The myth of normal, p.61
The Myth of Normal, page 61
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* Although I’ll mostly be using “myth” in its contemporary meaning of “fictional” or “misleading,” I will have occasion much later in the book to acknowledge the healing power of genuine mythic thinking, in the ancient sense of the word.
* Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist, Buddhist meditation teacher, and author.
* The viciously anti-Semitic fascist Hungarian political movement and paramilitary allied with the Nazi occupiers.
* See chapter 6, first paragraph and footnote.
* And fellow 1950s émigré to Vancouver, now a longtime London resident.
* Chapter 4.
* Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in 1983’s Return of the Jedi.
* I was saddened to learn of her death, about a year after our interview.
* A phrase coined in 1982 by researchers at Heidelberg University, Germany.
* A degenerative and nearly always fatal disease of the nervous system, it is known in Britain as motor neuron disease and in the United States also as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
* Longtime head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University (d. 2020).
* Clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute.
* “I’m on Fire” (1984), third verse.
* As in his rock-and-roll classic “Great Balls of Fire.”
* Professor emerita, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California San Francisco.
* There are a few diseases that are determined purely by genes, such as Huntington’s and one that runs in my family, muscular dystrophy. If one has the gene, one is almost 100 percent certain to get the disease. Such conditions are exceedingly rare. There is, for example, a gene for breast cancer, but only about 7 percent of women with the disease have the gene. And far from all the ones with the gene will necessarily get the disease, though their risk, to be sure, is significantly elevated.
* Receptor molecules embedded in the membranes of cells receive and bind with chemical messengers such as opiates and hormones. Their interaction with these messenger substances induces the DNA in the cell’s nucleus to manufacture proteins that instigate life processes. By such mechanisms, the environment instructs the cell what to do and when.
* How a gene acts—that is, what protein messengers it will produce, if any—is called gene expression. Gene expression is determined by inputs from the environment that reach the DNA by means of receptors on the cell membrane, and also by complex intracellular mechanisms programmed by experience.
* The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is discussed in chapter 2.
* The impact of “subjective” stress—fear, loss, emotional pain, etc.—is no less physiologically impactful.
* Her Korean given name, pronounced “Mee Oak.” For much of her life, growing up in the United States, she went by “Mandy.” Her full name now is Mee Ok Icaro, for reasons I’ll explain when we return to her remarkable story in chapter 31 (see footnote).
* For example, the C-reactive protein (CRP).
* See chapter 27.
* SSRI stands for “selective serotonin uptake inhibitor,” meaning that these medications block the uptake of the neural messenger chemical serotonin into nerve cells.
* The striking gender differences in autoimmune disease as well as the racial disparities are addressed in chapters 22 and 23.
* Obviously, with an external agent such as the novel coronavirus, we are facing an entirely different challenge. But even there, internal factors and social conditions play a major role in people’s vulnerability to the infection.
* Since our original interview, the writer and activist has changed her name to V, eschewing the names—personal and familial—given to her by her rapist father, by whose legacy she does not wish to be defined. Throughout in this book, we honor that self-affirming designation.
* Recall, too, the connection between PTSD symptoms and ovarian cancer (chapter 2).
* Professor of medicine and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine.
* At that time, director of the Behavioral Medicine Program at the University of Maryland Medical School.
* In fact, Temoshok was describing character traits, not a complete “personality”—more below on this misperception of her ideas.
* I used to write the Globe and Mail’s medical column and often contributed to the op-ed pages.
* The original names appeared in the column; I’ve changed them here to further protect privacy. Otherwise, the obituary is cited verbatim.
* February 2021.
* Stanley Greenspan (1941–2010), former director of the Clinical Infant Development Program, U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.
* And author, most recently, of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Our Worst.
* “Hominid”: all the great apes, including humans, along with gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees; “hominin”: species considered to be human or directly ancestral to humans.
* Personal communication. Dr. Khazanov is a neuropsychologist based in San Francisco.
* Homeostasis refers to the processes by which the body maintains the stability and constancy needed for all its subsystems to function properly, including temperature regulation, pH levels, and so much more.
* My reasons for using the “so-called” qualifier will be taken up in chapters 17 and 18.
* The world-renowned Dr. Panksepp distinguished seven such major brain systems responsible for our core emotional patterns. He rendered the names of each in capital letters. Along with CARE and PANIC/GRIEF, FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, and PLAY are the others.
* Dr. Neufeld’s formulation happens to mirror precisely the basic requirements offered by the parenting practices of small-band hunter-gatherer groups, according to the research gathered by Dr. Darcia Narvaez. See chapter 12.
* Chapter 7.
* Personal communication from the famed French obstetrician and author of Childbirth and the Evolution of Homo sapiens, among other books.
* And in the litigious U.S. system, the terror of lawsuits and high insurance premiums.
* That earnest nurse and I became very friendly colleagues years later at the labor and delivery suite of B.C. Women’s Hospital.
* I kid, but also not. The connection between the impaired supply of these feel-good chemicals early in life and later patterns of addiction, whether to drugs or compulsive behavior patterns, is a central theme of my previous book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, and will be revisited here in chapters 15 and 16.
* I flinched when she mentioned circumcision—I used to perform this procedure myself, one that in the North American context has no health benefit and has been shown to cause suffering to the child, especially in the medical form I was trained in.
* To clarify, Feldman-Winter’s comment regarding anti-vaxxers preceded COVID-19 days.
* For example, rats weaned just one week earlier than their Nature-appointed times are more likely to get habituated to alcohol as adults.
* Near the end of his presidency, “Ike” famously warned about the “military-industrial complex.”
* Address by the South African president at the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Pretoria, May 8, 1995.
* The phenomenon of peer orientation is documented extensively in Gordon Neufeld’s book, which I co-wrote, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers.
* Assuming, of course, that the adults themselves are emotionally stable, supportive, and available to provide safety. For abused children, the peer group, inadequate as it is, may be a lifeline in some cases.
* Slang for the psychoactive drug MDMA.
* Although these are U.S. figures, given the hyper-contagious influence of U.S. culture internationally, the impact is global.
* Similar sentiments are heard from Silicon Valley execs throughout the hit 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
* The acclaimed HBO series of which Dunham was both creator and star.
* The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines “addiction” as “a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addictions use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences” (2019).
* According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the U.S. surgeon general’s 2016 report on substance use, up to 50 percent of the “disease” is due to genetic factors. I’ll have more to say about the flaws in that view later in this chapter.
* The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s disease-oriented definition, cited earlier, does point to life experiences without naming or exploring them in detail; we need to go further and get more specific.
* Métis are people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, mostly in the Western Canadian context.
* Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
* Klonopin is a trade name for clonazepam, a tranquilizer of the benzodiazepine class, to which also belong such chemical relatives as Valium (diazepam) and Ativan (lorazepam).
* From an article in the New York Times by this prolific journalist and author, herself in long-term recovery (“Can You Get Over an Addiction?,” June 25, 2016).
* This inquiry, of course, need not be exclusive to uncovering the sources of addiction: anyone manifesting any of the signs of developmental injury covered in this book, from mild to severe, mental or physical, stands to benefit from a compassionate self-investigation into their own histories of distress.
* The Tennessee whiskey brands George Dickel, Jack Daniel’s, and Jim Beam.
* Or what Dr. Jaak Panksepp identified as the brain’s SEEKING apparatus.
* Historian of science at Harvard University and author of Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. CBC Radio interview, October 2019.
* The hit Netflix documentary Cracked Up!, directed by Michelle Esrick, catalogs the real-life horror show Hammond endured as a child. Dr. Kotbi is interviewed in the film.
* Traits can be passed on from one generation to the next without any DNA sequences being involved; and in identical twins, one cannot separate genetic effects from environmental ones, given identical siblings were gestated in the same uterus and most were brought up in the same family. If adopted to different families, they had still shared the same uterine environment and the same trauma of separation from their birth mother. I won’t fatigue the reader here with a further critique of adoption studies, a subject I covered extensively in two of my previous books, on ADHD and addiction, respectively. See especially In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Appendix 1: “Adoption and Twin Study Fallacies.” In brief, for all the attention they have received, twin and adoption studies prove very little, if anything. For an exhaustive refutation of twin-study “findings,” see The Trouble with Twin Studies, by the psychologist Jay Joseph.
* Currently senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and, most recently, coauthor, with Oprah Winfrey, of the bestselling What Happened to You?
* Full credentials: Ph.D., FCAHS, CGC; professor and Canada research chair, UBC Departments of Psychiatry and Medical Genetics; executive director, BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services Research Institute.
* By contrast, recall that we are born with evolution-programmed RAGE and GRIEF circuits in our brains.
* A scientific aside to Williams’s story is that research has now linked the onset of Parkinson’s—a close relative of Lewy body disease—with chronic depression and stress. See endnote 7 to this chapter.
* Also known as ADD, to denote that the hyperactivity may not always be present. In practice, and confusingly, the two acronyms are often used interchangeably.
* Though I am not categorically against the use of medications in ADHD, I decry the automatic, extensive, long-term, and almost exclusive reliance on them. For more, see my book Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
* 170 cm and 48 kg, respectively.
* Chapters 2 and 3.
* Although the term “neoliberalism” is mostly employed nowadays by critics of the erosion of social programs, the increasing power of the corporations, their laissez-faire ideology, and their sway over governments under late-stage capitalism, it was originally coined in the 1930s by prominent advocates of just such policies. My use of it is in itself neither critical nor laudatory: it refers to an objective reality whose health impacts we are investigating.
* To clarify, both chronically elevated and lowered cortisol levels signal overburdening of the body’s stress apparatus: the former its excessive activation, the latter its debilitation.
* Reported extensively, for example, in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and in many other publications, not to mention the academic literature.
* A Scottish friend of mine opined that the Times thereby flattered the American president.
* Alexander acknowledges the Hungarian American economist Karl Polanyi as the originator of the concept of social dislocation, in the latter’s 1944 work, The Great Transformation.
* As in their much-lauded 2020 book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
* Ironically, this pre-COVID-19 article, in its online version, was titled “How Social Isolation Is Killing Us.”
* Professor emeritus, University of British Columbia, and a world-renowned expert on psychopathy.
* As Dr. Lustig documents in his book The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains.
* The critically acclaimed cable TV series about the mid-twentieth-century advertising business.
* Or, as the case may be, other addictive substances such as caffeine: for example, the dopamine-boosting drink Red Bull, which, if advertising were honest, would add a qualifier to its label, billing itself as a “non-renewable energy drink.”
* Social character was the topic of chapter 14.
* In a desperate and probably futile attempt to reduce high obesity and diabetes rates, the Mexican state of Oaxaca has banned the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to children.
* This settlement has since been overturned on appeal and, as this book goes to edits, the court saga continues. More on the Sacklers in chapter 33.
* See chapter 13.
* Reisner hosts Madness: The Podcast, an engaging look at “where psychology and capitalism collide.”
* Until his untimely death at age fifty-nine, Dr. Hertzman was professor of the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia and Canada research chair in population health and human development. He was internationally renowned for his explorations of the social determinants of health.
* Vimalasara’s preferred pronouns are “they/them.” The racial pejoratives are cited above with their express permission.
