Pullquotes

Trying to bring back the notable/relevant links posts, but in a different format…

• “One of the features of major depression is not that people have negative reactions to negative situations, it’s that they can’t pull themselves out of those negative emotional moods. They seem to have a deficit in their ability to be able to regulate their emotions — to come back down to baseline after a negative experience.”
  …
  This finding suggests that healthy people are able to effectively regulate their negative emotions through conscious effort, but that the necessary neural circuits are dysfunctional in many patients with depression, the researchers say. The difference becomes even more pronounced the harder the patients try.”

• “I have a mental illness. It’s very serious. It’s called ‘borderline personality disorder.’ The reason they call it ‘borderline’ is because it’s right there on the cusp between normal and psychotic. Yeah, I said psychotic. Due to a brain defect or malfunction, psychotic people perceive the world in a fundamentally different way from normal people. Psychotic people might hallucinate or they might not, but the defining characteristic is what the doctors call a profound disconnect from reality. What they think is going on isn’t actually what’s going on.

  My problem — I don’t have a good word for it; call it a disease, handicap or disability and my eyes roll — my problem is a little different from that. I also have a profound disconnect from reality. But I’m aware that I have it. That’s what puts me on the borderline, rather that right in the middle of psychosis.”

  Corresponding Metafilter thread.

• I’m still working my way through this long, but rich interview with Deleuze, a philosopher I’ve heard mentioned a lot. There’s a lot there, but here’s one interesting bit:
  

  “The Liberation and after was among the richest one could imagine, when he and others were discovering things all the time, Kafka, the Americans, Sartre, in painting, all kinds of polemics that might appear infantile today, but it was a very stimulating, creative atmosphere. And the period before and after May ‘68 as well, very rich. And then there are impoverished periods, but it’s not the poverty that Deleuze finds disturbing, but rather the insolence and arrogance of people who occupy the impoverished periods. The stupider they are, he says, the happier they are, like saying that literature is now a tiny little private affair.”

• “In his landmark work, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews,’ Mr. Hilberg said the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler.
  As uncountable separate instructions were passed on, formally and informally, to a range of actors that included train schedulers and gas chamber architects, responsibility became ever more diluted, he argued, even as the machinery of death churned inexorably ahead.”

• “It was largely because of Freeman that the lobotomy became so popular during the 1940s and ’50s. He travelled across the U. S., teaching his technique to groups of psychiatrists who were not qualified to perform surgery. Freeman was very much a showman; he often deliberately tried to shock observers by performing two-handed lobotomies, or by performing the operation in a production line manner. (He once lobotomized 25 women in a single day.) Journalists were often present on his ‘tours’ of hospitals, so that his appearance would end up on the front page of the local newspaper; he was also featured in highly popular publications such as Time and Life. Often, these news stories exaggerated the success of lobotomy in alleviating the symptoms of mental illness.”