Body & Dreams & The Weird Wide Web 10 Feb 2006 12:20 am
Items in brief
This afternoon, I dreamed that my scalp was spontaneously breaking out in Far Side cartoons. (There was one with a bear in an Old West bar, and another with cavemen in their underground research facility.) I am sure this says something profound about my character, but I am not sure what it is.
Josh and I are wrapping up our STP@home at last. I hope to make it to the finish line within two weeks. Josh is about thirty miles behind me, but he could still catch up if I slack off. The race is doing a pretty good job of building my stamina.
Via Salon’s Broadsheet, this strange introduction to a recipe: “As a Southern belle once said, ‘A man can have sex with any woman, but not a good chocolate cake.’” I am not sure I’d want to argue with that.
And via Mind Hacks, an article about a very seriously mentally ill (but hot! oh so hot!) girl whose successful pharmaceutical treatment caused her to gain weight.
“They had removed a stigma of the mind and replaced it with a stigma of the body. It struck him as strange that the patient had been the only one not to worry about a loss that the team around her found so tragic… The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another—in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?”
How it strikes Nia, we’ll never really know. Nia doesn’t have a voice of her own in this article. But it does seem to me that, in her place, I would likely be so relieved at no longer being tormented that worrying over having my features “corrupted” (jeez!) would not be among my immediate priorities. The whole thing had me spitting hot nails. Pandagon has it right: “Can’t we just sedate her and put her in a glass coffin?”
on 10 Feb 2006 at 2:31 am 1.ben said …
Well, the fact that the article is about how weight gain destroyed her beauty sucks. Would the weight gain have been less important if she started out plain?
And yet… I can’t help but be reminded of my experience on remerol last April… In march I was as depressed as I have ever been, and my doctor put me on a drug that caused me to eat compulsively and gain weight like it was going out of style. The depression got better, but ultimately I decided that I would rather be a danger to myself than continue down the road I was heading down. My doctor wanted to keep me on the drug.
I guess it also sucks that psychiatrists often have different priorities than the patients…
on 10 Feb 2006 at 5:35 am 2.Rechercher said …
Well, yeah, given a choice between the two I’d rather be fat than insane. But really, should obesity (a legitamite health problem) be the price to pay for sanity? It would be nice if there was a way to have both. Of course, it’s not a perfect world.
on 10 Feb 2006 at 7:24 am 3.Torquemada said …
OMG her BELLY stuck out a little bit over her JEANS NOOOOOOOO?!!?!!?!
Jesus. A fair number of people would consider her more attractive that way. She’s probably still a single-digit size, anyway.
on 10 Feb 2006 at 8:08 am 4.McJulie said …
One of the commenters on your glass coffin link had it right, I think, when he compared the article to the novel Lolita — where the girl as a person is suspiciously absent, and it’s all about the girl as a manifestation of symbolic elements of the narrator’s psyche. Of course, Lolita is a work of literature, where we (the readers) are supposed to notice the fact that the narrator is lying to us, and crazy to boot. The article is presented as nonfiction.
For example, in a normal world, if you’re this girl’s doctor, you can actually sit down and ask, “Say, this drug seems to be working to control your schizophrenia, but I’m concerned about your incredibly rapid weight gain. What do you want to do about this?”
At which point the girl herself can weigh in on the crazy vs. fat & diabetic debate.
The doctor seems concerned that her indifference to weight gain is a sign the drug isn’t working as well as it appears to — that’s actually a legitimate concern, since, it isn’t at all normal for a modern teenager to be unconcerned about weight gain. It really isn’t. But this article makes it seem like he never even talked to her about it — he just started monkeying with her medication again.
But combining this article with Ben’s experience makes me think that psychiatrists just like to make people do stuff. You aren’t concerned that this drug makes you gain weight? That will never do! Have a different drug. You ARE concerned that this drug makes you gain weight? That doesn’t matter! You must keep taking it!
on 10 Feb 2006 at 9:21 am 5.Cam Sculpin said …
I’m on my way out the door, but let me add that those who know me well in real life may know that I too have gained a fair bit of weight suddenly. In early 2004 I had an unusually strong set of side effects from Depo-Provera. Among the lesser problems was weight gain: I put on about thirty pounds within a month or so, on top of the ten or so I’d gained a few months before after a back injury. In six months, I went from about 120 to about 160 pounds.
This is probably not too unlike the weight gain described in the article — not as dramatic, but the poundage is in the same ballpark. If she started out “willowy” and gained 42 pounds, she probably did not wind up particularly obese, at least in terms of the BMI, unless she is very short. She probably wound up a bit plump. Particularly if weight gain slows, and I have read that this particular side effect does slow dramatically for this particular drug in most patients, I do not see this as a big deal — certainly not one in any way comparable to psychosis. Which is not to say that it is not a big deal for some people, only that that it is not required to be a big deal.
So, that was a couple of years ago. And while I have been a bit surprised at how much less pleasant some people can be to 160-lb Cam than 120-lb Cam, I personally have not felt it to be a big huge honking deal. Sure, losing the fat would be nice — I do not like to be reminded of that horrible time on Depo, for one thing — but its priority for me is well below that of gaining strength, joint stabilization, balance, proprioception, flexibility, fascial health, and stamina.
Perhaps this is because I’m old and tough; perhaps it’s because the fat gain is really just an annoyance, not a tragedy; perhaps it’s because I have a chronic illness, and therefore relate to my body differently than I would if I were fully able-bodied. Who knows? People have different reasons, at any age, for deciding what’s important. I submit that a teenage kid who’s been tortured by hallucinations is likely going to have a different idea of what’s important than someone who’s been spared that experience. (It would have been nice, in this article, to have a clearer idea of where Nia was coming from. But instead the reader is stuck with trying to read between the lines of the self-indulgent Cary Tennis-ism of the author.)
And with that, I’m off to Pilates.
on 10 Feb 2006 at 10:59 am 6.Savannah said …
I’m hating the guy who wrote that article. He just wants to talk about how hot this girl was, and has constructed an elaborate, half-reverent, poignant story around it to draw out the masturbatory reverie; making himself look less base and more caring than simply saying: “This crazy chick? totally hot! I miss the hotness.” Taking away a life-threatening degree of crazy and replacing it with plumpness is a fine trade, if one must choose & it sounds like the girl has. (And hell, she might not have been an Exerciser before at all, as slimness comes more easily to growing teens…perhaps there is a very normal “cure”, if she cares). …But it’s not enough for him to miss it, he wants the girl to regret the missing hotness too, for him. It’s not enough that he do it in some flowery way. What a selfish dick. Glass coffin comment very apt. [/rant].
“…’ A man can have sex with any woman, but not a good chocolate cake.’” I am not sure I’d want to argue with that.” (Hilarious.)
on 10 Feb 2006 at 11:23 am 7.mizducky said …
Wow. That article pissed me off so much that I immediately wrote a scathing letter to the magazine’s editors. I’m still fuming about it. I mean, not only did this doctor seem to prefer skinny crazy Nia to fat sane Nia, but then the authors wax rhapsodic about it in a public forum, seemingly oblivious to the moral obnoxiousness of the whole thing. Certainly does nothing to improve my opinions of either the medical establishment, the dieting industry, our culture’s attitudes about fat and appearance (now *there’s* some real insanity for you), or the magazine that published this article.
on 10 Feb 2006 at 2:08 pm 8.mizducky said …
By request, here’s the text of the letter I sent to Prospect:
Greetings:
Regarding the story “Beautiful Madness” appearing on your website from the February 2006 issue, #119, of your publication:
I find the article’s unspoken premise, that Nia’s beauty was somehow more valuable than her sanity, to be obnoxious in the extreme. What, health professionals would rather have this young lady be totally disabled by psychosis but still slim? No wonder the diet industry continues to make millions off of similar young women, encouraging them to risk health and their very lives, let alone their sanity, in order to be unrealistically model-skinny. In fact, I can make a case for the declaration of insanity of our whole culture and the medical profession within it, just based on this insane emphasis on very limited standards of physical attractiveness ahead of anything and everything else, including true health and happiness. Leave poor Nia out of these deluded ideals of beauty and let the poor girl live a nice happy, sane–and fat–life already, okay?
Regards,
Ellen T. Brenner
on 11 Feb 2006 at 9:00 am 9.McJulie said …
What if the article was about how this girl wouldn’t take the medication that really helped her psychosis because she didn’t like the changes to her body? Would we all suddenly be on the doctor’s side?
on 18 Dec 2006 at 4:03 pm 10.Fan of Don Lapre said …
Didnt like the article myself…its good to see that there are some unshallow people out there..thanks for the posts!!!
Fan of Don Lapre
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