready to accept that possibility. Perhaps he knew a lot more than I ever will.

Oddly enough, my Grandpa Joe, for all his dedication to his faith, died in pretty much the same circumstances as my father. As fate would have it, he spent his last hours in a Protestant hospital. My Nana Tess, by contrast - the one who took church pills - happened to face her maker in a Catholic hospital attended to by no end of nuns and priests.

So anyway, getting back to the present, here I was, a boy of sixteen, with the girl who should have been my wife, the one I was willing to risk eternal damnation for, and had we stayed together any longer it might have come to that, but it never did.

No, we shared a different kind of intimacy. I look back on those moments with both fondness and amazement, the two of us in perfect comfort in the dark on the closed in front porch of her family's double-decker in the ethnic neighborhood where her quality of being different seemed to cancel out mine, without destroying that precious gift in each of us of being unique. Somehow we were able to share it without necessarily making out or talking.

Had I known how precious this was, I would have held onto her for dear life. With her, I could open up the inner spaces of myself and have her walk in and and warm me with her glow. Other women, I would discover, only sought to arrange the furniture or shattered the objects inside, leaving me with a feeling of broken trust and violation.

But I was young and stupid. I let her slip away, and we never kept in touch. Granted, there were probably a million reasons it wouldn't have worked, and I accept that. Still, I can't help but wonder: Where would I be now if I had held on to her? What would I be like?

Would she have brought out something in me that would have made me feel accepted? Would I have eventually found a way to fit in? Or would my quality of being different have proved too much, even for her?

God, of course, won't tell me, so maybe I'll ask Saint Aloysius.

Rerun: My Zombie State is Other People's Normal

From Last October ...

On Saturday, I received an email from a friend:

"Two people have emailed me to see if you are alright. How would I know? Hypomania is rocket fuel for your work."

My blog was no busier than usual that past week, save for an animated comment thread. Okay, let's make that a really really animated comment thread. My immediate reaction was a defensive one. There they go again, I thought. Pathologize my behavior. Attribute every action of mine to my illness. Most of you have been on the receiving end of this - show the slightest sign of life, dare to crack a joke and actually look happy, and it must be hypomania. Bipolars are as bad as the general population - worse, far worse - in this regard.

I once emailed a friend with news that I had won a major international award, and, without offering her congratulations or even acknowledging my achievement, she replied that it sounded like I was hypomanic and I needed to be careful.

What the ... ?

Then I had to laugh. All the week before, I had been down for the count with flu symptoms. I had been sleeping 16 hours a day. I would emerge from the blankets only to walk about with the feeling of the inside of my head wrapped inside these very same blankets. I had no energy, I felt like someone three times my age, and my mood was in a slow glide south.

Trust me, had they been auditioning for a remake of Night of the Living Dead, I would have received a call-back for the lead zombie role. Yet, somehow, I had managed to crawl to the computer and crank out my standard quota of blog pieces (two involving the intricacies of diagnostic psychiatry), plus fire off a long round of zinger comments.

What gives? Yesterday, while out on a country walk (with a clear head!), I got thinking about my friend's email. It's easy, of course, to get a totally wrong impression when there is no face-to-face contact. But I could recollect no shortage of real life Twilight Zone experiences dating from way back.

For instance, in my college dorm room 40 years ago - again in a flu-induced zombie state - I responded to someone with a lame comment and the whole room cracked up. I got off a repeat rimshot-worthy one-liner, then another one. I was death warmed-over, but to the people in the room I was Don Rickles.

Twelve or thirteen years later - same state of zombie-hood - I was the steady hand who calmed down a room of anxious individuals. I could go on and on. Sometimes it's the flu. Sometimes it's depression. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, my head is not attached to the rest of my body. There are no guarantees. Often, when I feel out of it, I am really truly, totally utterly, out of it.

On the reverse side of the coin, when I am feeling on my game - that is when I need to watch myself. Frequently, I find myself looking at a sea of perplexed faces. And heaven help if I know I'm off my game and my anxiety takes over. You know those Southwest Airline ads: "Need to get away?"

Anyway, here I was, taking my walk, gazing out into the mountains, when it suddenly hit me in a flash:

My zombie state is the equivalent of other people's normal!

If I could only be a zombie, I could lead a normal life. Here's how it works:

Like a lot of you, I experience racing thoughts. Think of my brain as the UN General Assembly with an angry Khrushchev on every seat yelling wildly and banging his shoe on the table. But the flu or a depression or some kind of brain fog shuts down all those Khrushchevs in my head. There are no distractions. I can focus on the task at hand. I appear sharp and to the point. Of all the crazy things, I give the impression that I'm operating on rocket fuel.

All those Khrushchevs are the equivalent of too much stuff coming in - too much thought, too much emotion, too much sensory input. Since I happen to work in a field that places a high premium on creativity and intuition, I tend to regard this as a good thing. I need those Khrushchevs. They work for me, provided I can show them who's boss.

But too much of a good thing for me has a way of manifesting as bipolar or anxiety or panic or just plain weirdness. This is the downside of Khrushchev. Every once in a while, things get out of hand. For others, these Khrushchevs may show up as ADD, schizophrenia, some forms of depression, or just simply strange or inappropriate behavior.

These days, I am fairly confident in matching the right Khrushchev to the right occasion, so that what comes out of my mouth doesn't embarrass me. Far from it. These days, I actually get invited to places. Back in the old days, I could be counted on to pick the wrong Khrushchev, generally a strange weird specimen that had people backing slowly toward the exits.

What has changed over the years is that I have slowly learned to read subtle social cues and modify my behavior accordingly. I suspect this is true for most of you. These days, I feel fairly confident walking out the door. Back in the old days, I didn't risk it. I stayed indoors and isolated, which, of course, made me fair game for crushing depressions.

It's a strange world when showing up as a zombie shrouded in a protective depression is the state most likely to create the best impression for me. But when I'm feeling good, I often lack insight to know that I'm feeling too good for my own good. That's why I need to watch myself, and - more important - watch others.

"Knowing thyself" is central to "Knowledge is Necessity." Only through long introspection do we find answers and learn to ask the right questions. Consider this blog piece a long and involved question to all of you. I'm very interested in your answers. Please fire away by going to the comments below ...

Rerun: Oprah Totally Endorses Me - Well, Sort Of

Yesterday, I ran a piece highly critical of Oprah. But there was a time when we were good buddies, as this oldie from June, 2009 illustrates ...

My last blog was entitled, Oprah is an Unmitigated Idiot and a Menace to Society. Perhaps, I was being too harsh. After all, at the time I was as bitter as the Phantom of the Opera. A bit of background:

In Oct 2006, HarperCollins published my book, "Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder: What Your Doctor Doesn't Tell You ... That You Need to Know." The book drew an unprecedented range of endorsements, including psychiatric experts (such as Frederick Goodwin MD, former head of the NIMH), advocates (such as Susan Bergeson, at the time President of DBSA), authors (such as Pete Early, who wrote "Crazy"), and alternative/complementary practitioners (such as Amy Weintraub, author of "Yoga for Depression").

But apparently, my book was not Oprah-worthy, and for more than two years I have been prowling the underground catacombs of Paris fantasizing my revenge. Then, suddenly, the other day, in the middle of a tenor solo, I had an epiphany, a realization, a sudden change of heart. Rather than crash a chandelier (or, alternatively, an overhead studio light) on Oprah's head, instead I would write a book that would do her proud, and today I'm pleased to announce the happy outcome:

"The Dihydrogen Oxide Cure: Nature's Boner-Popping Miracle Answer to Depression, Aging, Heart Disease, Obesity, Wrinkles, Memory Loss, Impotence, and Just About Everything, Totally."

Dihydrogen oxide is one hundred percent natural, and is found in all of nature. Dihydrogen oxide accounts for 70 percent of our body weight at birth, but as we age the percentage drops to around 60 percent. Without dihydrogen oxide, we would all die. Life on the planet would cease.

Yesterday, I finished taping my first Oprah show, and five more are in the works. My people and her people are negotiating a spin-off series. The first show should air any day now. Following is a partial transcript:

Oprah: "Today's show is entirely devoted to John McManamy, author of "The Dihydrogen Oxide Cure" (holding up book). I am absolutely blown away by this guy. Ladies and gentlemen, if women could pop boners I'd be popping one right now."

John McManamy: "Thank you, Oprah. That's a real nice outfit you have on, by the way."

Oprah: "You like it? But you know what? I used to look like a frump in this exact same get-up until I tried your Dihydrogen Oxide Cure. Suddenly, I started drinking about seven or eight glasses a day like you recommended, and, I mean my life has totally - totally - absolutely, totally absolutely, turned around. John, can you explain how dihydrogen oxide works? Oh, and do you have an easier-to-pronounce name for it?"

John McManamy: "Well, Oprah, since I see dihydrogen oxide as nature's miracle answer, I like to call it "Namirans," which by the way is the name of my dihydrogen oxide cure product, available in all health food stores.

Oprah: (Holding up bottle.) "'McMan's Namirans', to be more precise. One hundred percent natural. Just four dollars a bottle. And you can also order it online by going to John's website at mcmanweb.com."

John McManamy: "Anyway, Oprah, did you know that Namirans forms the basis of just about all of our medicines, both pharmaceutical and alternative?"

Oprah: "You mean even naturopathic?"

John McManamy: "Exactly. It's the major ingredient in everything we take to get us better. Not only that, it's the major ingredient in everything we eat and drink. So I was thinking - if this is the one ingredient common to everything, literally everything, why mess around with all the other stuff, such as additives that can be bad for you. Suppose, just suppose, we could isolate this compound? Then people could enjoy the one hundred percent Namirans experience."

Oprah: "This is amazing. How come we've never heard of it, before?"

John McManamy: "Well, Oprah, as you know doctors would be out of jobs if everyone were healthy. And because the stuff is one hundred percent natural, the drug companies don't have a patent on it."

Oprah: "Okay, John, before you go on, the entire medical profession is calling you a fraud. I have three Nobel Prize winners in the audience ready to totally rebut your claims. What do you have to say to them?"

John McManamy: "Well, Oprah, I know that Namirans sounds too good to be true, but the fact remains that we could not live one minute without it ..."

Oprah: "Say no more, John. And when it comes time to call upon these quacks, namely ten seconds before we're due to break into a commercial, I'll be sure to treat them with a total lack of respect."

John McManamy: "As you so totally should, Oprah. I mean, after all, you're Oprah. By the way, those are totally bomb ass earrings you're wearing."

Oprah: "Why, thank you, John. And you're quite the bomb yourself. Now, John, this is going to sound weird, but the other night I took a bath in your product. It's hard to describe, it was like a ... cleansing ... experience."

John McManamy: "There's no end of uses to Namirans, Oprah. You should see the fan mail I'm getting from people all over the world. A lady in New Zealand is using it to grow her plants - really, I'm not making this up. Someone in Massachusetts is actually cleaning his car with it. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of icebergs, did you know that Namirans is the main ingredient in icebergs, both Arctic and Antarctic?

Oprah: "Get ... out ... of ... here! I have to hear more about this! But first commercials. Next up. Elizabeth Taylor and her miracle Namirans story, and how Angelina Jolie is using Namirans to promote world peace. John, we have twenty seconds before we cut into commercials. Tell us real quick about your other product."

John McManamy: "Oh, you must mean my special avocado crotch rub ... "

Oprah: "You mean you rub it into your crotch?"

John McManamy: "No, Oprah, you have someone else rub it into your crotch."

Oprah: (In total admiration.) "John, you are a true boner-popper. Perhaps you can demonstrate it on me after the show. Ladies and gentlemen, the great, totally mind-blowing, John McManamy!"

***

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And don't forget to order McMan's Water, I mean, uh, McMan's Namirans - nature's miracle dihydrogen oxide cure - today.

Oprah Is At It - Again

Katherine Stone authors an outstanding blog on postpartum disorders, Postpartum Progress. In a December blog piece on my mental health heroes, I cited her as my "Internet Hero" of the year.

Today, Katherine features a contribution from Alexis Lesa. In response to an open request from the Oprah show, Alexis went to the site and entered in a brief account of her experience with postpartum depression. To the surprise of Alexis, the next day she received a follow-up email requesting more information. One of the follow-up questions included:

After your child's birth...are you feel empty and sad instead of elated and excited?

And another:

Are you scared you were going to hurt your child or yourself?

(The badly mangled grammar is theirs.)

As Alexis writes:

I know that the questions were most likely meant to get a broad sense of what PPD is like and I should probably just let it go, but I can’t help myself. ... It seems that people are intent on pigeonholing PPD as a crazy-making disease, one that turns women into baby haters, baby killers.

She adds:

Why is it that the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they hear PPD is “This woman probably doesn’t love her child,” or “This woman is probably going to hurt her child.”? It’s as though all the literature about the range of PPD symptoms simply doesn’t exist--in the eyes of the world, all PPD moms are a danger to themselves or their children. It’s no wonder many women fear speaking out.

Ah, deja vu all over again.

Three years ago, Julie, a producer from Oprah, contacted me. They were interested in doing a show on bipolar. Julie saw my website and wanted to talk. Who doesn't have time to talk to someone from Oprah?

Soon into our phone conversation a day or two later, it became obvious why Julie was calling. She wanted to know about my mad scene. My mad scene of 20 years ago is fairly boring as far as mad scenes go. (I had merely quit my job in a huff.) A total disaster from my point of view, but hardly a newsworthy one. Depression is the real bane of my life, and Julie didn't want to hear about that.

"Did Bipolar Drive a Mother to Kill Her Child?" read the home page of Oprah's website, about a month later. "Tune in Monday."

The show started out with a 911 call: The mother, Andrea, had just confessed to choking her six year-old son. It turned out her idiot family doctor had been giving her antidepressants. In prison (she is serving a 42-year term), a doctor made the right diagnosis, put her on a mood stabilizer, and now she is doing fine, all things considered.

The entire first segment of the show was devoted to Andrea, while nearly all the second featured Andrea's friends. Then Kay Jamison came on. Two minutes. Kay Jamison, two minutes.

Then came "General Hospital" star Maurice Bernard, talking for 10 minutes about his "blow-out" that turned out to be an anxiety attack. The last segment featured actress Jennifer Lewis who turned out to be smart and personable. Then a hurried one-minute wrap-up with Kay Jamison. End of show.

Three years later: Postpartum depression is about to get the Oprah treatment. Many thanks, Katherine, for tipping me off. My suggestion, Katherine: Time to suit up as an internet hero. Maybe Oprah is way too powerful for the likes of us, but we don't have to take this lying down, either.

Time to make some noise ...

What Is It With Those Finns?

This is too weird not to let go unnoticed. Newsweek just came out with its first-ever World's Best Countries. Finland topped the list of 100 countries surveyed. Finland? Fortuitously, I had prepared myself for this eventuality. Three weeks ago, I was in New Zealand - by rights a country that should rank number 1 on the list - having a beer with my old friend Chris.

"What is it about the Finns?" he happened to ask, seemingly out of the blue. But nothing in our conversations is ever out of the blue. We're both in search of a grand unified theory of everything. Every topic, however arcane, is on the table, and - who knows? - this could very well be the one that would yield the ultimate universal truth - 42 explained - the answer to life, the universe - everything.

Think about, he said. The Finnish language is only one in four in the world not connected to any major language group. (Okay, technically, Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family that also includes Estonian, but you get the point.)

Hmm, I thought. A language - and by extension, a people - from nowhere. Interesting. For extra credit: The word "sauna" is Finnish in origin. So is a type of granite known as "Rapakivi."

Next, Chris said, the Finns beat the Soviet Union during World War II.

I nodded my head appreciatively. During the Second World War and its aftermath, the Soviets overran Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Nazi Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Yet they had no luck trying to subdue a nation of a mere five million people right on its border.

What is it about these mysterious Finns? I could only wonder.

Last but not least, Chris added. They make Nokia phones.

Holy crap! I could only think. They make Nokia phones. If this were in any way connected to the Swedish making IKEA furniture then this was very significant indeed.

It just so happened that we had both seen a "60 Minutes" report from the 1990s, "Tango Finlandia," narrated by Morley Safer (the pic above is from the report). The surrealism in the piece would have made Salvador Dali jealous. According to the report, the Finns are a highly depressed and morose race, intensely private and painfully shy, who pay the equivalent of twelve dollars to take part in a national obsession - the tango.

Indeed, this is beyond the realm of human understanding.

And now - number one on Newsweek's Best Countries list. Very - very intensely - significant indeed.

Clearly, without doubt, cracking the Finnish Code will yield the secrets that Einstein spent the last half of his life searching for in vain. And I just know many of you are putting the final pieces in place right now. Those last neurons are connecting, about to reveal the ultimate answer to everything.

Life will never be the same again.

Don't be shy, post your comments now ...