Rosemary on my mind...

I'm in a quandary. I didn't sleep well last night. 

In the wake of Senator Edward Kennedy's death the other day, and all the news and documentary footage I've been watching about this storied family, I cannot help but think about only one particular Kennedy.

Rose Marie Kennedy. Rosemary. Rosie, to her family.

I will admit off the top, I do not know a great deal about the Kennedy family. I am no expert. But I loved the Kennedy dreams and hopes and, in the case of Teddy, all the good he did for the American people. Yes, those three "boys" – Jack, Bobby and Teddy – had their faults. They made mistakes. (Who hasn't?) They were exuberantly human. Brilliantly so. I don't know why that should be such an issue, when you consider the big picture and all they accomplished and the hope they embodied.

But their sister Rosemary's life was a tragedy that didn't have to happen. Today, it never would.

Rose Marie Kennedy, born on Friday, September 13, 1918 in Brookline, Massachusetts, was the third of the Kennedy children – the first daughter of Rose Fitzgerald and Joseph P. Kennedy.

I don't know for sure all that much about Rosemary because there are too many conflicting accounts of her life and too many questions that remain unanswered. 

Was she brain damaged at birth? Was she slightly mentally retarded? Was she simply not as brilliant and naturally athletic as her extraordinary siblings? Was she more high spirited and exuberant and moody than her brothers and sisters? Was she just a little too different for her controlling father to bear?

What is known for sure is that in 1941 on the recommendation of his doctors, Joseph P. Kennedy insisted that his 23-year-old daughter be given a pre-frontal lobotomy. At that time, Rosemary was the 65th American and according to some reports the only patient with a diagnosis of "mental retardation" to be subjected to this then-radical and experimental treatment.

It was a disaster. This beautiful young woman with a glorious smile who loved attending the opera and tea dances and writing in her diaries, following the surgery, became an incontinent, blubbering child-like soul who stared into space for hours. Her mother was devastated and considered this the first of the calamities that became known as "the Kennedy curse."

In 1949, Rosemary Kennedy was sent to the St. Colletta School for Exceptional Children where she remained for 56 years until her death at the age of 86 of natural causes on January 7, 2005. Her sister, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her brother Teddy Kennedy were at her bedside. In the Kennedy lore, Rosemary is considered the inspiration for the Special Olympics, which the Shrivers initiated and championed.

Two biographies of the Kennedys published in the mid-1990s have different accounts of young Rosemary Kennedy and what led to her lobotomy.

Laurence Leamer, considered an expert on the Kennedys, in his 1994 biography The Kennedy Women: A Saga of an American Family suggests that Rosemary was "mildly mentally retarded" – the most widely accepted story – and a potential problem expecially for her father who feared she may do something to disgrace the family. She may have been brain damaged at birth, but no one knows for sure. Apparently placid and easy going as a child, in her adolescence she developed "violent mood swings" and tended to sneak out of her convent dormitory in the middle of the night, according to Leamer.

On the other hand, conservative journalist and biographer Ronald Kessler in his 1996 biography The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, presents another picture. Rosemary, he suggests based on research he conducted, had a mental illness, depression perhaps. 

I don't know what to believe. 

All this petrifies me. Insisting that a 23-year-old woman have a pre-frontal lobotomy because she was considered "mildly mentally retarded" and might be a source of family embarrassment is abhorrent to me. I was sleepless last night. It all harkens back to my concerns about diagnostics and treatments. About what is considered "acceptable behaviour." To whom? 

Rosemary Kennedy never to my knowledge ever hurt a soul. Kessler suggests her story "is the biggest mental health cover-up story in history. Since the public story is still that Rosemary was retarded, the lack of support for mental illness is part of a total lifelong family denial of what was really so." 

Back in the 1940s, the mental illnesses were hugely feared. Enormously mythologized. Ignorance abounded. Along with hideous prejudice and discrimination. Secrecy. No one talked about mental illnesses or wrote about mental health in newspapers or magazines. No one knew anything, compared to what we are beginning to understand about the brain and the mind, today. Including psychiatrists.

Pre-frontal lobotomies were put out to pasture in the 1950s. Dr. Walter Freeman, known as "The Lobotomist" because he was running around the countryside performing thousands of these Draconian procedures, eventually lost his medical licence when one of his patients died.

Finally, pre-frontal and ice-pick lobotomies were replaced by the first antipsychotic medication Chlorpromazine – known as "the chemical lobotomy." That drug was given to me in the early 1960s when I was first hospitalized for mania with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. I remember very little of the experience. It hit me like a sledgehammer and turned me into a "zombie" – I slept for days, I'm told.

Pre-frontal lobotomies were used primarily in cases of schizophrenia back in the 1940s and 1950s. 

That's why the story of Rosemary Kennedy haunts me still. She was never diagnosed with schizophrenia. I'm sure she was well-treated in her Wisconsin institution and cared for with compassion.  

Still, she should never, ever have been given a lobotomy. Poor, dear girl. Now, she would have so many other options, I like to believe. 

I know this. She was born at the wrong time. And perhaps into the wrong family.

Speak soon.

All quiet on the August front...

I'm happy. I'm free. For the next 13 days minus one morning, I am not a part-time community college teacher. I am a blogger. Full-time. Your blogger!

If I have not commented or responded to your recent comments, please forgive me. I read them. I wanted to respond, but I was under a huge gun. Thank you for them, for caring and being so tuned in to me and to each other. That's what community is and we, I believe, are a community. I want us to be.

But now, today, as of 2:40 p.m. this afternoon, the Summer 2009 term at Seneca College is officially over and I am me again, entirely. Not a split personality, driving madly between my life with you, thinking about you, and concerned about you, and my students, and their concerns – trying desperately to get them through my course. If you want a thoughtful and very insightful sense of my life as a part-time community college teacher, read this from The New York Times. My niece, a newly-minted PhD who began teaching today at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh sent it to me and in turn, I've sent it to about 12 of my part-time colleagues, all of whom agree that it was the story of their lives.

Not now, though. 

Right now, I have NOOOOOOOOOOOO students. Yipppppeeeeeee!!!!!!!

So, I want to celebrate. Here I sit, with not a thought on my mind. Well, not quite. I have two deadlines that are niggling at me and I'm going to do something about those. That's a good thing.

You know, it's interesting, but since everyone takes August off, it seems, nothing much is happening in the mental health world. I subscribe to about 20 psychiatry, mental health and bipolar blogs and right now the biggest news story is that Prime Time on ABC is airing a show on Mad Pride in a few minutes – the old violence issue will be a focus. You'd think an outfit like ABC News could come up with something other than this tired stereotype. 

You know what they say. Good news is snooze news, so it's easier to go after a sensational angle that represents a tiny minority of cases than find the real story. When the media does the diagnosing, as often happens with a sensational crime, I wonder how accurate those diagnoses really are. Well, I'm not going to think about it right now. It's borrrrring. 

I'll watch it tomorrow.

Other than that, nothing much is happening in the blogosphere around mental health.

I guess when the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other psychotherapists go on vacation, "illness takes a holiday," too.

Helen Henderson's piece in this paper a few days ago about a British film called "Schizo, the horror story" was, as always, excellent. Have a look. The Brits are light years ahead of us in challenging mental health discrimination and working to end it. That's exactly what this new mini-movie, produced jointly by the British government and Time to Change, a leading mental health charity, is doing.

While the Mental Health of Commission of Canada is "Making the Case for Peer Support" with yet another cross-country, face-to-face consultation and focus group, we're still the only country in the G8 with no National Mental Health Care Strategy. They're still working on it. As if "peer support" is news. It's important. Very important, but I guess since it's August, nothing else is newsworthy. Please.

How many people are able to access Wellness Action Recovery Plan (WRAP) groups in this country? Or Pathways to Recovery? Does the MHCC even mention Mental Health Recovery on its website in any meaningful way?

But you know what? For the next few days, I don't care. I'm going to relax. Take care of business I've neglected. Doctor's appointments. Spend some time with my husband who doesn't recognize me these days. And my Dandies. Read anything that has nothing to do with what I'm going to be teaching in the fall. Go to a movie, if we can find one that appeals to us. And think about some intriguing material to share with you.

The Fall film line-up doesn't look all that promising, but I don't care. The Toronto International Film Festival is around the corner, and that's always intriguing to read about. Right now, though, this minute? I don't care about anything. I haven't a care in the world. Until September 8, when it's back to school.

On one sad but inevitable note. Senator Edward Kennedy has died. A voice for reason and compassion in health care, all health matters. Yes, especially mental health care. When you consider the madness that is exploding south of the border around securing  fair and equitable health care reform so all American people can receive the health care they need, Senator Edward's Kennedy's passing is a true loss and a great tragedy. His voice or reason will be missed.

Be well and speak soon!

Very soon!

Grading...

Right now, today, I'm living in a nightmare. My own personal trial by fire. It's an ordeal. A struggle. I agonize over it every time I am faced with it. It never gets any easier. I think it becomes more difficult. Maybe it's character-building. I don't know. But it's unquestionably one of the most challenging tasks I ever have to face. 

I'm grading my students. I genuinely like my students. As I grow to know them, more and more. My job is to help them succeed. I tell them that. Again and again. Grading them seems counterproductive to me.

I do not like assigning "final grades" to people. Period. Isn't that what a eulogy is for? Or an obituary? 

How can you put a final grade on a work in progress – a student. I can't pin them down with a final grade and I don't want to. What if I'm wrong? It's possible. I'm human.

My mostly young college students are very vulnerable. They take their marks terribly seriously. They do not yet have the life experience to realize that it's not the mark that really counts, but what they've learned. What they take away with them. What they can apply in their lives – at work, at play, in their personal relationships with the people they know and meet.

"You know, in 20 years you probably won't remember the mark you receive in this course," I always tell my new classes of students in an attempt to defuse their initial concerns about a new course and a new teacher. "But I bet you'll remember what you've learned." 

(I can attest to this. I have no idea what my transcript looked like when I graduated from Seneca in 1971, but I have full recall of what I learned. I can visualize my most outstanding professors and the important lessons they taught are still with me.)

My students look at me incredulously. They don't buy it.

Sadly, for too many of them, marks determine their future. And they're so arbitrary.

A single mark never seems entirely right. It never seems to say enough. It seems unfair.

Do we assign a letter or numerical grades to our sisters, brothers, parents, friends, colleagues, employers and acquaintances? 

"I have an A++++ boss. What about you?" 

"Oh, mine only rates a C+/B-. But she's improving. Maybe next term. We'll see."

Take our politicians. Voting is grading I suppose. Winning or losing is a mark of success or failure. But what does a winning number of votes say about an individual? Other than more people voted for him/her than the other person in the race? I'm a little naive when it comes to politics, I know. But I'm very nervous when I have to apply either a number or a letter grade to a human being. I can't help it.

I don't like competition. Never have. Not when it comes to human beings. (I'm not a sports-buff, so I'm not referring here to games people play. That's different. That can be character-building, depending on the sport. Boxing doesn't fly with me, though. I prefer team sports. But not violent ones. Or golf. Or tennis. I like baseball, too.)

Grading what students learn when they've just finished a course seems rather premature. They should be graded when they've been able to put what they've learned into practice in the real world. A year or two or three later. After they've graduated. And worked for a while. A job is the acid test. A profession.

It would be nice if students could receive a grade of "complete" or "incomplete." But that wouldn't help them in the big picture of their lives – if they want to continue with their education. The post-secondary education system simply doesn't work that way. Too bad. Ultimately grades are for administrators.

So I'm left with my trial by fire every term. I agonize over my eternal conundrum. Is it possible to appropriately and accurately grade or categorize or classify or place a value on a person you see only three hours a week for 14 weeks? Especially the students I teach. Often they're 17 years old and from other countries. International Students. This past term 99% of my Women in Canada students spoke English as a second language. Only one other person besides me in my classroom spoke English as a First Language.

Bear with me for a minute and imagine this. You're going to study at Peking Community College. It doesn't exist, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it does. 

You walk in on your first day and everything is printed in Chinese. Every sign. Everyone speaks Chinese. You are automatically enrolled in a 14-week term of "Chinese as a Second Language" and for 12-hours a week, that's all you do. Study Chinese. 

Then, Bingo. You begin classes where Chinese is spoken and written and everyone around you either speaks Chinese as a First Language, or another language that you don't speak as a First Language – a language other than English.

That's how my students from China, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, Iraq, India and many other countries feel. My heart goes out to them. You wouldn't believe how hard most of them work and how well they manage to do.

Grading students who are just forming and developing and learning about life seems almost immoral. Unfair. Meaningless. It's a form of pigeonholing that can really be damaging, depending on the individual student.

Isn't that one of the major issues around mental health and psychiatric labels? 

Bipolar Disorder. Anxiety Disorder. Schizophrenia. Hypomania. Depression. 

If I tell you my psychiatric diagnosis is Hypomania, and that's all I tell you about me, what do you really know? About me? Other than the fact that I have no trouble telling you about my psychiatric diagnosis.

A grade is a rating, a classification. A pigeonhole of sorts. Can't the same be said for a psychiatric label or disorder? Yet with psychiatry, where so much is still unknown, the label can be very damaging.

And in psychiatry, once you're pigeonholed or labeled, that's it. Labels stick. You're in the system. Someone may give you another label, too. You'll believe it. You'll internalize it. And that can be very damaging, especially if you begin taking medication. Too often, even the medication may not work for you, because you are unique. Special. An individual with your own experiences, your own body chemistry, your own uniquenesses.

And ultimately, psychiatric labels are for insurance companies, I suppose. Administrators. 

By definition, a label or classification is restrictive. But labels are often inaccurate, and in psychiatry, this is all too commonplace. How many of us have had multiple diagnoses? After all, you're dealing with diagnostics in an imprecise science. They're far more imprecise than a grade in college which sums up a student's classroom performances and behaviour over more than three months. Their assignments, class activities, interactions, attendance and punctuality, questions, concern, tests, exams.

As well as, you can learn a great deal about a student's individual complexities, their extraordinarily diverse cultural and personal perspectives and their backgrounds in the learning laboratory of a classroom.

Why, compared to giving a human being a psychiatric diagnosis, grading a college student seems like a walk in the park.

In school, you can at least change your Grade Point Average or your letter grade with hard work, if you really apply yourself. You can raise it. Improve your prospects. Often there's lots of help available to you.

"I've got a 3.5," one of my former students told me the other day. "Not very good," he said, sounding dejected. Confused. Lost.

Like someone who says, "I have bipolar disorder."

Whether it's a grade or B+ or C+ or a label like bipolar disorder or depression. What does it tell you about an individual? I ask you.

Does that tell you what this person has learned about life or a particular subject? What this person loves to read? Does it reveal their personal ethics and morals? Does it tell you who this person loves and cares about and cherishes? What this person likes to do in his or her spare time? What she or he wants to accomplish in life? What his dreams are? What her hopes are?

If you have a GPA of 3.9 it means you're a good student in a specific course. You write exams well and know all about how to do academic research papers. You have a set of skills at which you can perform in a classroom. 

But what about meeting deadlines in the real world? About respecting your co-workers and their concerns? About being a good citizen?

Does a 3.9 GPA indicate you'll be successful in life? Read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for an intriguing perspective on that question.

The same goes for a psychiatric label. It's a pinpoint on the course of life, a judgment made by an individual psychiatrist based on a collection of criteria – the DSM-IV and soon the DSM-V. People write the DSM criteria. Psychiatrists may have their own agendas. 

We are all human. We make mistakes. We're always changing. Evolving. Growing. Learning. And surprising ourselves and others. I'm always curious about people, waiting hopefully to be pleasantly surprised. Often I am.

Our outside appearances may not change all that much. But our minds are constantly in flux. Like kaleidoscopes. Beautiful fleeting refracted images of coloured glass that are never, ever repeated. Never the same. Unique. Like us.

That's why grading is so painful for me.

Teaching – a tonic for soul and spirit!

There's nothing better to keep your mood in check, your mind in shape and your spirits high than facing a group of young, expectant students two or three times a week – and throwing every ounce of your energy into helping them learn a new subject.

Whether in a school room or a community centre, in a college or a university. Teaching is giving back at the highest level. It's giving of yourself. It's tonic for your soul. Nothing makes you feel better about who you are than sharing a little of yourself. You can't buy that feeling. Whether you teach a child to knit or a classroom of serious professionals the secrets of success. 

I am convinced that everyone has something to teach another human being that will be of interest or benefit. Teaching refocuses your energy. Teaching is a gift. And teaching is learning.

My mind has never felt so agile. Teaching is the steepest learning curve I've ever encountered. I'm constantly challenging myself. And wow, do I make mistakes. I have a genius for mistake-making and I've discovered it's best way of all to learn.

I encourage my students to try new things, to take risks, to make mistakes. Lots of mistakes. They think I'm a little mad – but we know that already, don't we. The point is, it seems to work. Students get into the spirit of risk-taking and mistake-making and they begin to branch out beyond their comfort zones. Every time I walk into a classroom, I'm outside mine. I like company.

Of course, I didn't know any of this when I was hired to teach the second half of a Women's Studies course in the summer of 2007 at Seneca College. I had a smattering of teaching experiences – in the 1980s in the journalism program at Humber College, as a guest lecturer, also in journalism at Centennial College, at the now defunct Learning Annex during its hey-day.

Nothing like what I'm teaching now.

This week, I finished my fourth term teaching Women's Studies, the course I was originally hired to teach. It looks nothing like what it was back then. I never teach a course the same way twice.

I adore my students. Every class is a mini-United Nations with young people from all over the world coming together to learn from each other, share their cultural experiences and morph quickly into a vibrant learning laboratory. What an education.

My contract has just been renewed for the Fall 2009 term. Six hours, two classes, at two different campuses. Somebody up there loves me. This is my dream come true.

Right now, I have a pile of final exams waiting on my dining room table to be marked, several assignments still due in, final grades to be computed and my new Fall Addendum to finish for the course I've developed called Leadership in Society – a course where students learn about leadership through doing volunteer community service. All this has to be completed by 10 a.m. on Monday, August 24.

And I'll do it because I am passionate about teaching, the courses I teach, Seneca and the students.  

Have I ever told you that I graduated from Seneca back in 1971?

Seneca saved my life. No kidding.

Were it not for Seneca, I don't know where I'd be today, but I doubt I'd be here at Coming Out Crazy, blissfully posting to you and responding to your comments. Engaging with you and learning so much from you. 

Back in September 1968, at the age of 19, I ventured through the brand new doors of Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology's Newnham campus at Don Mills and Finch in north Toronto – apprehensive, raw but ready to learn.

Seneca was my last chance.

I was a broken soul. It was Seneca or bust. Get a job. But there was no job I could do and even if there was, no one would have ever hired me. I was in educational limbo and an emotional ragbag – without a shred of self-confidence.

Until then, an academic "untouchable". No teacher had ever really been able to reach me in the public school system. I was labelled a "chronic underachiever" – with untapped and untappable potential. Finally, after two failed attempts to complete Grade 13, I was forced to drop out of my academic stream in high school with only one skill – typing.

Two years earlier, I spent eight months in The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. A year later, I discovered my diagnosis was schizophrenia. I didn't know this diagnosis was wrong. It stuck for nine years. I just buried it at the back of my miind. What else could I do.

I had blown secretarial school, too. Bored silly, I played hooky every afternoon, cut classes and spent hours reading through the fiction section at the library – until my parents caught on. 

Not my happiest hour. 

Then I read about the brand new Community Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology that were opening up in Ontario for dead-end students like me. In 1967, without Grade 13, we didn't qualify for university. Grade 12 in an academic stream gave you a ticket to nowhere. I certainly wasn't marriage material, so college looked like my last hope.

These community colleges were a revolution in Ontario's post-secondary education system. Headlines of the day hailed them as "promising for bright people less inclined to philosophizing than 'doing things' – a progressive sphere of opportunity with trailblazing training to shift students from the industrial age into the age of information."

For one thing – computers were in their infancy but there were very few people trained to use them.   

Seneca wasn't too far from where we lived and one two-year diploma program looked intriguing.

Applied Communications Media – a veritable smorgasbord of tantalizing courses including journalism, photography, TV and radio broadcasting, film production, advertising, marketing, public speaking, sociology, psychology, drama, even communications theory.

Seemed tailor-made for my histrionic nature, innate curiosity, uncanny knack of engaging people in conversations about themselves, plus my deplorable academic record.

My application was accepted and I was in. I could say the rest is history, but that's not the case. It wasn't the curriculum so much as the instructors who were able to reach out to me. Most were straight out of the working world. As enthusiastic about teaching us as we were about this new, exciting, cutting edge, avant-garde educational environment. They cared about us. Not their personal academic research. They didn't have any. We were their proteges, their educational challenges, their experiments. They wanted us to succeed as much as we did. 

I was very fragile and made sure my psychiatric history was no secret. In those days, students didn't go to guidance counsellors to have "Academic Accommodation" forms filled out to give to their teachers, like they do today. You had to advocate for yourself. So I did. 

What a difference it made. 

With these young teaching mavericks who were only a few years older than their wards, I found my niche and myself. Suddenly I could think intelligently and creatively. I had flunked English in high school because I never fit the mold, but there was no mold to fit into at Seneca. My ideas were suddenly valid and interesting. My essays scored straight A's.

We, students, were pioneers and our teachers, a brave new breed of precedent-setting post secondary educators. Mine believed in me, nurtured me and encouraged me – a revelation. I always believed I was an academic imbecile and as for my mind, the Clarke Institute shrinks had labelled mine a lost cause. 

Yet after graduating from Seneca, I trotted off to Queen's, then Ryerson, then The Toronto Sun, and now I'm at The Toronto Star and Seneca, back where I began.

I marvel at the curious synchronicity of life. 

And all its gifts. Why not consider all your gifts? Then go out and find someone to teach them to. It's not that hard. Whether it's swimming or volunteering your services somewhere. It's the teaching that's the pay-off. You'll feel like a million bucks.

Happy August.

Speak soon!

Shhhh! Wanna hear a secret?

(Editor's note: this has been modified from the original version to correct an error.)

I wear hearing aids!

It's no secret, really. I started wearing them in December 2005 after my sister Elayne turned to me at a big, noisy social function and said, "You know, you really should look into wearing hearing aids. I'm having trouble communicating with you. Why don't you go and see Jerry?" 

She was right. I had been in denial. I knew I had a problem with my hearing. I just didn't want to face it. Now, I decided to. Head on. Am I ever glad I did.

Jerry, Elayne's husband and my brother-in-law, happens to be the head of the ear, nose and throat department at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. So I bit the bullet and made an appointment with him for a hearing test, which I flunked. Big time.

Turns out I had 20% of my hearing in my right ear and 70% in my left. It was so uneven, Jerry sent me for an MRI. He thought I might have an acoustic neuroma, a benign tumour that can cause hearing loss.

I didn't.

But as it happens, my maternal grandmother had a similar kind of hearing loss. She died when I was a kid and Jerry never knew her. My hearing loss is hereditary. On both sides of my family. My late father wore little inside-the-ear hearing aids and his "kid" brother, my Uncle Laurie, has had two cochlear implants.

I am very lucky. My wondrous audiologist Leslie Garbett assures me that I will never need a cochlear implant. My hearing will never get that bad. I will always have problems with clarity, but new hearing aid technology will to continue to improve my hearing. Isn't that good news?

With my very lopsided hearing, one of my hearing aids is twice the size of the other. 

All this is really no secret. (Nothing in my life is a secret, it seems. No one would ever describe me as a woman of mystery, except my husband. Maybe. He often finds me difficult to understand.) 

I've written about my hearing loss. My first story – headlined Hear! Hear! – appeared on pages 10-11 of the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of "The Sentinel," the Seneca Retirees Association magazine. It was reprinted from the Mount Sinai Hospital's Spring 2006 issue of "Your Health Report."

Another, Hearing is Believing on pages 14-16 in the Fall 2006 issue of "Network" magazine, published by the Canadian Mental Health Association (Ontario). Quite a different slant. 

What's really important is that every time I walk into a new class (or I make a speech, for that matter), I trumpet my hearing loss. I announce to my new crop of mostly very young Seneca College students that they'll have to speak up for me to hear them clearly. 

Here, we know all about "speaking up," don't we?

"Speaking Up" and "Speaking Out" is what Coming Out Crazy is all about. Advocacy. All of us are or can be advocates for change by using our voices. That's all it takes.

In class, I whip off my brilliantly coloured big, behind-the-ear Widex Inteos to show people what they look like. 

No tiny little nude-coloured hearing aids that fit neatly, almost invisibly inside your ear for me. Nope. They're not strong enough. I need the big guns, so I wear a bright, cherry-red coloured one on my right ear. And a magnificent deep turquoise-blue coloured one on my left.

Red-Right. Blue-Left. The nautical approach to hearing aid wearing. It makes them easier to tell apart, too.

I wear my red and blue hearing aids like fashion accessories. Like you may wear eyeglasses. Today, they've become fashion accessories, whether your eyesight is fine or you need corrective lenses. Either way, eyeglasses are facial fashion and these days, there's nothing particularly bothersome about needing glasses.

Unless you take Dorothy Parker's "News Item" seriously:

"Men seldom make passes
 at girls who wear glasses."

That might be "news" to you and it still may be true today, but I doubt its validity, especially if those glasses are sunglasses! Designer sunglasses – prescription or not – are mega-high fashion.

The bottom line is, whether their lenses are tinted or clear, it's all in the way you look in them and what you see or choose to see.

Furthermore, it's how you wear them. I sport vintage frames for my prescription glasses – for sun and shade, reading and distance – in wild colours or big black dramatic classic shapes and sizes. I always receive compliments. It's fun to turn a liability into an asset. 

That's my philosophy. It's another version of my favourite hobby – turning lemons into lemonade.

I apply this maxim to almost everything. Especially my unique brand of madness and my hearing loss. I'm me. I celebrate my differentness. I enjoy who I am. You can, too.

Depends on how you look at it. Your point of view. Your lens on life.

By the way, I am not deaf. I have a hearing loss. There's a huge difference.

Whenever I talk on the phone, I don't use my hearing aids. They don't work for me. I use my good ear. My iPhone has a fabulous sound system because it's also an iPod. I don't store music, but I love talking on it. It's better than any other phone I use, anywhere.

Hearing loss is like any disorder or difficulty. It's not objective but subjective. Peculiar to each individual. There are many kinds, causes and varieties of hearing losses just like there are many kinds, causes and varieties of mental health issues, disorders, difficulties, challenges. 

Madness. (Such a nice simple compact yet all-encompassing word. That's why I like it so much.) Difference. That's another way of looking at it.

Hearing loss could be viewed as difference. I don't like the word dis-ability. I've never felt dis-abled by either my mania, my hypomania or my hearing loss. I've always felt that "labels disable." So I've learned not to take the labels too seriously. I'm lucky that way, but I've worked hard at it. This fall, I enter my 50th year of psychotherapy. Dr. Bob remarked the other day that he doesn't know of any psychiatrist who's been practicing for 50 years. 

Anyway, hearing loss and psychiatric disorders or madness have several things in common. 

They're relatively invisible. They're most misunderstood and frightening to too many people – ignorance and fear go hand-in-hand with prejudice and discrimination. They're part of the human condition. Hearing loss is inevitable as we age. In our youth-obsessed culture, no wonder people deny needing them.

Consider some stats. 

• 75% of people who could potentially be helped by some form of intervention do not receive it – be it recovery-oriented, peer-support, community mental health and what clinical social worker Ron Unger likes to call the "Life Model" or some form of biomedical approach, according to Queen's University epidemiologist Dr. Heather Stuart, who has consulted with the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

• 90% of people who could potentially be helped by some form of hearing aid either will not wear them, cannot afford them or are in denial about their hearing loss, according to Krista Riko, Director of Audiology, Speech Language Pathology and Hearing Aid Dispensary Services at Mt. Sinai.

I remember telling a friend about being fitted for hearing aids in the fall of 2005. "Oh really?" she said, sounding shocked. "I thought hearing aids were only for old people." 

I quickly discovered that not only is noise-induced hearing loss affecting younger people these days because they crank up the volume of the music they listen to, but hearing loss has long been deleteriously stereotyped. Linked inextricably to an image best summed up in the insensitive, erroneous and archaic phrase "deaf and dumb." 

Not unlike the phrase "mentally ill", an adjectival phrase I never use. I hate it. It colours a whole person and we are all so complex. So multi-faceted. We may have challenges, difficulties – who doesn't? But, we are all human beings first. People first. Individuals first. And the way we use language colours the way we perceive the world. That's why I try to be so careful.

I know so many people my age wearing hearing aids and desperately trying to hide them. Most musicians and DJs have serious hearing loss. Famous people, too. 

I don't hide mine. What's the point?

Hearing aids are just that - aids. If you don't let people know you have a hearing loss, they won't take the time to slow down or speak up. I tell people that. Even though I'm a brilliant lip reader, when someone takes the time to accommodate my hearing loss a little, it beats my saying something inane or insane-sounding because I haven't been able to aurally process it correctly. It's terribly isolating when your hearing loss shuts out conversation.

It's often embarrassing, although nothing embarrasses me anymore. I just make a joke of it. I whip out my trusty little Widex remote control and adjust the volume controls of my hearing aids and the mode in which they process sound.

"I'm a bionic woman," I quip. Dazzling people with my smile. Humour is a great way to diffuse embarrassment. Most people grow curious and start asking questions. Opening their minds as a dialogue begins. Then I have an opportunity to do a little on-the-spot advocacy. One person at a time. That's how social change happens.

That's what we're doing here. You and I. Social change. Together. 

Thanks for listening. Let me know your thoughts and feelings about all this. I'm curious. In the comments, please. That way we can all join the conversation. No one will be left out.

Have a lovely meantime and a sensational weekend.

Speak soon!

"Julie & Julia" and me...

I'm back. Refreshed. 

That's how Julia Child in Mastering the Art of French Cooking instructs you to prepare all green vegetables after they've been blanched in boiling water. Refresh them. Plunge them into a bath of ice-cold water for a minute and they retain their glorious colour and crispness. They stop cooking, too. 

That's how I feel right now. Crisp. Bright. Not raw but ready. Tingly and alive again. Yum.

When I left you two weeks ago, I was a limp, burnt out asparagus spear. Desperately in need of refreshing. Emotionally parched. Spiritually dried-out. (Oh, dear. That's quite the metaphor, isn't it? ;-)) 

Then, the next day, the day following my departure – after I hung out my "Gone Fishin'" sign – my alter ego, my trusty iMac, burnt out, too. First, it froze. Then it died. Its hard disc damaged beyond repair.  

Now, all that is behind us – as you may have read in last week's Postcard from the Edge – and we're cooking with gas again. 

As you may have already guessed, over the weekend, my husband Marty and I treated ourselves to Nora Ephron's new movie Julie & Julia and we emerged refreshed and ravenous. 

More than that, we felt validated, knowing our marriage is what keeps us alive and loving life. We held hands all the way through the film – I cried – convinced our "enough" has made us rich beyond belief.

It wasn't always that way for me. Just as Julia Carolyn McWilliams Child wasn't always "Julia" – I wasn't always the person I am today. 

Back in the early 1990s, I was on dialysis. For close to two years, I had to spend 12 hours every day, seven days a week, hooked up to a peritoneal dialysis machine – to stay alive. Nauseous most of the time, I couldn't eat well. I had to restrict foods drastically, especially salt. Still do. 

Tethered to my machine through a shunt in my gut, in bed, I watched Julia Child's television shows religiously. Her vitality, wit, energy and passion for life and delicious French cuisine kept me emotionally enriched and vicariously well fed. 

If I couldn't eat, at least I could watch ... and imagine how her exquisite-looking dishes tasted. 

Those were lonely years. I was single. Unable to work. My Endstage Kidney Failure was the result of Lithium toxicity caused because my psychiatrist at that time neglected to monitor my Lithium levels properly. I never knew they had to be monitored so carefully back in 1975 when I started taking it for mania. (If you are on Lithium, please be sure to have your levels checked!) 

So, I lost the functioning of my only kidney. Yes, that's right. I had only one to begin with – not that it would have made much difference. Lithium toxicity affects both kidneys if you are lucky enough to have two.

Anyway. That was then. This is now. My youngest sister Glorianne saved my life by giving me one of her two kidneys on March 7, 1994 and the rest is history. She's healthy and well. Transplant is no cure, but it sure beats dialysis.

I returned to work as a Lifestyle feature writer at The Toronto Sun and on August 13, 1997, two days before her 85th birthday, I interviewed Julia Child. 

We talked about butter. 

Julia Child's trademark was her love of butter and rich French cookery ... and her revulsion for trendy, nutritious, low-fat cooking. 

"It's adulterating good food," she trilled on the telephone, I recall, in her unmistakable vibrato. "I was in a restaurant the other night and they had quenelles, and someone in our party said, 'Gosh, I haven't had a quenelle in years.' But this chef had done them complete 'diet', and do you know what one of those bouchees tastes like with no cream? It was awful, like chewing a chunk of rubber."

Yet even Julia admitted she was cutting back on butter to try to keep her weight down. Her approach to "cutting back" is either taste something rich or don't serve it at all. 

"Make another recipe. Don't adulterate something that's supposed to be good and delicious," she sternly 

advised. "You have your mouth all set for food the way it's supposed to be and then you get foam rubber. It's much better to eat an apple than this fake food."

Until seeing Julie & Julia, I never knew much about Julia Child's personal life. In part, the film is based her autobiography My Life in France. She wrote it with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme in the last few years before her she died on August 13, 2006 – two days before her 92nd birthday.

It's a charming love story. Not only about her passion for France and its food, but her zest for life and especially, her lusty loving husband, artist Paul Child. She had a glorious and relatively late-in-life marriage – she was 34 and a virgin – to the most delicious man in the world. Paul absolutely adored Julia, who was 10 years his junior. He supported her wholeheartedly during her close-to-10-year odyssey writing her first landmark cookbook and getting it published. He illustrated and took photographs of her culinary creations for this and many of her subsequent cookbooks all their married life. He encouraged her to try teaching cooking on TV and was thrilled watching her phenomenal rise in the world of cooking.

What struck me most was that he loved her exuberance. She was loud and big and wildly enthusiastic. All 6-feet, 2-inches of her. Decidedly, admittedly different and he was utterly smitten. She was the "butter to his toast" and their marriage was a valentine, year-round.

That pretty well describes how my husband feels about me. And I him. And our marriage. He's more than 12 years older than I am. He calls me his "child-bride." He sees me as beautiful, even first thing in the morning, fresh out of bed. Unbrushed. He loves my exuberance, my excitability, my over-the-top enthusiasms. My passions, many of which he is thrilled to share. I'm different, too. Very different, as you well know. He especially loves that about me. 

I am not 6-feet, 2-inches. Just over 5-feet. As tall as Julia Child was, so I am round. 

Well, not quite, but in truth, I've had a real problem with food and my weight for too many years. I eat when I'm stressed, bored, anxious, frustrated and upset, as well as when I'm hungry. For any reason. The only time I don't eat is when I'm asleep. 

I eat too much. I gorge myself to fill emotional voids by stuffing my mouth and my stomach, sometimes to the point of pain. Food is my drug of choice. Unlike Julia. She was happy with tastes. A good eater. I'm not.

There's a reason. It began following a sexual assault by an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the Toronto Western Hospital when I was there for a week of observation in the early-1960's. I was in my early teens. It was my first hospitalization. Within six months I gained 50 lbs. I suppressed that memory for 14 years. All too common a story. Build a wall of fat around yourself and no man will ever want in again. Eat away your unconscious psychic pain.

Today, you might call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but back then PTSD hadn't yet been invented. When I was about 28, the memory of that sexual assault suddenly came out during a therapy session with the same psychiatrist who neglected to monitor my Lithium levels. He didn't deal with it, so it festered for years. I ate for comfort. At one time, I weighed as much as 242 lbs. Now, I'm well under that, but by no means trim.

So, I am a perpetual yo-yo dieter. Marty met me when I was thin and fit. Now, I'm not, but he cannot see the difference. Like Julia and Paul Child's marriage, we are blindly in love and about to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary on August 22. He's the most dashingly handsome man I've ever known.

Now, even my yo-yo dieting is less a problem.

As for the "Julie" in this film – Julie Powell and her account of her year-long adventure cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogging about it – that's me, too. 

I was new to blogging when we launched Coming Out Crazy on Healthzone.ca in April 2008. Since then, I've reinvented myself and I love my online life with you. My "other life." I live for your comments. I care about how you will react to my musings. Marty is my editor – he is also a writer – and although the New York Times has not come calling, I believe we're making a difference as one of the only online mental health blogs carried and promoted by a major urban daily newspaper. 

Sadly, I learned yesterday from Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons that Liz Spikol is no longer writing her award winning bipolar blog The Trouble with Spikol at The Philadelphia Weekly – a loss for all of us.

I don't know what happened, but I hope she'll be back. Her voice is needed. The more voices, the stronger we become. Your voices, too. All our voices.

Meanwhile, on Saturday evening, following the movie, Marty and I picked up a fresh whole-wheat baguette, some luscious local Ontario strawberries, tomatoes-on-the-vine, a gorgeous bunch of fresh basil and a small triangle of Italian Parmesan cheese. I've discovered the most divine new salad, thanks to Mark Bittman and his New York Times blog, Bitten. 

Here's the recipe. It's easy. Perfect for right now. A seasonal summer "red salad" – divine.

Fresh strawberries, tomatoes, sliced parmesan, fresh basil and – get this – no fat. Just a good balsamic vinegar. Toss and enjoy. Julia wouldn't mind. I bet she'd love it because it tastes scrumptious – without a smidgen of butter. 

Julia always said, "We must have the courage of our convictions." In the kitchen. And in life, too. That's what "Coming Out Crazy" is all about. 

I'm so happy to be back. I've missed you. 

Speak soon!

A Postcard from the Edge*

Hi there. I wish I could say I wish you were here, but you wouldn't want to be where I've been for the last week or so! Quite frankly, I don't know if the fish were biting or not.

Here's the story.

You may recall, about 10 days ago, I decided I needed a break. So I signed off for a week, hung out my Gone Fishin' sign, and signed off.

I wish. 

The next day, my iMac froze. Completely. Off it went to my Apple specialist where it stayed until Saturday and I had to do all the other things I do in my life without my computer.

Believe me, there are a lot of other things I do demanding my computer to help to keep this ship afloat.

So, it meant I had to use my husband's computer. We're hitched and so are our iMacs. A wireless network.

That meant that he had to put his life on hold for a week for me. He's a writer, too. 

Every time I started to walk into my office, which I do automatically, I saw my empty desk. Sans computer. Sans external backup. Just my sleek but orphaned Chiclets-style Apple keyboard lying on my desk, its wires straggled amidst papers and pens and my dead little white mouse.

A sorry sight. 

Meanwhile, my "other" life carried on. I had to continue teaching my Seneca College women's studies course sans computer. Lesson planning. Emailing with my 18 students. Marking their online journals. I had to write their final examination. All sans my computer.

I was not entirely handicapped. I have an iPhone, so I could read my email. On my husband's computer, using his identity, I could respond. I could Skype, being him. (Talk about an "out of body, out of mind" experience.)

I was able to work, but every time I went into his office, he had to leave. It wasn't the relaxing week I had planned, although he was absolutely darling about the whole affair.

Want to test your marriage? Share your spouse's computer for more than a week. Especially when your spouse doesn't like you fooling around with the configuration of the files on his desktop. 

Mind you, he has more than 6,000 opened emails in his inbox and I had access to them, to all his correspondence. That didn't bother him a bit. Talk about trust. We have two rules in our marriage:

1. No secrets. No lies.

2. I cook. He cleans.

And now a third. Computer Sharing.

We have a blissful marriage and will be celebrating our ninth anniversary in exactly 18 days. 

But living without my computer was no fun for either of us. I couldn't read any of my RRS feeds. I subscribe to about 55 blogs and other websites. I felt cut off from the world. I do more reading on line than in hard copy. I don't yet do much reading on my iPhone – I'm still learning how to use it – so the only advantage it had for me, besides email, was having my calendar at my fingertips.

To the best of my knowledge, I didn't miss any important appointments.

I don't Facebook on my iPhone, so that part of my life died until yesterday. I don't Tweet on it either.

Now my iMac is home and once again fully functional – or almost – there are still a few little glitches.

That's to be expected with a new hard disk. 

That's what happened. My hard disk died. My computer needed a heart transplant. 

It wasn't a very happy time, last week. I was stressed out every day, calling the hospital, checking on its progress. 

Two complete backups were needed. Diagnosis was difficult. Finally, the problem was found. It wasn't software, but definitely hardware and in the hard disk. Couldn't be fixed. The whole hard disk had to come out and be replaced. 

With what model? The same one it had or an upgrade? We decided on an upgrade, but the one we wanted wasn't available, so we went with the top of the line. One that had to be removed from one of my computer doctor's other Apples. A double transplant. Not brand new, but tested and working well. A better option.

Meanwhile, I wasn't allowed to visit and for long stretches of time couldn't even locate the doctor. He's busy. I had to be patient.

Have I ever told you that I'm not patient? That's not one of my virtues. Doesn't exactly fit with my perennially hypomanic mindset.

So. For more than one week, my fishing trip was aborted, but I was gone. Really gone. Out of cyberspace, practically.

All this to let you know that I'm taking this week off, too. I need a week of relaxation. I don't know where I'll be. Just away.

I hope you'll understand, but I feel I need a little more time. Just one more week. After all, its summertime – and the livin' is supposed to be easy, isn't it?

Hugs,

sln

* Postcards from the Edge