Here’s one of my pet peeves. This survey was linked from BoingBoing with the explanation that cilantro-haters have a genetic mutation that causes them to perceive the taste differently. The linked article claims, without a reference, that there is a study in identical twins showing that cilantro-hate is genetic. But the study being reported proved no such thing. It only showed that preference for or against cilantro varied by culture, which is no surprise as cilantro is an herb that has been used heavily in some cultural cuisines and not in others.

The study authors called cilantro “the most polarizing” food. I disagree that it’s polarizing. Actually, I think online cilantro-haters are a bunch of whiny assholes. Lots of people have foods they hate, and they can and do hate them passionately. Some people can’t bear the taste of onion. Some people hate the flavor of all vegetables. Some people hate coffee. Etc. Etc.

People who hate cilantro, however, are the only group that seems to think it is somehow special.

Now, it is remotely possible that there’s some chemical in cilantro that can be perceived by some people and not others, but I doubt it’s the case. People who hate cilantro say it tastes like soap or dirt, and I agree. Cilantro does taste like soap – enchantingly delicious soap. There’s is also an earthy, “dirty” taste to it. I like that, as well.

Nothing in the strength of people’s dislike for cilantro, or in the nature of their descriptions, suggests this is any different from not liking onions or garlic or coffee. Different strokes for different folks.

When we are babies, we come programmed for one basic taste: mother’s milk. As our parents introduce new foods to us, we mostly don’t like them at first. Check out a baby trying a new food for the first time. It invariably comes right back out with a highly amusing “ick” face. (Yes, I know that some babies like trying new foods.) Over time, as we’re exposed to foods again and again, the taste is gradually less off-putting until our brains finally figure out it is food and has nutrition in it. Then it crosses over from being something yucky to something delicious.

A lot of people don’t understand the process of developing a taste for a new food, and think if they hate it the first time they try it, they will always hate it. It’s just not true. This is why it’s best not to push vegetables onto little kids. It truly will make them gag and throw up if they go from zero to broccoli in one meal. But if they see it, see their parents eating it, and try it a time or two or fifteen, their brain will eventually stop objecting to the flavor.

I think most of this cilantro hate is just unfamiliarity. I can’t comment on the twin study, but I will note that separating identical twins in adoption went out of style in the 1950′s, so it’s unlikely that the twins in the study grew up in different homes, unless they are about 70. Twins probably tend to share preferences about cilantro, because, duh, same house same family.

None of this is to say that cilantro-haters, or haters of any other particular food, need to get over it. Far from it. We all have a right to our preferences. I don’t like capers! I never understood why those icky little sour things so frequently show up to spoil a perfectly nice sauce or whatever.

I just think people need to get over thinking they’re special if they don’t like cilantro. In fact, since cilantro comes from cuisines of Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, and is gaining popularity rapidly in the U.S., the exceedingly vocal resistance to it strikes me as a little bit racist.

I grew up before the internet. I know, it existed. But it wasn’t a reality for me or most other people. We also had no cell phones, which resulted in a pretty much perpetual farce of missed connections and misunderstandings that we mostly don’t worry about anymore. It was a different time.

One thing we used to do a lot of, back in the 80′s, was writing in regular paper journals. Not blogs. Just paper. Private, handwritten journals are great for all of the things that blogs are not great at. You can write about your actual problems, you can keep your to-do lists, you can dabble in poetry, you can doodle. There are many things worth writing about that could not and should not be shared on the internet. I also find that writing by hand feels like a different activity, and activates a different part of my writing brain.

Lately, I’ve been keeping two journals. In one, at the end of the day, I write down what I’ve done. I started doing this because I was having a lot of days that seemed to get sucked into a vortex, and I would wonder where the time went and feel bad that I had not gotten more done. So now, when I get things done, I celebrate by noting it in my journal. If I cleaned the bathroom, I take credit for it. If I scoop the litterboxes, score! It just makes me feel better. I also try to note something about the day, particularly positive things. It’s just nice. I also write down all of those really cool story ideas that come to me when Writer Brain gets stuck on the novel and doesn’t want to do it anymore. Putting them some place I can find them again is a good compromise with the Writer Brain. I don’t journal in it every single day. I seem to go in spates.

My other journal is a moleskine where I keep writing related notes and doodles. Since reading Steal Like an Artist, I’ve been stealing a little something every day. Every day has something I can save and use later. One day, I wrote out the lyrics to a pop song. Another day, I copied out a descriptive scene from a book I was reading that worked well for me, and wrote some notes on why I liked it. Yet another day, I took plot notes from a book I was reading that I thought I could adapt for a different project, later. I expect I will also find opportunities to steal from life. People-watching at a cafe could give me some good character sketches (particularly in Ann Arbor!). I sometimes overhear conversations that are funny or suprising. Memories, too, can be “stolen” for use in stories. In short, there’s really no excuse not to engage in some kind of creative larceny each and every day in order to build up a dragon’s hoard of material for possible later use.

At the top of each page, I write in large capital letters what it is I’m stealing. DESCRIPTION. CHARACTER. FIGHT SCENE. And so forth. That will help me find my stolen treasure later when I might need it. Obviously, I don’t intend to copy the stolen property directly. But it’s very helpful to have something similar to look at when you’re writing a challenging bit of story. If I can flip through my notebook and review a couple of fight scenes, I can use them to decide how to block out my own fight scene, and remember what works for me and what doesn’t.

I think a lot of writers do this consciously or unconsciously with their memory. My memory doesn’t work that way. I’ve never known if it’s a bug or a feature, but when I read a book or watch a movie, the details go away as soon as it’s over. Very often, upon rewatch, I can’t remember how the story ends. On the one hand, it lets me enjoy my favorites over and over again. On the other hand, I am at a handicap compared to other writers who have easily memorized the stories, scenes, and much of the dialogue from their favorite stuff, and when they write a fight scene, they can easily call up examples. I can’t do it. Instead, most of what I write is reinventing the wheel. No wonder I’m so slow.

This notebook feels like something I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I only wish I’d thought of it sooner.

Considering the fact that I ALSO blog, AND keep a record of all of my food and exercise in my cell phone, my life is extremely well documented. Future Historians, you’re welcome!

I sent a query to info@fitocracy.com to complain about the existence of a Whites Only social group on their site, and to ask them to delete my account, since I was not interested in continuing to be a member, and there’s no way to delete your own account, there.

Here is the response I received on May 15:

From: richard
Subject: whites only?

Hi Catherine,

Sorry to see you go. I’ve marked your account for deletion and an admin will take care of it ASAP.

Best,
Dick

I sent the following reply immediately:

What about the Whites Only group? I’ve blogged about this with some screen caps of the offending material, and my readers are curious what Fitocracy’s response will be? Will you allow Fitocracy to be a gathering place for white supremicists?

 

Catherine Shaffer

As of today, I’ve received no reply to that second query from Fitocracy. They deleted my account quite swiftly and are done with me, and apparently have no intention of addressing this concern. It’s disappointing because, as a number of people have pointed out, Fitocracy is a place where you can track workouts socially without becoming drawn into a weight loss program, and for some people it’s been a really great tool. It’s really too bad that they’ve decided not to make the minimal required effort to remove egregiously offensive material from their servers.

I have two writing epiphanies to share, one on process and one on craft.

Craft first: I read Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon, and felt very enlightened and inspired. It’s a quick read, only about 45 pages, and I thought it was well worth the $9.99 download to my ereader. I will probably read it again from time to time in the future when I’m getting discouraged.

Steal Like an Artist brings together a set of ideas that I’ve been working on for a while, but had not expressed coherently before, not even to myself. Kleon’s basic message is to embrace your influences. That art is made by building on other art, and that your best work will be done by consciously copying other artists.

I’m not sure where or how it happens, but most of us who are destined for a career as writers have at one time or another internalized the idea that our work is worthless if it is even vaguely derivitive of another writer’s work, much less a conscious copy.

Ironically, it’s been in my nonfiction work that I’ve broken through that barrier. As a nonfiction writer, everything I do is heavily sourced and derivitive. It has to be. I can’t just come up with a bunch of facts and ideas and not say where they came from and how I got them. The entire value of a nonfiction piece is based on its sources and how skillfully they are knitted together by the writer.

And yet in fiction we somehow expect to come up with fully formed stories, even novels, that show no influence, no source.

With my last book, I decided that was bullshit, and I started consciously using ideas and techniques from other sources. I’ve kept track of those because they’re valuable to me, because I want to acknowledge them, and because I realize that no matter how slavishly I copy another writer’s work, I will inevitably come up with my own unique treatment.

I knew all of this, but before reading Steal Like An Artist, I would have been reluctant to admit all of it, because it still felt slightly sketchy. I’m pleased to have found something that both validates what I’m already doing, and is full of tips on how to do it better.

Moreover, I think it’s a very interesting alternate way of looking at the craft of writing. Just about every book on writing you can think of focuses on methods and ingredients–a sort of bottom-up approach that suggests that new works can be created using a generic recipe of plot, setting, structure, style, characterization, etc. Volumes have been written about what all of those actually are, and what the right and wrong way is to create them, but it’s a very bottom-up approach.

Stealing is top-down, and it’s not a way we often look at writing. In painting and sculpture, it is a centuries-old tradition to learn by copying the masters. I’m going to enjoy thinking about this more.

My second epiphany has to do with process and writing schedules. I’m at a point in revising my work in progress where there’s not a lot of momentum to carry me forward. I want to be done with it and start something shiny and new, and having to continue working on it is bumming me out.

Heretofore, my schedule has been to do fiction writing MWF mornings before 10 AM, when my dayjob starts. On TTh, I go to a morning yoga class. Then weekends are catch as catch can. It’s not bad, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. It’s much easier to stick to a schedule if you do the same thing every day. Switching out my morning routine every day was making every morning an act of willpower. I need to be on automatic.

So I started doing a new thing. My friend Jim Hines has definitively proved that you can write a lot of books within the confines of a regular work lunch hour. I’ve not used his schedule before for two reasons. One, I feel like morning is the ideal time for me to write. Two, in the past my freelance writing has made it tough to have a consistent lunch hour. What if I needed to interview someone and they were only available during the time I planned for lunch? Plus, for a long time I’ve also tried to fit some yoga/exercise in during lunch hour.

I finally decided to go full-on Jim Hines. Mornings will be for yoga and other exercise. And now that my work schedule is very consistent, it’s not that hard to carve out a regular lunch hour. It might only be 30 minutes some days, but that is plenty of time to get some fiction words written.

Today was my first day. I did the yoga at 8 AM. I worked from 10 to 12. At noon, I turned off my wifi and forced myself to work on the novel. I squelched approximately 97 impulses to surf the web or pursue other distractions. After about 20 minutes of fidgeting, I set to and got a good chunk of writing done.

When I turned my wifi back on, I had a new plan for the day. It didn’t discombobulate me nearly as much as it might have, because I already had my yoga and my daily fiction done. No need to rush and try to squeeze it in at the end of the day. I like it!

I joined Fitocracy just to check it out, since making workouts into fun social games is an intriguing idea. So far my opinion is that the site is difficult to use, nonintuitive, and somewhat broken, based on the fact that I’ve been trying to reload the same page for about five minutes, now. There also seems to be no way to permanently delete your profile, so beware.

However, that’s not what I’m hear to complain about. Fitocracy has groups you can join, like Facebook. There are groups for different sports, for weight loss, for just about anything you could think of. Oh…like…maybe…WHITE SUPREMACY?

Yep, check out.

I guess this group somehow scrolled past my attention at the exact time I was looking at groups yesterday, or something, because apparently not very many people know about it. On first glance, I was a bit shocked. I clicked through and saw the picture of the egg whites, and thought, for a second, that perhaps it was a body-building diet group, dedicated to eating lots of high protein, low fat foods like egg whites, and that the title was just an unfortunate mistake.

That charitable impulse lasted about five seconds, because nothing that reads “whites only” is an unfortunate mistake. The subtitle for the group “we don’t take kindly to yolks around here,” is frankly chilling.

Here’s a picture of the group leader’s profile.

Why, yes, that is a cute little doggie, WEARING A WHITE SHEET. I’ll note the group leader is only 18, which explains why he seems to think he can fool us by pretending the group has something to do with eggs.

Seeing this group made me very angry, and put me off Fitocracy much more forcefully than my initial difficulties understanding and navigating the site. I filed a complaint immediately, using their help email, info@fitocracy.com. No response thus far, but it’s only been a day.

If you have thoughts to share with them about their hosting of white supremicist bullshit, feel free. I’m all for sharing thoughts. I would caution against joining for the purpose of engaging on this, because I haven’t figured out yet how to delete my profile, and I would hate to see Fitocracy’s user numbers increase because of this.

[Update: Fitocracy responded to my complaint by deleting my account, as requested, with no answer or comment on the Whites Only group. Here's a link to a full update.]

There’s so much for me to be doing and talking about on the internet. But…I’ve been happily distracted by life and family stuff, so am not caught up on responding to comments and such. Last week we took Glen out and bought him a bike. He’d outgrown last year’s bike by a ridiculous margin. I looked at the old bike the other day and wondered how he’d EVER ridden it.

The new bike is quite nice, and it’s a fully adult-sized bike ridden by a full adult-sized person. Looking at all of the bikes in bike shops and sporting goods stores last week, I remembered that you can do other things on weekends than chores, errands, and school/church events. You can go outside! I decided that we should take the bike out and put it through its paces.

Having grown so much since last summer’s bike riding, Glen was a bit unstable on his new, bigger bike, with his new, heavier body, so I suggested we go bicycling at Hudson Mills Metropark, which has miles of bike trails with no car traffic.

It took us over an hour to get out of the house with our bikes, because we found that our three bikes wouldn’t fit on our small, three-bike car carrier. Brent has a recumbant, and two adult-sized bikes plus a recumbant just don’t fit on it. Brent had to go fetch our bigger, tailgate-mounted bike carrier for the Suburban from our storage locker.

Since we weren’t on any sort of schedule, we all stayed cool, finally got the bikes loaded up, and headed out to the park. It was after 4 when we got there, but once we got going, I was so glad. The weather was perfect, the trail very even and pleasant for humans who have been in winter storage and whose bike-riding muscles have atrophied (and who also may or may not be close to four decades old).

We rode all of the trails, clocking about eight miles altogether. We made friends with a bullmastiff and we saw a person riding a bike with two live cockatoos. For real! One on the handlebars, one on the shoulder. Glen said he thought there was a third riding behind the seat.

We were all ready to ride some more, but hunger drove us homeward. I’m excited to do more biking as a family. When you have a small child, the child is so inconvenient. Everything you do as a family is like 10 times harder than it would be just to do it yourself. And even if you’re fully prepared -you have brought snacks, drinks, spare diapers, sunscreen, sippy cups, sun hats, first aid supplies – there is always something you forgot that makes the whole thing that much more of a struggle. Plus, constant interruptions of the activity for bathroom trips or other crises of child life and the inevitable tired/hungry child meltdown signaling that the activity is over and you have, in fact, pushed too hard, missed afternoon nap, and will pay for your fun time in equal increments of lost sleep later.

In comparison, doing things with a teen is a breeze. Teen boys are like the opposite of small children. They love to run off without coat or sunscreen or snack or beverage, and will not care or complain that things aren’t perfect. (TEEN HULK NOT COLD. TEEN HULK NO NEED JACKET. TEEN HULK ALWAYS HUNGRY SO WHAT. TEEN HULK EAT OLD PRETZELS ON FLOOR OF CAR. GOOD NOW.) Teens will help you pack and unpack, load and unload. They’ll help plan. They’ll remember things you forgot. And when you get wherever you’re going, you can send them off on their own. And if family fun time disrupts their schedule, more the better. Teens hate being kept on a regular schedule, anyway.

It’s kind of a strange, new era for us. Dim memories of life Before Child are reawakening, hearkening to a time where we had an active life and it was not necessary to hire a babysitter or pack as for an arctic expedition in order to enjoy the outdoors. It was a good day.

I’ve seen Marvel’s The Avengers twice this week. It’s quickly become one of my favorite movies, ever. In watching it the first time, it bypassed the critical parts of my brain and simply entertained me. I also had one of the best possible action movie watching companions, a 13 year old boy. Very helpful for when you need to turn to someone and say, “That was AWESOME!”

This is all I can say without spoiling the movie. I am normally not big on being perfectly unspoiled for movies, because my enjoyment usually doesn’t depend on not knowing what’s going to happen. However, there are a lot of great moments in the movie that depend on surprise to hit you just right, and I want everyone to enjoy that, if they can. There were bits of dialogue I heard before I saw the movie, and even that little bit took a bit of the punch out of the actual scene when it came. So if you haven’t seen it: STOP. Go see the movie. Come back. I promise I’ll leave this post up.

This is probably the first time ever that I was tempted to sit in the theater and watch a whole movie immediately a second time. Ultimately, I couldn’t because I had life, a kid to take home, etc. I did return the next day, however, because I really wanted to analyze why the movie was so successful. It’s very easy to pick out flaws in a movie or book. It’s more difficult to identify what makes it a success.

Unfortunately, seeing it the second time still nearly overwhelmed the critical circuitry of my brain, but after a couple days’ mellowing, I am able to analyze some of the features of the film that made it such a success.

1. Excellent use of screen time to show maximum character without slowing the movie down. For example, the first time we meet “Hawkeye” Clint Barton, he is sitting up on a catwalk watching a developing crisis. When Nick Fury asks him why, he says that he can see better from a distance. That, plus the tone, body language, and attitude of the actor tells us pretty much everything we need to know about Hawkeye for the whole film. All of the main characters have these moments of intense exposure that illuminate character without slowing the film down. (One negative for me was that we got these insightful flashes on XO Maria Hill early in the film, falsely leading to an impression that she was going to be a main character.)

2. Powerful story arcs. The Avengers was able to take advantage of character development in at least six prior films: Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and two Incredible Hulk films. (I haven’t seen the hulk films. My understanding is that they were made with a different actor and are not necessarily meant as a part of the series. Ruffalo’s Banner references “breaking Harlem.” Was that from one of the films?) Because the characters are all established with their respective problems, strengths, and flaws, Whedon was able to build on what was already there, instead of creating all of those characters from the ground up.

Tony Stark and Bruce Banner were the central changing characters, and each of them had a compelling challenge. Banner’s challenge was to overcome his fear of being “out of control” in order to harness the power of his pretty much invincible alter ego. The film builds tension as we see people around Banner showing quite a bit of fear, while at the same time we don’t see the Hulk until about half way through. Tony Starks character change involves his self-centeredness. This is shown by a) his disinterest in responding to an urgent call from Shield at the beginning and b) his conflicts with Captain America, who calls him out on it.

Each then has a “big moment” where he confronts that character obstacle and overcomes it. Other characters have similar challenges, and scenes that showcase them overcoming those. Each character’s story is well-thought-out, and the important moments are showcased.

3. Characters interact with and react to each other. The movie isn’t long enough to truly show how self-centered Tony is, or how scared Bruce is, or how confused and lost-in-time Steve is, etc. etc. But a very valid shortcut is to have them tell each other. Steve TELLS Tony that he’s self-centered and immature. We don’t get to SEE much of that on screen. There’s no time. Instead, we get a few lines of dialogue, a few mini-scenes of Tony being egotistical and self-centered, and then Steve confronts him about it, and they talk about it while having some awesome fight scenes with each other. In the end, I don’t believe in Tony’s self-centeredness because I’ve seen it so much as I believe it because Steve has said it with such conviction. If the narrator broke in and explained how self-centered Tony was, it wouldn’t work. But when characters tell it to each other, it works. This is something I was already thinking about in context of my own work in progress, so I was either primed to pick it out of the next movie I saw, or this was a lucky coincidence.

4. Bruce Banner’s big reveal. There are so many great dialogue and action moments in the film. But when Bruce Banner says, “That’s the secret, I’m always angry,” and instantly transforms into a focused and relatively controlled Hulk, it was breathtaking to me. It took me days to figure out why.

I finally concluded that it’s because it speaks to a greater truth about anger and control. Banner is asked probably at least THREE TIMES what his secret is, how he keeps control. Is it yoga? Is it meditation? Is it a low-stress lifestyle? In the end, the answer is that he controls his anger by accepting it. Banner’s confession is meaningful to everyone, because we all have ugly stuff inside. We all have anger and resentment and hurt feelings and hateful thoughts. And if you’ve lived past the age of 20 or so, you’ve probably learned that trying to deny or suppress those thoughts and emotions is fruitless. They keep coming back up. Ultimately, the hulk represents that to each and every one of us, and Banner shows us that we can all control the monster inside of us through acceptance rather than denial. Loki tries to create chaos by unleashing the hulk, unleashing Banner’s anger. In the end, though, he is defeated by that anger that Banner successfully directs back at Loki.

[The repetition, by the way, was also very effective. The characters asked Banner often enough what the secret to his control was that it made the audience curious. If the film had simply shown us Bruce Banner being calm and going about his business, we wouldn't have known to wonder. There had to be voices asking that question for it to have an impact later when we learn what's going on.]

One failing of the film, unfortunately, comes with Natasha/Black Widow. She’s introduced in Iron Man 2 as a sort of supercompetent ninja assassin spy. As she becomes part of the Avengers team, though, she needs something to distinguish her. She doesn’t have literal superpowers, but she needed a specific talent to match Hawkeye’s archery, Thor’s hammer, Cap’s shield, etc. Whedon made the unfortunate choice to give Natasha the superpower of Feminine Wiles. Jim C. Hines blogged here about the off-note that comes from scenes where people then confront those wiles. The first time, Banner deliberately frightens her to see how she’ll react. Later, Loki launches a vicious gendered attack against her.

Both of those scenes are somewhat defensible in the context of the movie, and certainly Natasha overall is a very strong female character. She turns other characters’ assumptions of her weakness against them, and so makes a strength out of it. To me, the problem is not so much in the specific scenes as in the fact that Whedon and the other creators defaulted to making Natasha “the girl” on the team, rather than giving her a gender-independent talent and identity. No matter how strong you make the character after that, you can’t undo her being “the girl.”

Natasha is also the only character that, upon second viewing, made LESS sense to me. I ultimately wasn’t sure what she meant by “I have red in my ledger,” when she says it to Hawkeye. I suspect that having her identity too closely tied to her gender made it then difficult to construct a functioning character arc for her.

What have I learned from this? Many good things. As always, watching a Whedon product reminds me to polish my dialogue. In interviews, I’ve heard Whedon talk about going over and over the dialogue to punch it up. In my own work (when I remember), I make a revision pass for dialogue with a specific eye to efficiency, character, and wit. Is there some more clever way that the conversation could have gone down (that is in character for the speaker)? Then do it.

[Having reread this, I feel it needs to be emphasized that simply trying to mimic Whedon's dialogue style would probably be a bad idea. Even Whedon himself can overdo the Whedon. What I mean here is that I polish the dialogue with an eye to my own style and my own brand of wit, which is not terribly dissimilar to Whedon's, and yet it is still very much me, and not him. Finding role models that have similar style qualities to your own is a great way to find and sharpen your own voice, but you can't always have the role model you want. I get to have Whedon. I don't get to have Jane Austen. If you're a Jane Austen type, then you should be looking at her dialogue, figure out how she makes it work, and use that in your own stuff.]

As well, this film teaches me to think about all possible relationships and interactions among characters. One exercise I’d like to do next writing session is draw my main characters’ names in a big circle and draw some lines between them to see if I know how the two characters feel about each other, and whether there is something between them that can support the forward movement of the story.

In addition, I’ll be looking at my characters’ strengths and weaknesses, making sure that characters are a) talking to each other about their traits and b) reacting appropriately. Is a character dangerous? Then the people around him/her should be nervous. Is a character a narcissist? Then other characters should be falling under his spell or rolling their eyes.

I’d like to mimic some of the initial introductions I’ve seen in this movie, too. Hawkeye is first seen sitting in his hawk’s nest. Banner is rushing to help a child with a sick father. Natasha at first seems a victim and is then shown totally in control. Captain America is whacking and stacking punching bags, says he doesn’t need sleep because he’s slept for 70 years. Thor lands on top of an aircraft in flight, breaks in, and abducts a prisoner without saying a word. Etc. Etc. All extremely revealing. All much better than my habitual method of introducing a character, which is to have them magically appear out of thin air and do something that anyone could do in a way that anyone could do it. “Mr. Smith is a barkeeper. He polishes the glasses and pours a whiskey.” Bleh.

In the wake of the very tragic loss of her friend to an act of violence by a mentally ill person, Cassie Alexander makes a very powerful point about mental illness and society’s attitudes towards it. She writes:

This is also why mentally ill people are not magic. Same thing for homeless people. If your book has one of these characters in it, where somehow being unfit for society = fairy dust, I will put it down. Or throw it across the room, with violence, and tell everyone I know that it sucks.

 

I couldn’t agree more. As the child of a person with schizophrenia, I’ve struggled with people’s romanticization and minimization of mental illness my whole life. TV and movies invariably portray the mentally ill as “magical” or more awake to reality or as having special insight.

Fucking hell. Having something wrong with your brain doesn’t give you magical powers or special insight. It makes you miserable and it makes the people around you suffer, too. And, in a minority of cases, it leads to violence. THERE IS NOTHING GOOD ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS. Not one thing. This is one reason I haven’t seen The Soloist. It may or may not be a good movie, but the premise seems to much like the stereotypical romanticized mentally ill person for my comfort. It’s about a homeless man with schizophrenia who also happens to be a brilliant violinist.

I waited a long time to see A Beautiful Mind, and there was a lot to like about it. But, still, the screenwriters had to make some very dishonest changes in Nash’s true life story to make the story seem appealing and “real” to us, to shield the audience from the very real destruction of that “beautiful mind.”

In real life, Nash’s marriage doesn’t survive his illness. In the movie, his wife sticks by his side. Do you know how hurtful it is to see imaginary movie people having satisfying relationships with their mentally ill family members, when in real life we have to endure being hurt over and over and over again in the same way in order to have something resembling a relationship?

We have a huge problem with mental illness in this country. I have been told that at some point in the past, perhaps the 70′s, there was a movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. It was believed that isolating and confining them was dehumanizing, and that may be true. A new system was created whereby the mentally ill were supposed to be cared for in community settings. Then local and state governments systematically stole funding from that new system until it became nothing more than a skeleton of an idea.

Our new system for taking care of mentally ill people is shoving them on their traumatized and overburdened families or putting them out on the street. Most of them quietly die from preventable diseases, drink themselves to death, or kill themselves. But some of them, a small, but significant minority, are violent, and they kill people.

It’s like we’re loosing grizzly bears to wander the streets, and no one can see it. It takes six months to stabilize a psychotic person on antipsychotic medication. It’s not perfect, but for most people with schizophrenia, it can make the difference between having a person wandering around locked in their delusions, and having them minimally participating in society and able to interact and communicate with others.

But six months. It takes six months. Do you know how much time an actively psychotic, suicidal individual spends as an inpatient in a psychiatric ward following an attempt at suicide or attacking a person? A day or two. Three if they’re lucky. Then they’re streeted right back into the situation that sent them to the emergency room. And if you haven’t tried to kill yourself or someone else, you’re likely to be given a referral to a psychiatrist, with an appointment in two weeks or so, and sent right back home.

Grizzly bears. Roaming the streets. And we can’t see them.

Every time there’s a high profile mass murder, I wait – and it doesn’t take long – for the reporters to unearth the shooter’s history of mental illness, and how the system failed to help that individual. And yet people only want to talk about gun laws or politics. Even though most of those incidents are perpetrated by mentally ill people, I’ve never seen it spawn a discussion of how we can identify and help those individuals before they get to that point. The most I see are angry denials that the shooter should “get away” with “an insanity defense.”

No, mentally ill people are not magical. They’re sick, and it’s not their fault. During her psychotic episodes, I heard my mother say terrible things about how she didn’t want to live. Then, after we got her help, she would tell me how scared she was. Scared that we wouldn’t stop her. Scared that the things she felt compelled to say and do were true. We were able to get help for her. But thousands of people are not getting help. They are sleeping outside. They have no one to intervene and say, “Oh, hell, no, you are not living like this,” and to get them the medicine that will quiet the demons. They have to live with the terror, every day. And sometimes, when they try to fight the demons on their own, innocent people get hurt.

JUST GOT BACK FROM AVENGERS PANTSWETTINGLY AWESOME GO SEE IT TONIGHT CATCH THE LATE SHOW CALL IN SICK TOMORROW BRING YOUR KIDS BUT ONLY IF THEY ARE MATURE ENOUGH FOR REALLY OUTSTANDING VIOLENCE.

I kind of feel like Joss Whedon should kill himself now to protect the integrity of his legacy.

I have a background in science (biochemistry), have worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and am currently reporting on the industry full time. At the same time, I live in a very liberal college town where hippy lifestyles and alternative medicine are very popular. That means I am quite frequently doing a conversational tango of tact around people’s various strongly held beliefs about health and healing. Many people I know are scientists or doctors, or strongly align with science and conventional medicine. Many others have been let down by conventional medicine and are distrustful of science and of the motives of the health care and pharmaceutical industries, and have embraced alternative medicine theories like homeopathy, traditional chinese medicine, yoga, and more.

Quite often, directly or indirectly, people seek my opinion on these issues. It can be difficult for me because I have mixed feelings. I recognize that medicine and science have real limits, and that the practice of medicine is just as fallible as the human being in the white coat. Medical science can’t fix everything that’s wrong with you, and sometimes it will make things worse.

At the same time, I don’t agree that the pharma industry is an evil industrial complex pushing poisons on us purely for profit. I’ve been inside it too much to buy into that. It’s true that the pharmaceutical industry is huge and very influential in medicine. In fact, I have often noted that it seems like doctors view patients as buckets of water into which they dump medicines until they get what they think is the right balance of chemicals.

There’s a good reason for that. It’s because historically many of our biggest medical breakthroughs have come in the form of medicines–generally small organic compounds that can be taken orally or injected, diffuse through the entire body, fix whatever is broken, and are metabolized relatively harmlessly out.

Drugs have been revolutionary for many diseases, and patients like the idea of them so much (“take a pill and you’re cured”) that much of the practice of medicine seems reduced to handing patients a wad of prescriptions and hoping or assuming that they’ll be better in time. Sometimes the doctor even has samples provided by pharma companies to give to patients directly.

I believe there are many reasonable alternative therapies completely overlooked by science because of the pill/bucket paradigm, and in that sense I harbor a healthy skepticism of the pharma industry.

In addition, there are some business practices and scandals that are inarguably evil. For example, the pharma industry is often penalized for “off-label marketing” of drugs. That means marketing drugs to patients for indications for which the FDA has not approved them. It is completely legal for doctors to prescribe medications off-label, and there are many excellent off-label uses for drugs. But that is a decision for a trained medical professional to make.

Marketing off-label drugs directly to patients, and then having them come into a doctor’s office pressuring the doctor to prescribe it, is a situation the FDA frowns on. Drug companies have been punished with huge fines, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, but it hasn’t stopped the practice of off-label marketing, and probably never will. It seems pharma companies have come to view those fines not as a disincentive, but as a business expense, along with the lawyer’s fees that go with them. Unless the government comes up with a fine that hits the pharma companies on the bottom line, it’s likely they will continue to push the envelope of off-label marketing.

That’s kind of evil. And I could go on at length about ways in which for-profit pharma business conflicts with patient health.

At the same time, the pharma and biotech industry depends on a commitment to fighting and curing terrible diseases. Yesterday I wrote an article for BioWorld Today about a new drug combo for cystic fibrosis. Exceeding all expectations, in a Phase II trial, the drugs, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, showed a big benefit for a group of cystic fibrosis patients with two copies a mutation called f508del. That accounts for about half of all cystic fibrosis patients. It’s a huge breakthrough, and it’s thrilling for me as a writer to have a front-row seat when these things happen.

While my mother was in the ICU, one of the other rooms was occupied by a man with cystic fibrosis. We struck up an acquaintance with the family, and learned that he was 40 years old, and that he’d had a sister who died of the disease at the age of 16. At 40, he has already survived longer than almost everyone with the disease. Seeing him fighting for his life in the ICU was incredibly moving. ICUs are moving toward as much physical therapy as possible, to the tolerance of the patient. Each day they got this intubated and ventilated patient out of bed, and with a parade of therapists, nurses, and aids holding all of the bags, tubes, and equipment that was keeping him alive, he went for a walk with his ventilator clicking and whooshing as it pushed air into his diseased lungs the whole way.

I prayed like crazy for him. No one should have to live with such a terrible disease. No family should have to lose two children. No one as young as forty should be spending that much time in respiratory ICU.

He had a tough battle, but each day he seemed stronger. Eventually, the tubes came out, and he disappeared from the floor. I hope and believe that he is somewhere, safe and alive. I hope and believe that he is a candidate for Vertex’s new drug combo, and that he can hold out until it’s ready.

There’s no effective homeopathic treatment for cystic fibrosis. There’s no effective traditional chinese medicine for it. Yoga may alleviate some of the symptoms, but it’s not a cure, either. Nature can be harsh. The natural remedy for cystic fibrosis is death. We want to do better than that.

The pharmaceutical industry is the army we have for fighting diseases like cystic fibrosis. Medical science is the only hope when nature turns against us, when nature wants to kill us and get us out of its gene pool, and that’s not evil. That’s a profound good.

And, in fact, in my interactions with the industry, and the scientists and business people who run it, true believers seem to outnumber profit-mongers. That’s probably because the industry is so inherently risky. If you just want to make money, go invest in a tech startup or trade commodities or something. The pharma industry is for people who want to change the world, and possibly make some money at the same time.

I know many people are upset at the profit motive, but that is an unchanging fact of the world we live in. It costs roughly $600 million to invent and develop a new drug to the point of marketing. Those costs have to be covered by drug revenues, and for pre-revenue companies, investors have to front hundreds of millions of dollars before they see a return. The government does offer some research grants and support, but these are barely adequate to get a small company through some early animal studies. In order to have a totally non-profit drug industry, we would have to have a completely different society. We would have to want to invest our tax dollars heavily in drug research and development, and the will is just not there.

In a weird kind of way, the government does provide much of the funding, because Medicare and Medicaid pay a huge chunk of the costs of new drugs on the market for patients. That’s probably a blog post for another day.

So what does all of this mean? Can you trust your doctor and the pharma industry to take care of you?

My take on it is this. The sicker you are, the more you need to trust in science, because, honestly, that’s your best shot. If reasonable natural healing alternatives are available, yes, definitely try them. But do it with the knowledge and blessing of your doctor. If your doctor says, “No, that’s too risky, you need to be on this treatment now to save your life,” then believe her. If your doctor sends you home with a prescription, and you choose not to take it, then let her know. You have already paid her for her very best advice, so give her a chance to counsel you on your decision. The investment in a medical education and advanced training is non-trivial, and can’t be replaced by unsourced information you find on the internet.

Natural healing will not save you from everything. Nature gave you an amazing immune system and the ability to heal from a huge number of injuries and illnesses. Your body’s healing capacity is awesome. But Nature does not have your back. In the event that your body can’t heal or repair itself, Nature’s Plan B is other people. Yeah, sucks, don’t it? So give medical science a chance.

I also caution people to be a little extra careful of new drugs. They are tested as thoroughly as possible before market, but the first year or so is sort of a final test. If you can safely do so, maybe wait to try it until several hundred thousand other suckers have tried it. If it passes that first year, you can feel more confident that the drug is truly safe.

This doesn’t apply, of course, to lifesaving drugs for dangerous diseases. If this is your best and only shot, and it’s a new drug, and your doctor thinks it could help you, then go for it. Again, because Nature’s cure for cancer and other serious disease is to breed more people. It works well on a population level, such as it is, but Plan B is not that helpful for you.