Talent Development Resources..............dysfunction / disorder: page 2

Dogville stars Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany got a taste of maverick Danish director Lars Von Trier's eccentric ways within minutes of meeting the movie maker for the first time.  First, he picked Bettany up from the airport and insisted on grabbing a pile of pornographic magazines from a gas station on the way to the hotel - and then he tried to pass them off as the A Knight's Tale star's collection.  Bettany recalls, "He comes into my room with this huge stack of porn and he starts talking and he just puts it down. And then he says, 'Nicole's coming in to meet you.' She came in and I said, 'Hi, how are you, ' and then he said, 'I have to go, look at Paul's enormous stack of porn.' I've just met her and I turned into this babbling 13-year-old boy, going, 'It's not my porn, it's not my porn.'"  Von Trier's eccentricities didn't end there - five minutes later Bettany heard the director creeping around outside. He adds, "I look out and he's hanging off the fire escape listening to our conversation. He's as mad as a chicken with lips." [imdb.com June 6 2003]

*related page:.......eccentricity

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The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis This dense, maddening and frequently brilliant book on the life and career of the British actor Peter Sellers (1925-1980) isn't a biography in any conventional sense.  Rather, it's an epic meditation on talent and rampant egomania, a rambling improvisation on the theme of Sellers's intermittent genius as a performer and his relentless monstrousness as a person, by the erstwhile chief book reviewer for the British magazine Punch. ...  Nearly all of the many anecdotes and reminiscences about Sellers by his co-workers over the years -- from Spike Milligan to Blake Edwards -- come to the same conclusion: that he was a genius but also a monumental jerk, a borderline psychopath.   [Publishers Weekly] photo: Peter Sellers as title character in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned  to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) [dvd]

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What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn't Mommy and Daddy  show you enough attention when you were a child? Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Drill Instructor (R. Lee Ermey)  to Pvt. Leonard 'Gomer Pyle' Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio)    in Full Metal Jacket (1987) directed by Stanley Kubrick   related article: Stigma Continues in Hollywood by Steven H. Hyler, M.D.

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"How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof...how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?" Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."  from prologue of book: A Beautiful Mind - A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 by Sylvia Nasar

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"Do you have any control over how creepy you allow yourself to get?" Waitress Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt) to her obsessive-compulsive customer, writer Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) in As Good As It Gets

 

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I found him inside with very little research at all. He is the darkest side of me that I had an opportunity to visit, and I've found him very empowering to play.  My first step was to find the wounded child inside, and then all the subsequent steps fiited in after that.  Don Logan is a man who is desperate to be loved, who is desperate to love, desperate to be needed, to have a role, to be seen and admired. And I think the wounded child inside him has turned into a screaming psychopath because those wounds have never been addressed. Ben Kingsley - about his character in Sexy Beast  [Interview mag. Feb. 2002]

related page:....the shadow self

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"My family was what today we call 'dysfunctional.' That's a fancy name for screwed-up. Being raised in that environment cost me years of therapy and maybe more than one marriage. But you know what? I'm not angry. In fact, I'm grateful for their craziness. ...  Growing up with them was the perfect career training for a life spent around people who put on makeup for a living and think every job is their last. That's why nothing in show business throws me."       Bernie Brillstein -       excerpt from his book Where Did I Go Right?

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Shaw said that we judge the criminal by his lowest moments, and the creator by his highest moments.  So obviously, in a sense, they are absolute opposites, and that is what's so interesting about them.  And yet you can also see very often that the criminal, maybe particularly nowadays, is a quite interesting intellectual creative sort of person.  And that when he explodes, as let's say Bundy did, into crime, he's choosing a path just as much as let's say a painter, like Picasso, or more Van Gogh, chooses to create this kind of thing. The explosive sort of force behind Van Gogh's painting is obviously a force based upon a sort of frustration, and it's the same frustration that you would find in a criminal.

.. .. The only difference is, of course, that Van Gogh deliberately makes the effort to transmute that to a much higher level.  The criminal merely says, oh the hell with it, lets go, and invariably destroys himself in doing so, destroys something essential in himself. Colin Wilson - from interview : lycaeum.org from book Mavericks of The Mind   //  Wilson is author of The Outsider

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Andreasen is not a biological determinist. She emphasizes the important role of non-genetic factors in mental illness and the plasticity of the brain: "Our brains are constantly rewiring themselves so that we very literally 'change our minds'." Brains can be changed not just by pharmacology but also by psychotherapy.   excerpt of book review by Robert Plomin, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London    book: Nancy Andreasen  Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome

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*******************Kenneth Gergen, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College

Instead of accommodating oddly behaved people, we now identify them in order to segregate them.
Said [Prof. Kenneth J. Gergen], "A kid who doesn't sit still in class gets taken out and becomes infirm, diseased" --
a child who has attention deficit disorder.

Meanwhile, those in the therapeutic, pharmacological and insurance industries have an increasing economic
stake in the existence of such abnormal people.

Gergen asked: "At what point does it stop? The latest addictions added to the DSM-IV have to do with eating,
work, exercise, religion and sex." Engagement in life itself, he joked, has become a diagnosable mental illness. ...

"By locating disease within individual minds, we not only fail to consider the broader social context in which the
problems are occurring, but we also generate a world picture in which people are fundamentally separate."

from article:  On the Fringes of the Bell Curve, the Evolving Quest for Normality [NY Times]
"science and medicine, along with legal systems and states, shape our notions of who
and what we are, who is sick and who is well... normal and abnormal"
 

related articles:   Eccentricity and Creativity      Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

   << photo from article: Ghost in the therapy machine - An interview with Kenneth Gergen

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******************** 

Actress Anne Heche said in an ABC interview... that sexual abuse by her father until she was 12
drove her "insane''...  "I had a fantasy world that I escaped to,'' Heche said in the interview with Barbara Walters. ...

Heche told Walters that her father.. abused her sexually from the time she was a toddler until she was 12. ...
"I did a lot of things in my life to get away from what had happened to me,'' she said. "I drank, I smoked,
I did drugs, I had sex. ... I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life.''   (Reuters, September 4 2001)

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I gradually started losing more and more and more of myself, which certainly isn't Ellen's fault. I do believe that...
two people are the cause of the relationship coming together and the cause of the relationship falling apart,
but I allowed myself to get to a place in that relationship that was really self-destructive for me.

And I didn't even know, 'cause I loved her... because I wanted it to work. In the meantime, I was falling apart.
I was ignoring parts of myself that I loved, which was my acting. My creative side did come out in certain ways
but not in every way that I wanted it to.

And I hid that... I was hiding a lot of stuff, and when you hide, you start falling apart. And I did.

         Anne Heche    [E! Online interview Jan. 02, 2002  eonline.com]

    her memoir:  Call Me Crazy

    related articles:     Shame*****Cognitive Accommodations to Childhood Sexual Abuse

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Toxic Childhoods By Randy Dotinga

A troubled home life can literally make children sick -- even after they become adults. Researchers at
the University of California at Los Angeles have found that children raised in "risky" families -- high on anger
and low on love -- were more prone to develop mental and physical illnesses later in life.

The trend held up regardless of whether the families were rich or poor. However, children who grow up
in such homes aren't doomed to their fates, says study co-author Rena Repetti, an associate professor of psychology.

"There's a lot of hope," Repetti says. "All of these things can be changed. We're not saying the family environment
sets chain reactions in motion that can't be reversed." Repetti and her colleagues spent six years examining
more than 500 studies that looked at how a family's "social environment influences [the children's] physical
and mental health." Some of the studies followed groups of people for decades. ...

Children who grew up in "risky families" were more likely to suffer from diseases like cancer, heart disease,
obesity, diabetes and hypertension. They were also more likely to die earlier, and have bouts with depression.

The researchers uncovered two major types of "risky" families. Some featured "high levels of aggression, overt conflict
and expressions of anger," Repetti says, while the other type was "cold, unsupportive and neglectful."

Repetti and her colleagues speculate that children in "risky" families may not learn how to deal with stress properly.
"If you live in a chronically stressful environment early in life, you become hyper-responsive to stress later in life," she says.
"There's a cumulative effect on the ability to respond to stress and recover from stress."

"People can learn how to cope with stress, how to regulate their emotional states, how to do things to reduce
how they react to stress," she says. The results of the research appear in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Bulletin.

 (from HealthScoutNews, April 11 2002)

related books by Alice Miller:

The Drama of the Gifted Child : The Search for the True Self   [above image from cover]

Thou Shalt Not Be Aware : Society's Betrayal of the Child

The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness

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excerpt from article Where Postmodern Art and Schizophrenia Intersect by Eleanor Munro, NY Times, 3.21.02

The human mind, so fragile and so susceptible to trauma, pain and despair, also has wonderful
recuperative powers and can find a kind of release through the processes of art.

That was the message of a recent conference at Cooper Union sponsored by the National Alliance of Research
on Schizophrenia and Depression, or Narsad. The centerpiece of the event was "Mind Matters," an exhibition of
paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures by artists with brain diseases.

At first look, there seemed little difference between these products of disordered mentality and work by
postmodern artists. We are all, normal and abnormal alike, brain-centered, brain-driven.

A half-century ago, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger proposed: "Gone forever is the notion that the mentally ill person
is an exception. It is now accepted that most people have some degree of mental illness at some time."

Most of the artists in "Mind Matters" are integrated into society and its visual culture. All use their eyes to place themselves
in the environment; each uses hands and mind to diagram the world, to make a home for consciousness in it, to stabilize
themselves in space, perhaps to bring back ghosts of childhood.

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Subject: Where Postmodern Art and Schizophrenia Intersect

A fine idea with good intentions, but perverted into the usual NARSAD and NAMI dogma about "'mental illness."
The article describes "distinguished neurologists showing slides that illustrated, with melancholy objectivity, the many
unknowns and relatively few knowns in brain science today" and refers to "artists with brain diseases."

No acknowledgement of the controversies about the medical model of human distress, or the lack of definitive diagnostic tests
of causative blood or tissue pathology alleged to cause "mental illness."  The artists, without realizing what was happening,
were being used to support one ideology.

One of my ex-patients, a "schizophrenic" artist (hospitalized and drugged in the past, still very troubled) strongly objects to
her own art or any other art being put in a category separate from art by "normal" people, arguing that the art should be responded to
and judged on its own terms rather being being considered "different" because of labels that have been applied to the artist.

The New York Times is a consistent and unquestioning supporter of NAMI, NARSAD, and their doctrines. Good journalism used to be
independent. Was any drug company money involved in sponsorship of this conference?

    note by Tom Greening, Faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School -  posted on psychiatry-research list

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artwork: Untitled'' ink on paper, 1996, by Melvin Way was on view at Cooper Union conference on art and brain disorders.

   related books:

Raw Creation : Outsider Art and Beyond

Henry Darger : Art and Selected Writings

Souls Grown Deep : African American Vernacular Art of the South : The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf

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I have long had a suspicion," wrote the great Victorian psychiatrist
Henry Maudsley in 1871, "that mankind is indebted for much of its individuality
and for certain forms of genius to individuals [with] some predisposition to insanity.

They have often taken up the by-paths of thought,
which have been overlooked by more stable intellects.

Dylan Evans, Department of Philosophy, King's College London -
from book: Strong Imagination : Madness, Creativity and Human Nature

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"See, the human mind is kind of like... a piñata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside.
Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience."

Lily Tomlin - as one of the characters

   from book: "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" by Jane Wagner
 

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    "bad thoughts"
 

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge
no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream
horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.    Herman Melville (1819-1891)

'Many harbor, but few admit to, the sneaking suspicion that deep down we are really
another person, far darker than the polite face we present to other people. For many then,
when the Imp of the Perverse visits, and they notice having bad thoughts, these can seem
to signal for them the "awakening" of this other, evil part of themselves.

The classic literary description of this fear made real is Robert Louis Stevenson's story
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ... Sadly, many of my patients, when they
first experience violent, sexual, or blasphemous bad thoughts, believe that there is deep
down in themólike the ruthless Mr. Hyde living deep within Dr. Jekyll and waiting to be
unboundóan evil murderer or molester, their "true" self, whose appearance is heralded by
the appearance of the bad thoughts.

For my patients who come to this conclusion, thought suppression seems to them the only
logical approachóthat is, to block all attempts of their evil nature from forcing itself into
their consciousness. Sadly, as we now understand, this makes a bad situation far worse
(as do artificial attempts to suppress the thoughts by drinking or illegal drugs).

Consequently, another rule of thumb in taming one's bad thoughts is: Bad thoughts do not
signify that you are truly evil deep down, and voluntarily suppressing these thoughts will
only make them stronger."

excerpt from Lee Baer Ph.D. The Imp of the Mind : Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

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Societal attitudes create what we consider normalcy to be. So when you talk about pathology,
you are talking about deviation from what is presumed to be in the norm, and anything that is
outlying statistically, or different from what we consider the norm, gets labeled pathology or 'bad.'

Now there are definitely disorders. Gifted people are by no means disorder-free. We know
there is a strong correlation between creativity and depression; creativity and mania....
Giftedness, per se, has often been described as pathology.

I've had a lot of clients who come to me who have been told they are 'too sensitive',
'too empathic', 'too smart', 'too verbal.' I can't think of one person I've seen who hasn't
been pathologized, for being 'too' -- and I put that in quotes -- all those things:
'too high energy', 'too quirky', 'too introspective', 'too intuitive' -- blah, blah, blah."

    Prof. Kathleen Noble -  from interview

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Cutting is the loneliest and most embarrassing experience, but once you talk about it you discover
how many people have done the same thing," says Wurtzel. "People that I wouldn't expect would
pull me aside after reading my book and tell me they also had a problem with cutting. It made me
realize that I wasn't alone."

In addition to Shirley Manson and Elizabeth Wurtzel, other public figures that are reported to have engaged
in self-injury include Angelina Jolie, Christina Ricci, Princess Diana, Johnny Depp, Courtney Love and Fiona Apple.
   [PR Newswire, May 30, 2000]

book:Elizabeth Wurtzel.  Prozac Nation : Young and Depressed in America : A Memoir

related page:....cutting/self-injury

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Rates of "mental illness" or "psychological instability" as judged by psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig, M.D., in his studies of the lives of a thousand "original thinkers of the 20th century, drawn from 18 professions" -- reported in Psychology Today, Jan/Feb, 1999, and article Moods and the muse by Bruce Bower :    (rate in general population: approximately 35%) rate among poets: 77% *******actors: 74% *******architects; composers: 54-64% *******novelists: 59%  social scientists (e.g. psychologists): 51%  ***journalists: 47% *** natural scientists (e.g. biologists, chemists): 28%

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more :  dysfunction / disorder : page 1......dysfunction / disorder : page 3........

dysfunction / disorder resources : articles books sites....

related pages:  the shadow self.........mental health.........mental health : teen/young adult

       nurturing mental health.........books: nurturing mental health.......

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