“In apparently quitting his psychiatric medication for the sake of his creativity, Mr. West is promoting one of mental health’s most persistent and dangerous myths: that suffering is necessary for great art,” Ms. Mull wrote.
Philip R. Muskin, MD, who is affiliated with the department of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, agreed that linking mental turmoil with creative genius is indeed problematic. “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed, or so manic that no one can tolerate being with them and they start to merge into psychosis, or when they’re filled with numbing anxiety,” he said in the Atlantic article.
Esmé Weijun Wang concurred and offered a counterview to that of Mr. West. A novelist who has written about living with schizoaffective disorder, she said: “It may be true that mental illness has given me insights with which to work, creatively speaking, but it’s also made me too sick to use that creativity. The voice in my head that says, ‘Die, die, die’ is not a voice that encourages putting together a short story.”
For his part, Mr. West’s decision to stop taking his medicine threatens to undermine his own mental health. And his public musings could drive others away from treatment.
“Antiopioid backlash” causes pain
An article by Fox News has highlighted the daily toll that opioid addiction is exacting on Americans. Government efforts aimed at quelling the use of opioids by targeting availability have had the unintended consequence of the cut-off of prescriptions by many physicians. With that route turned off, many people are turning to other sources for pain relief – or are being left with no relief.
One person in the article related how his wife is unable to obtain pain relief for her neurologic and spinal diseases. “A welcome death has become a discussion,” he said.
Meanwhile, a 69-year-old veteran said the Department of Veterans Affairs ended his pain medication. “I now buy heroin on the street.”
Another person in the article, Herb Erne III, wrote: “As a nurse, I have seen addicts and the other end of opioid abuse. But there is another side to this crisis that people are not talking about, those that actually need pain medications but cannot get them because of the ‘fear factor’ of running afoul of the antiopioid – including legal ones taken safely under medical supervision – backlash.
“The chronically ill who do not abuse, who do not divert, have become the unintended victims of misguided and overzealous efforts by policy- and regulation-making bodies in the government,” he said.
Grandparents filling void
An article in the Detroit News reported on more carnage of the opioid crisis. In Michigan and elsewhere nationwide, increasing numbers of parents with opioid addiction are unable to safely care for their children or have died because of an overdose. Grandparents are stepping in to assume care.
Results of a national survey involving more than 1,000 grandparents found that 20% are the daily caregivers to their grandchildren. They can be on their own, without any financial aid from state or national programs. Other children without grandparents can be diverted to foster care.
It’s a role few grandparents anticipated. “Our system as a whole is messed up. It tears at my heart,” 47-year-old Christina Wasilewski said in the article. “Everyone keeps saying children are resilient, but only to a point.”
Ms. Wasilewski and her husband assumed care for their granddaughter when they discovered her in physical distress from lack of care.
In Michigan, the increase in the rate of opioid-related deaths slowed in 2017 but deaths still rose 9% from 2016 , according to the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services. The prior year the death rate was 35%. In Michigan, grandparents raising their grandchildren do not have legal parental rights for this care, including the right to seek medical care and to pursue educational options.
Ms. Wasilewski’s concern about these trends led her to launch the Caregiver Cafe, a support group for grandparents raising their grandchildren.