“They give unique insight into mental illness. These are very gifted people. They have very fine minds; they have thought about mental illness seriously. These are people who can write very intelligently. You can study case studies until they’re coming out of your ears, but if you read these poems you gain real insight into the human condition.”

Mental illness meets creativity in new journal of literary arts

By Laurie Davis
News Office

A MIND THAT POSSESSES GREAT ARTISTIC ability often suffers from great mental anguish, as well. This was a finding in a study of well-known visual and literary artists, and it was a result that Robert Lundin applied to contemporary artists who have lived with mental illness.

Lundin, Publications Manager for the University’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, was inspired by the research and subsequent book by Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University. In her book, Touched with Fire, Manic-depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Jamison analyzed the mental suffering of such historic artists, composers, poets and authors as Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Virginia Woolf.

Read the rest of it here:

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020307/awakenings.shtml

"People with mental illnesses enrich our lives":

http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Helpline1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4858

Posted by: Vinia Datinguinoo | September 21, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Filed under: Health Issues, PCIJ Podcasts

FIVE in every 100 Filipinos are suffering from some form of depression, say mental health experts. Of them, a huge number have what doctors call “bipolar disorder” or “manic-depressive illness” — swinging from depression to euphoria, unable to function normally, and in real danger of hurting themselves and others.

Sadly, experts say, many of those with bipolar illness are left undiagnosed and, consequently, untreated. Equally unfortunate, we refuse to talk about the disease; the stigma persists. But the illness can be managed and a bipolar person can still lead a normal, productive life — especially if diagnosed early.

In this podcast, a daughter speaks about her mother, whose life, she says, has been diminished by the cruelty of her bipolar disorder.

Language: English and Filipino

Part 1. Ruby recalls scenes from her childhood, as her mother’s manic-depressive illness begins to cause feelings of hurt and betrayal among her children. “It’s like seeing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Length: 00:27:20
File size: 18.8MB

Part 2. While the illness does not go away, Ruby says, the symptoms get less intense. Here she also talks about her father, the one, she says, who is most consistently loving and kind to her mother.
Length: 00:29:01
File size: 19.9MB

Part 3. Ruby says there is a need to understand not just the illness, and the patient — but those who care for them, their families and loved ones — as they, too, suffer.
Length: 00:21:38
File size: 14.8MB

....................

http://www.pcij.org/blog/?p=1177

CONSIDER: Five in every 100 is 1 in every 20 -- five percent. that's a large number.

In honor of Mariannet Amper, I will be dedicating the next several posts to three dark topics I believe Pinoys should start talking about: depression, mental illness and poverty.

Let me start off with the article by GMANews.tv

The tragic life of Mariannet Amper, or why children commit suicide
11/10/2007 | 09:15 PM

By CLAIRE SY DELFIN

She would have completed her elementary school, but the 12-year-old girl grew so dejected that she hanged herself, and her dreams of finishing school died with her.

Mariannet Amper’s suicide last week in Davao City hogged headlines and sparked off protest rallies against the government.

Poverty has been blamed on her decision to end her life.

Under her pillow was a letter she wrote addressed to television program, “Wish Ko Lang," which grants viewers’ wishes. On it, Mariannet wished for a new pair of shoes, a bag, a bicycle and better-paying jobs for her parents.

She also left a diary, narrating her family’s difficulties surviving a life penniless in a little hut that has neither electricity nor running water.

She also wrote that she had not attended school for a month for lack of transportation fare.

“I suspect she did it because of our situation," her father Isabelo, a carpenter, told reporters in the vernacular.

But psychiatrists disputes that poverty cannot be the only factor to push someone, especially a child, to commit suicide.

“It is unfair to simply look at suicide in that angle (poverty)," said psychiatrist Dr. Ma. Luz Casimiro-Querubin. After all, many poor Filipinos do not resort to killing themselves despite their hopeless condition. And there have been cases of children born to well-to-do families who have committed or attempted suicide.

Suicide is not an instant decision, she said. It is borne out of a suicidal tendency that the child develops within himself.

Suicidal tendency, in turn, is a psychosocial and multi-factorial behavior that is developed through time when the child faces long-standing problems within himself and in his immediate environment.

Soon, the child would manifest episodes of depression, hopelessness and low self-esteem.

Although poverty is a risk factor, it can hardly stand-alone. It is the lack or absence of support system that compounds the child’s problem, leading her to lose hope and meaning in life, and eventually commit suicide.

“The fact that Mariannet has six more siblings in a family with very limited resources indicates that some of them, including her, may be marginalized," Casimiro-Querubin says.

Hence, even if she was born to a rich family, but was wanting of proper attention from significant people around her, she is prone to develop suicidal tendencies.

Lack of data

Experts, however, find it difficult to conduct research on suicide for any age group in the country because the Philippines has no central registry for recording suicide and suicidal attempts. Data gathering is even made more difficult by religious and social biases.

The latest data available is from the World Health Organization, which was released in 1993. It says that suicide rates per hundred thousand population in the Philippines are 2.5 for males and 1.7 for females.

Casimiro-Querubin agrees that suicide is rare in the Philippines, but warns that it is happening and is increasing especially with the rising incidence of parents going abroad for employment, leaving behind children with distorted support system.

“It has a high psychosocial cost to children," she said.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Agnes Bueno said that in her practice, the youngest in her files of patients who attempted suicide seriously is an eight-year-old boy.

A child below five years, she says, has no concept of death as permanent and meaningful. “Therefore, he is incapable of actualizing suicide although accident-proneness could be an equivalent in their age group," Bueno said.

She shares in her article entitled, “When a Child Wants to Die,’ published in Medical Observer magazine in April 2001 a background inventory of attempted suicide among her patients. Her inventory shows the following:

- Ten out of 10 belong to Class A economic status
- Nine out of 10 are Catholics
- Eight out of 10 are males
- Eight out of 10 are due to relationships (family and romance)
- Two out of 10 are due to clinical depression
- Two out of 10 are in an incestuous relationship with their fathers
- Ten out of 10 occurred in the home
- Ten out of 10 are students
- Five out of 10 are positive for family history of alcoholism
- Two out of 10 are positive for family history of suicide
- Three out of 10 have friends who also attempted suicide

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/68149/The-tragic-life-of-Mariannet-Amper-or-why-children-commit-suicide