The difference between the psychological health of those who had been abused and those who hadn’t, they found, was marginal.... Once you’ve separated out the small number of seriously damaged people.. the balance of abuse survivors are pretty much going to be fine.

The same is true, it turns out, of other kinds of trauma. //

What these patterns of resilience suggest is that human beings are naturally endowed with a kind of psychological immune system, which keeps us in balance and overcomes wild swings to either end of the emotional spectrum.

Most of us aren’t resilient just in the wake of bad experiences, after all. We’re also resilient in the wake of wonderful experiences...

“People have very fast emotional reactions to events that serve as signals, informing them what to do.”

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"I've never been a person to shy away from topics," she said. "It's who I am. I hope the fact that I talk about these things in my life might help other people find peace in their own conflicts.

"But to the extent that all of that served as the building blocks of me being a different person, I won't ever shy away from it."

In reality, Heche never stopped working... But her attention focused mostly on the new loves of her life. Her son was born six months after "Call Me Crazy" was on the bookshelves.

"I saw in Coley a way of life that I really liked," Heche said of her husband. "He is so calm, and he so enjoys life. I was born into drama, and I survived a lot on that drama. The more I healed, the more I understood I didn't need it anymore."

> from article : There is life after Fresno - Anne Heche's midstate mental meltdown in 2000 was a crash landing by all accounts (including her own). Now she's grounded in a good way, and ready again for close-ups. By Maria Elena Fernandez, Los Angeles Times Oct 17 2004

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We are not mysteriously odd - we are human beings, just like you, with chemical malfunctions that periodically cause us to behave in seemingly incomprehensible ways.

When the chemical imbalance is righted, as hundreds of thousands of us have been lucky enough to be able to do with the help of a strictly scientific practice known as Orthomolecular Medicine, our lives are fully restored and we become, in the deepest sense of the word, WELL.

Actress Margot Kidder.. decided this week to lead the campaign to introduce a new voice for mental health care. ...

"The number of people looking for help without medication is staggering, she said. Sometimes I am on the phone three to four hours a day with people asking me how I did it. Now I can refer them to AlternativeMentalHealth.com.

She is the writer and director of the film starring Guy Pearce and Lili Taylor as Evie, a timid woman who plays a rabbit in a small town amusement park and lives alone with her widowed father. 

Evie who deals with a myriad of psychological issues in the film (she exhibits bipolar disorder and obsessive behaviors). 

She listens repeatedly late at night to the radio to the voice of "Drumstrings Casey" (Guy Pearce), a local "rock poet," and an unexpected romance between rabbit and rock star ensues.

Andy Behrman : How would you characterize Evie's psychological condition? Is this is a film about mental illness?

Toni Kalem : I wouldn't say it's a film about mental illness. It's a film about healing yourself from a mentally ill act (Evie carves "Drumstrings Casey's" name into her forehead backwards).

Andy Behrman : Yikes. How does the audience respond?

Toni Kalem : They gasp. But there's a sense of humor that follows up with this act. But I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Andy Behrman : Some people who see the film, think Evie is a manic depressive. In fact, I did.

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Andy Behrman : How do you feel Hollywood portrays mentally ill people?

Toni Kalem : They romanticize the mentally ill, and it completely angers me that every mentally ill guy is a hunk and every mentally ill woman is a hottie like Angelina Jolie.

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. ... All people know -- or think they know -- about Lucia is that for a while she was in love with Samuel Beckett and that, not necessarily as a consequence of her disappointment with his response, she went mad and died many years later... ///

Lucia had some talent as a dancer, a writer and a book designer, but she could not turn these gifts into a life. 

She studied dance in Paris with Raymond Duncan -- Isadora's brother -- and later with Margaret Morris and Jean Borlin. There were also lessons in eurhythmics at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute. And a few lessons in singing.

Lucia was never short of teachers. Or of lovers. After Beckett, she was involved with Alexander Calder, Albert Hubbell and Alexander Ponisovsky. ///

Lucia started showing signs of mental illness in 1931 and was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox. 

But the diagnosis is still doubtful. Her friends disagreed about her condition: Some of them thought she was mad, others felt that she was just strange. 

Harriet Shaw Weaver did not think she was mad, but Maria Jolas thought she was. Stuart Gilbert concluded that her insanity was a pose, to begin with, but that with long practice she acted herself into the condition of madness.

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Or maybe Lucia refused his help. "To think that such a big, fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul,"  [the biographer] Shloss reports her as having said of Jung's ministrations.

What was the matter with her? Shloss doesn't claim to know, but she stops short of saying she was mad. "Joyce's daughter may have had problems," she says, "but she was no lunatic." ///

Shloss has written this book on the conviction that Joyce knew Lucia "much better than anyone else, including well-meaning family friends." 

Lucia, she claims, "was a person of great seriousness and intensity." Many who "lived in her presence drew light from her being."

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Her fourth novel, "The Best Awful" (Simon & Schuster), tells a semiautobiographical version of those events. 

It continues the journey of Suzanne Vale, actress, wit and alter ego, whom Fisher introduced in "Postcards From the Edge," her bestselling 1987 literary debut.

The chatter [in the book] is a riot, by turns glib and pithy. Fisher's writing has been compared to that of Martin Amis and P.G. Wodehouse, and the ghost of Dorothy Parker smiles on it as well. 

One measure of her talent is how vividly she evokes craziness while no longer being certifiable. Suzanne/Carrie plunges deep into her emotional swamp with the bravado of an Olympian somersaulting off the high board.

It isn't a secret that Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists Agency managing director who is the father of Fisher's 11-year-old daughter, left her for a man or that she was loony enough to occupy a room at the bin during a psychotic breakdown. 

Since "Postcards," the literature of addiction and recovery has exploded. Behavior that once stigmatized now provides a credential. 

"I find it unappealing," she says. "But there is a part of this illness that is funny. I don't understand the stigma. I understand funny. It is what I do. 

"Because I have the sense of humor I have, things don't prey on me long. And that's why I have it. If I didn't, I would be... in pain. If my life weren't funny, it would just be true, and that would be unacceptable." ///

It was fun for a while, being crazy Carrie, hyper Carrie. And then it wasn't. 

"The manic depressive's battle is you don't know where you're going to land, and you don't know how long it could take to get back if you land in the bad place. 

"That's why I call it the best awful. It gets great! And then very rapidly it gets to the point where you don't make sense. 

"I've gotten to where I don't track. It's derailment. That's embarrassing to someone whose identity is rooted in being articulate. 

"It is fun when you're in your 20s. You feel you can house this energy. Maybe it's sort of OK in your 30s, but it's starting to be not right. And when you go off the tracks it's not right at any age."