Amy Lemmon, poetry editor for ducts.org, accepted two (or 3) of my poems for the ducts summer 2010 edition.

http://www.ducts.org/content/two-poems-9/

His Big House

His Big House

Jack’s friends lit candles.

Libby read Kindness.

I shook all the hands—

sustained embraces.

When the last guest was gone

she re-arranged the back room

imposing her order

over yours or her mother’s.

The furnace works long

to melt winter’s breath

drawn through a window

some summer cracked open.

As long as I have

this big house,

you have a place to stay

if you need one.

“Then I would hope you will keep that big house

so I have a place to stay when I need one.”

A silver frame cradles

a photo of Jack

climbing his tall sister

in Chenonceau’s garden.

The cold glass blurs

but I can’t polish it clean.

The tarnished loop and whorl

trace ridges like my own.

Dust collects under Jack’s bed.

I swapped his for yours

so others feel his support

and imprint his firm mattress.

I stopped resetting the clock

when the power comes on.

A green beacon beats

from your dark bedroom.

You can heal faster here,

not on your own,

and sound depths of your heart

worn brittle, riddled by grief.

My guests, you and I,

we understand much

too late.  Please don’t you

think that it’s time?

“What may I bring to make me feel welcome?

Cook us his favorite

after school snack.

“I will pan fry Jiaozi or hard boil an egg.”

Make sticky rice as well—

I share his sweet tooth.

I hold a Bordeaux

I hold a Bordeaux

The glass tapered so the wine ignores the tongue
worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge she says something I miss.
The glass crumbles like an eggshell. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold
the glass, a broken bird that slapped a window,
still aloft so she could see. Or like a peony
slumped on the asphalt defeated by the morning dew.
Did grief constrict my grip? Is wine preserved
like the yoke in a broken belly? But my palm
is washed. Red drains down my wrist, sticks my jeans
against a leg. Make the anger run more rampant.
More glasses would survive and I could feel the shard.

Ode to a Pillow

Ode to a Pillow

You slept nights in 300 count cotton.
Maybe towards the end,
Denise shrouded you in 500.

Only today I noticed you missing.
In some police locker, obviously,
with the knife and GameCube.

I have to admit some jealousy.
You were the last to bruise his cheeks,
to taste vomit on his lips.

When you smothered his cries,
did you feel his tears soak through your slip
and stain you where you blinded him?

There was an instant, wasn’t there--
when he fought through the drugged sleep,
to feel his arms pinned between her legs?

You didn’t answer him, did you.
You thought you’d shelter him
from the precise nature of her betrayal.

I know you lay awake always
searching for his head to cushion—
to atone for his eternal rest.

If I can’t praise you, dear pillow,
if I don’t petition your release,
where will I find my place to sleep?

Scientists try to stop schizophrenia in its tracks

On Sunday, this article was posted on MSNBC.  I read an article like this completely differently than I would have a few years ago.  This idea that psychosis is a distinct phase in some illnesses like schizophrenia and manic-depression was news to me. And that mental illness is a progressive disease.  I thought back then that crazy just meant crazy. (I don't know if it is true for schizophrenia, but Kramer in his book Against Depression, demonstrates that depression, untreated, deepens over time and becomes more frequent.)

I'm then very keen on what are the early warning signs that hint that psychosis is coming.

Then I look for the bottom line ... does the new treatment or program have proven results?  In this case not yet, but the article gives anecdotal evidence that PIER is helpful.

Subtle, early signs Researchers have known about this warning phase [or prodrome] for decades, but they're still working on how to treat it. Now they're calling in tools like brain scans, DNA studies and hormone research to dig into its biology. They hope that will reveal new ways to detect who's on the road to psychosis and to stop that progression.

In the prodrome, people can see and hear imaginary things or have odd thoughts. But significantly, they understand these experiences are just illusions, or they have a reasonable explanation. In contrast, people with psychosis firmly cling to unreasonable explanations instead.

PIER emphasizes non-drug therapies for its patients, ages 12 to 25, although about three-quarters of them take anti-psychotic medication.

The treatment regimen includes group meetings in which patients and families brainstorm about handling the condition's day-to-day stresses. It also focuses on keeping patients in school and in touch with their families and social networks.

When it comes to treating the prodrome, scientists say they have some promising approaches but no firmly proven treatments to prevent psychosis from appearing.

On Cha: an Asian Literary Journal

http://www.asiancha.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=193&Itemid=112

New Yorker article of Psychopathy

Psychopathy is not my favorite subject.  But I find myself reading a cross section of articles on mental health, and letting the ideas pollinate across the various subjects.  In this article I do sense distance between the author John Seabrook and the researchers, Dr. Kiehl and his mentor Dr. Hare.  For example when Seabrook was interviewing Dr. Hare, he commented, "Hare was friendly but wary of me."  I share that sense of distance with the author.  I know the subject is important, but I'm not sure I want to get too close to it.

I've excerpted some quotes below just to give a bit of the background on Hare and Kiehl.

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population.

In order to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths among the Western volunteers, Kiehl and his students use the revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R, a twenty-item diagnostic instrument created by Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist, based on his long experience in working with psychopaths in prisons. Kiehl was taught to use the checklist by Hare himself, under whom he earned his doctorate, at the University of British Columbia.

Today, Kiehl and Hare have a complementary but complicated relationship. Kiehl claims Hare as a mentor, and sees his own work as validating Hare’s checklist, by advancing a neurological mechanism for psychopathy. Hare is less gung ho about using fMRI as a diagnostic tool. “Some claim, in a sense, this is the new phrenology,” Hare said, referring to the discredited nineteenth-century practice of reading the bumps on people’s heads, “only this time the bumps are on the inside.” (Hare himself is a “strong proponent” of brain-imaging technology, but he noted that scans in isolation will always be insufficient.) Hare sees himself as a generalist, and Kiehl as “more of a data-driven guy.” Hare added that, while Kiehl’s brashness sometimes puts people off, “that’s why Kent gets things done.

And it was this paragraph below, that made me want to excerpt the article for this blog.  It illustrates much of the misinformation out there which we have to deal with regarding mental health awareness.  And this misinformation or distortion (I'm searching for the right word ... casualness?) is coming straight from the mouth of Dr. Kiehl, a PHD, doing fundamental research, an expert in the field.  1. The DSM definitions are subjective, cover a broad, continuous range of symptoms, and are mutable.  You cannot take a blood test and get a definitive diagnosis.  When Dr. Kiehl says "so much" it almost implies too much.  2. He mentions the famous drug companies that fund research, and profit from treatment.  Quotes like this make the general public suspicious of what is happening.  When you read commentary in the MSM you always run into this.  3.  The categorization of the disorder is influenced on whether it treatable or not.  (I have added the blue for emphasis.)

If a biological basis for psychopathy could be established and pharmacological treatments developed, the idea that many people have at least a little of the psychopath in them could well become accepted. As Kiehl points out, “It used to be the case that it was very hard to meet clinical criteria for depression in the fifties and sixties. However, the definition of depression has been broadened so much with DSM-IV that nearly every person will meet the criteria at some point in their lives. One reason for this is that drug companies have lobbied to change the criteria—because they have a treatment, a drug, that can help people even with moderate levels of depression. It’s a completely different issue whether this is appropriate.” He added that “even moderate levels of psychopathy may someday be considered a disorder—especially if we can treat it.”