How to use this Page

Compressed visual narratives are Tomer Hanuka’s stock-in-trade. He s an illustrator by occupation, but his book covers, comics and editorial renderings transcend that title. In Overkill, he’s selected some of his most vividly drawn and intensely colorful work, juxtaposing intense imagery with a truly unique palette. Hanuka is the winner of gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and the Society of Publication designers, and has been featured in numerous magazines. In 2008, a book cover he created won the British Design Museum award as part of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. His image was used for the cover of the bestselling survey Juxtapoz Illustration. Not to be contained by the print medium, this versatile artist also contributed art to the Oscar nominated, Golden Globe winning animated documentary Waltz With Bashir. Tomer Hanuka lives in New York.

Get this book on Amazon and help out Rabbleboy.com : Overkill: Tomer Hanuka

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Gingko Press (September 16, 2011)
• Language: English

Check out Tomer’s web site at thanuka.com

Add a Comment

It's World Mental Health Day today - so what better time to address the subject of mental health in children's and YA books? I'm going to focus on bipolar disorder, because it's a particular interest of mine. But much of what I say can be applied to depression and other mental health conditions.

First of all, let me announce that I'm a sufferer myself from chronic/recurrent depression. Although I've never been diagnosed as bipolar, I do have mood swings and have some idea, at least, of what the highs as well as the lows can be like (the highs in my case may possibly be the result of not getting the levels of medication right - who knows?)

I now believe that my depression started when I was in my teens, though I had no idea what to call it at the time. It was all put down to PMT, though I'm not sure that the term had been invented in the late sixties. The fact that I suffered from it at other times of the month - well, that's easily got around - there's always another period on the horizon somewhere!

Or perhaps it began even earlier, when I was five and my dad disappeared off to Singapore with the RAF and I was terrified for months afterwards that my mum would vanish too. I'm sure my parents did their best, but knowing me, a book would probably have helped, and there weren't books for kids about that sort of thing in those days.

Perhaps I became depressed when bullied at my new school at seven, when I was ostracised because of my 'posh accent'. The memory still brings tears to my eyes and the teachers didn't help.

My depressive episodes, never diagnosed or treated, recurred at intervals of a few years until eventually, in my late twenties and living in Edinburgh with two small children, I took myself off to the GP with stomachache and she had the sense to see that there was something more going on. I was prescribed anti-depressants (which I refused to take on that first occasion) and told to get a part-time job. The part-time job helped. But the depression came back after a couple of years. This time it was worse and I took the medication. I also had counselling and the combination of the two brought joy and colour into my life that I'd forgotten could exist. Just waking up in the morning feeling at peace with myself... free from the self-condemnation, guilt, shame, worry, and all those other horrible things depressed people suffer.

Since then, I've had further episodes, often but not always associated with times of difficulty and stress in my life. I still fear my depression and try to make sure I don't get too busy or stressed out - but it hits me from time to time. I'm adept these days at recognising the early warning symptoms. I have medication on hand and don't delay in visiting my GP. In fact my depression these days is like my bad back in some ways - I know that if I'm sensible I have less of a chance of setting it off - but there's always the possibility that something (or nothing) will trigger it. And I have to accept that I'll have down times when I can't do very much.

I'm very lucky in one respect, though. I have never been too depressed to read. I have several favourite books I turn to when I feel bad. William Styron's memoir Darkness Visible is one of them - where the great American author describes his own experience of depression. I'm not sure why it helps me, but it does. Perhaps it's just the putting into words of some of my own dreadful thoughts. The 'I'm not the only one' feeling. Whatever it is, I am so grateful to William Styron for writing it.




Anyway - children's books. I decided a few days ago to compile a list of characters in fiction who have bipolar disorder. Of course, it's difficult to be sure, if you go back very far, because the condition wasn't sufficiently understood. I asked for suggestions from various friends, contacts and writers' groups, as well as trying to come up with some of my own. I was partly interested in which books came to people's minds - i.e. the ones that had made a lasting impression. Thanks to all who contributed, I now have a list - and for the purposes of this blog I will restrict it to novels for children and YA.

This is my list, in no particular order (further suggestions most welcome).




 

Display Comments Add a Comment

Max Fink, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus at State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Guide for Professionals and Their Patients. The book tackles such questions as: For whom is electroshock effective? How is it administered? What are its risks? How long does the treatment take? Is it a cure? In this post, Dr. Fink explains what, exactly, electroconvulsive therapy is.

Long a mystery among psychiatric treatments, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, electroshock) has revealed some of its features to science. Interest in ECT revived after its denigration in the 1970s and 1980s by its continuing success in relieving melancholic depression and bipolar disorder, especially in the large numbers of “medication resistant” patients who suffer chronic debilitation despite extensive courses of medications and psychotherapy. In such patients ECT is effective and safe, especially with present methods of treatment, oxygenation, and muscle relaxation.

The patients successfully treated with ECT are those with severe mood disorder, loss of appetite, weight, and sleep, a preoccupation with death, hopelessness, helplessness, and motor retardation, agitation or catatonia. These symptoms are understood as a failure in the body’s hormone regulatory system, especially in the functions of the thyroid, adrenal, and sex glands. Interestingly, the control of these glands resides the brain’s central glands of hypothalamus and pituitary, structures in the middle of the brain.

ECT stimulates the brain’s central glands directly, either by electricity or chemicals, that produce brain seizures (similar to spontaneous epileptic seizures). Electricity alone, without the seizure, is not clinically useful although occasionally recommended as “brain stimulation” without seizures.

With the seizure the brain’s glands release their hormones into the brain’s own circulating system and into the blood stream, effectively stimulating all the glands of the body. The hormone systems are temporarily normalized. To achieve a long lasting effect, the treatments must be repeated over many weeks, and occasionally over months.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Today we are excited to bring you Emily Martin a professor of anthropology at New York University. In her most recent book, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture, (published by Princeton University Press), Martin guides us into the fascinating and sometimes disturbing worlds of mental-health support groups, mood charts, psychiatric rounds, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychotropic drugs. Charting how these worlds intersect with the wider popular culture, she reveals how people living with bipolar disorder are often denied the status of being fully human, even while contemporary America exhibits a powerful affinity for manic behavior. In the post below Martin look at how this is affecting American’s perception of mood disorders. Thanks to our friends at PUP for letting us know about this fascinating book!

What lies behind the recent explosion in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among American children? There is much to wonder about, as we know from Time magazine’s 2002 cover, “Young and Bipolar;” and from a recent 60 Minutes segment, “What killed Rebecca Riley?” Four year old Rebecca is said to have died from an overdose of psychiatric medications given to her for her bipolar disorder. The New York Times had already reported the month before that the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Not long afterward, under the headline “Your Child’s Disorder May be Yours, Too,” The Times reported that parents are struggling with whether to acknowledge aspects of their own behavior that are consistent with mood disorders in order to help their children feel they have “fellow travelers.” Behind these stories lie powerful cultural changes in how Americans regard their moods.

Bipolar disorder is becoming not only a disability but also an asset. Because of the creativity of their manic states, larger than life figures like Robin Williams and Ted Turner are frequently described as “bipolar.” Depression, at the other end of the mood spectrum carries a different load of associations. If mania comes to signal success in the competitive, sped-up global economy, depression signals the opposite: the failure to be productive. What interests me as an anthropologist is that cultural values very specific to our society are carried along with the diagnosis of a mood disorder.

For bipolar disorder, the our cultural fantasy is that as depression can be made to wither away altogether, the high energy of the manic phase can be tamed or optimized, so that individuals can succeed and economies grow. The growing numbers of psychopharmaceutical drugs are what allow contemporary doctors to give a patient a diagnosis of mood disorder and treat it, rather than (as in earlier historical periods) lay the patient’s problems at the feet of his or her temperament or character. At a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, I met a young doctor who practiced in a well-known hospital near Hollywood. When he heard about my research, he became quite interested and offered me this experience.

Where I work, we get a lot of Hollywood comedians coming in. They are manic depressives. There are two important things about this: first, they do not want their condition publicized, and second, their managers always get involved in the details of their treatment. The managers want the mania treated just so. They do not want it floridly out of control, but they also absolutely do not want it damped down too much.

He felt he was being called upon to optimize his patients’ moods (for the theatrical profession and for the particular kinds of creativity it requires) through proper management of their drugs. Listening as an anthropologist, I began to feel uneasy about the prospect of extending the optimization of psychotropic drugs to suit other kinds of employment and people in other age groups. What would happen if optimizing states of mind were extended, as the DOD hopes, to soldiers on combat duty? What are the implications of extending the use of powerful psychotropic drugs to treat children whose behavior causes problems at home or school? A number of factors have been blamed for the rising statistics of bipolar disorder in children: improved treatments or more knowledgeable diagnosis by doctors. But the need for treatment (real as the need may be and helpful as the treatment may be in some cases) cannot be separated from values in our cultural environment that associate some moods with success and others with failure. A broader conversation about the cultural environment in which rates of bipolar disorder are rising would enrich our understanding of what it means to be bipolar – for children and adults alike –today.

ShareThis

Add a Comment

One question I often field in my capacity as OUP’s editor for American dictionaries is, “What’s the longest word in the dictionary?” I don’t hear it as often as “How do I get a new word in the dictionary?” but it still comes up from time to time. My stock answer isn’t very interesting: “It depends on what counts as a ‘word,’ and it depends on the dictionary.” That answer doesn’t satisfy most people, since the follow-up question is typically something like, “No, really, is it antidisestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” Those two specimens are the “usual suspects” that get hauled out in discussions of the longest word in English, perhaps because most of us have been familiar with them since grade school. But there are many other worthy candidates for the “longest word” mantle.

(more…)

Share This

Add a Comment