I pride myself in keeping an open mind about mental illness, but I have to admit that it’s tough to watch this video without feeling a pang of conservative rage. Where are we going with all of this? Are we so desperate and starry-eyed that we’re willing to experiment on our own children?? Don’t they deserve a more cautious approach?!??!?!

I’m not quick to judge any of the parents. My heart goes out to them. I’ve never had a kid, let alone one with mental illness. But I do know something of the helplessness that surrounds families in the midst of these crises. It’s a God-awful experience – and a dangerous one, too. Feelings of abject helplessness lead to extreme vulnerability. And that’s exactly what you see in this video: vulnerable families being pressured into troubling treatment, all at the behest of powerful institutions with their own interests to weigh. I’m not skeptical of doctors or “experts” (that’s a strain of American fundamentalism I could live without), but at the same time we have to recognize our respective roles. A child’s care is the sole responsibility of his or her parents. The educational system and the health care industry, despite what they advertise, were not designed to care for any particular child. Those institutions have competing priorities (the profit initiative, organizational flow, etc.), including millions of other kids. What is good for a school or a doctor’s office might be at odds with what is good for a child. When it comes to medicating our youth, we should be especially vigilant about these conflicts of interest, and wise to how good people’s judgment can go bad.

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In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.”

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[Surely dreaming has some sort of physiological purpose. But how does that undercut the power of interpretation? Dreams aren't designed with analysis in mind – that's precisely what makes them so interesting. In a sense, dreams are the purest form of free-association. When we're not awake to censor ourselves, our expressions run rampant. Dreams can be confusing, scary, mystifying and weird, but they cannot be someone else's. They may feel foreign – they often do – and it's always useful to consider why that's so. After all, one thing's for certain: we are their authors, intentionally or not. -Ed.]

(photo: detail from The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli)

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Neuronetics NeuroStar TMS Therapy System

[I'd still use it. -Ed.]

[A] genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another. We needn’t look far to see this in human behavior. To survive and evolve, every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant—and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent—than the norm. All of this helps answer that fundamental evolutionary question about how risk alleles have endured. We have survived not despite these alleles but because of them. And those alleles haven’t merely managed to slip through the selection process; they have been actively selected for.

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[Fascinating stuff – reminiscent of this post. Also included, this wonderful zinger: "The orchid variant of the DRD4 gene, for instance, increases risk of ADHD (a syndrome best characterized, Cochran and Harpending write, 'by actions that annoy elementary-school teachers')." -Ed.]

“If you just sit on your couch, then steroids aren’t going to be very effective,” he says. “Antidepressants are the same way: if you want the drug to work for you, then you have to work for the drug.”

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