@_@

[pauraque_bk]

Stayed up waaaaay too late last night chatting with sioniann, xylodemon, shaychana, bloodybrilliant, and fivil. Hoped they wouldn't think I was kind of butting in since sioniann was the only one I actually knew. Can we have regular fandom chats? I love them so.

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Stuck it to the man by joining a GLBT-friendly guild. Take that! (Also somehow went up a rank this week, which surprised me, since I did like a third of the honor I gained last week. Too bad the necklace I've got is better than the Senior Sergeant reward.)

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Must go to library. Argh, natural light!

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ETA: Oh, oh, I wanted to link this article: Beautiful Madness. Nonsensical tripe about a woman who was cured of her schizophrenia, but -- GASP -- gained weight as a side-effect! OH NOES! "The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another - in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?"

This would be funny if it weren't sickening. bigfatblog did a post about it; the comments from 'joey' are me.


ETA2: Argh, the CD player I've had since the Precambrian Era just died. If fandom was planning to buy me an iPod, now would be a good time.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed by that, in a lumpenly way. I could understand if it were a case of her being massively obese in such a way that her health is effected so she was sick a different way, but basically it seems like he's just disturbed by the fact that this girl, like thousands of other people, doesn't consider being overweight the worse thing that could happen to her.

Not to mention, I suspect that schizophrenia is a much bigger danger to "beauty" than some extra weight. Lumpenly Jeez.

[pauraque]

Yeah, you don't even have to be a big proponent of fat acceptance to see that the priorities there are lumpenly fucked up.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to that article.

I was...stunned. Lumpenly stunned.

[pauraque]

Me too!

[cschick.livejournal.com]

*blink* That article is horrible.

You have a girl who has just emerged from what sounds to have been a nightmare, and she's not concerned about the fact that the medicine that brought her out of it has made her fat? Sounds to me like she's a sensible girl. First get her reestablished, then deal with the side effects when she indicates she's ready to do so. And if she's perfectly happy with whatever weight her body settles at, then it's her right to be happy with it. If she indicates down the road it's something she wants to address, then that's the time to address it.

[pauraque]

Yeah, it reads like they're trying to impose some subjective standard of perfection on her, which no doctor has the right to do.

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

Dude. You've just given me the topic for next week's column. What an article. What bugs me, though, is that the two guys who wrote it aren't as anomalous as I'd like them to be. They speak/write for legions who really do believe madness is preferable to a sagging jawline.

[son-of-darkness.livejournal.com]

Oooh, fandom chats scare me a bit. I always feel as if it's a group of people that are all friends and then just me on my own watching them talk. I should maybe join in a few more...

[pauraque]

I usually feel like that too. You can always try asking people about themselves, it makes them think you're a brilliant conversationalist. :)

[shaychana.livejournal.com]

damn, and there i was thinking i was all stealth and sneaky and untransparent. :P

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I'm sitting here thinking and thinking about that article but really, there is no generous way to look at it.

She gained three stone which is, what, 42 pounds? If she was "willowy" before, that makes her no more than 160 pounds now. No way her health is affected, not at that age. Just ... a softened jawline and a need for better-fitting jeans. I mean, who hasn't seen a pretty girl who weighs 160 pounds? Even with society's non-fat-accepting standards?

I'm still trying to understand the point of the article - complaining about the fact that there are no good schizophrenia drugs? That's part of it, but really, it seems to be about the fact that she's no longer willowy and doesn't care and that bothers the authors. That blows me away. Talk about a messed up perspective.

And then the way they write off the mentally ill population as being unattractive and how tragic it is that such a pretty girl was there at all; how unusual that is. grrrr.

I'm just amazed. Thanks for linking.

[florahart]

Heh. I was working under the assumption 3 stone in three weeks was a start and not where it stopped, in my comment below.

[pauraque]

complaining about the fact that there are no good schizophrenia drugs?

Now, that is a complaint I can get behind. We do need more effective anti-psychotic drugs with fewer side effects. But if that was supposed to be their point, they sure did hide it well!

[shinywhimsy.livejournal.com]

i'm way late into this discussion heh stupid rl stuff keeping me away from flist *shakes fist*

but i'm replying to your comment because it really brought things into perspective for me (it took me a while to work out how much the weight gain actually was, what with the different units). dude, if she weighs 160 pounds by the end? that's, what, 72kg? she still weighs less than me and i'm not considered fat (by medical standards anyway), merely a bit over what my weight should be. not anywhere near the weight that would cause her physical and dangerous health problems. of course, we're not told by the moronic author if her weight gain stopped there; if it didn't, then that's concerning, for her health, definitely not for her physical appearance. but as far as side effects of anti-psychotic (among other psychiatric drugs) go, weight gain is so very at the bottom of the scale. it's really despairing when you see a psychiatrist, if not writing this at least endorsing it by putting his name there.

this article is such a perfect example of why people suck. *shakes head sadly* as a health professional, i'm hoping it's actually fiction like some people seem to think it is. it'd be bad bad fiction and made worse by being passed on as a true story but at least i'd be consoled by the fact that it didn't happen.

[florahart]

Huh.

So, I went and read that article, and thought it was--must be--fictional. It reads like fiction, not like a report of something that, you know, happened. I am not particularly familiar with the source, so am not sure whether that's likely.

Okay, and I seem to have written a whole essay of my own here, which I hope isn't obnoxious.

Anyway. If it's a fairly truthful account, I *do* think that the staff was entirely right to be concerned about a weight gain of three stone in three weeks, though. Which is not to say the tone of the article as written does any great service or talks about this well at all; if in fact the author and doctor's concern is OMG uggy fat ew, that's just weird and, well, ugly.

But, okay, 1 stone = like 14 pounds, right? I'd be damn concerned if someone I knew gained 40 pounds in 3 weeks. To do so, with reasonably normal metabolic function, would require something like a spare 6-7000 calories a day (besides what's needed to maintain weight), and since most likely it would be apparent if she were eating like that, and/or they would be able to take some serious control of portions to eliminate the problem, I'm assuming the real problem, from the doctors' point of view, if obviously not the author's, isn't about fatness/ugliness so much as about this drug resolving one very serious health concern and introducing another: a metabolic issue that makes any kind of normal eating completely impossible--if a reasonably normal diet is creating that kind of weight gain and isn't tapering off and stuff, it's not going to take long at all for the detrimental effects of a lot of excess weight (by which I do not mean 20 or even 40 extra pounds on a girl who was slender--I mean, at that rate, it's going to be a hundred or two hundred pounds, and that's a lot) on the heart, the lungs, the joints, etc, as well as whatever social issues would be of concern. What kind of restriction of diet (and nutrition) might it take to keep those kinds of troubles at bay? If there's that big of a metabolic shift going on, what else is happening, chemically? I would submit that's a very different question than what's going on chemically with someone who has over time gained a great deal of weight. Is she likely to develop other nasty chronic problems as a result? Like, okay, my brother doesn't metabolize a certain enzyme combination, which almost killed him as a baby because it is the primary nutrition in human milk. It doesn't impact him now because he is an adult and eats a range of food, but that's a metabolic disorder which had a fairly devastating impact. Might there be something of the same class of mess going on with this girl? Obviously she's not starving, but what is she doing?

So, yeah. I'm hoping that the actual medical concern, there, was about that, and also about how frustrating it is to deal with a condition where the best solution presents other, also bad, repercussions. This is of course not a new dilemma--we kill cancers with drugs and radiation which have nasty effects. We "cure" certain mental/emotional conditions with drugs that make the person living in the body feel deadened/uncreative/unspark-ish. This isn't one I've seen before, where the trade-off is so very explicitly mind/body, but I imagine if I were a practitioner who wanted every patient to be as well as she could be, I would find it hard to deal with.

Lest anyone get the idea I have no idea about being fat, I currently weigh 223 pounds, which is down 32 from where I was November 18; I have ~70 to go to reach my goal, which is still at the high end of what the charts suggest; you'll note this means I include myself in that 100+ pound group I said had a lot of extra weight. I hate that my body doesn't seem to think I should be able to eat whatever and still be healthy, but there it is. My inclusion of this note is not intended to suggest I think poorly of people who don't wish to lose weight, or can't or aren't ready or whatever. All I'm saying is, I'm familiar.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

See, that's the thing. We don't know any of that - if she kept gaining weight, at what rate, what the weight gain prognosis for the drug is - does the gain slow down, does it stop, what the impact on health is, what exactly the doctors thought was going on metabolically. We don't know because the authors were completely uninterested in that - all they cared about was the idea that she was trading beauty for sanity and how tragic that was - particularly that she didn't care (which they almost seem to think is an insanity of its own). They mention the word diabetes once but beyond that, *nothing* about her health. That is what is so shocking. If the article had been about physical health versus mental health, that would be interesting and legit but it was about beauty versus sanity! I'd better stop before I start ranting. : )

You're right that the doctors probably were concerned about her health, but the writer of the article wasn't and am I misremembering that one of the authors was a doctor?

[pauraque]

am I misremembering that one of the authors was a doctor?

You're not misremembering. He's a psychiatrist, of all things!

[pauraque]

I'm not familiar with the publication either, but the article is presented as factual.

If there had been any discussion of actual health problems caused by her weight gain, I might be more inclined to go easy on the writer. Has she got diabetes? High blood pressure? A heart condition? We don't know, because the article doesn't offer that information. What we are actually told is that "her features are being corrupted", that her beauty has been savaged, that she now "looks mentally ill". Her newfound sanity is called into question merely because she values her peace of mind over her appearance (not her bodily health, most definitely her appearance).

This is offensive to me. It puts down fat people by saying they are ugly and look crazy, and it puts down people who suffer from mental illness by saying that they, too, are ugly, and that their physical appearance to others (not to Nia herself, mind!) is more important than their own sanity and happiness. You don't even have to read between the lines to get this, it's right there on the page.

I don't think this is a matter of pounds or metabolic processes. It is the attitude the writer takes that is offensive.

[florahart]

Oh, yeah, the writer is an idiot. I just got hung up on the rapid weight gain and how THAT was really an INTERESTING story, and probably the actual story the doctors in question cared about, if it was about the problems inherent in trying to treat this person when the treatment did other Bad Stuff. As I say, obviously the author wasn't concerned about this at all.

Weird.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Re: that article - Wow. Just...wow. Who wrote that? Are there really people out there who don't think gaining a little extra weight is a reasonable price to pay from freedom from schizophrenia? Do these people know what psychosis is like? Jesus. And whoever mentioned that bit about the kid who was infatuated with her makes a good point - the degree to which this girl was objectified, by her fucking doctors even, is really disturbing. Girls are for looking at, not for having healthy inner lives, apparently. Maybe that's why she was crazy - because everyone around her insisted on treating her like a thing, not a person. I'd be happy to get fat under those circumstances, too.

Sorry for the italics abuse. But I mean...wow.

[pauraque]

Girls are for looking at, not for having healthy inner lives, apparently.

Yeah, I totally saw the sexism in that too. It's creepy that this stuff sees mainstream print.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

If fandom was planning to buy me an iPod, now would be a good time.

As soon as fandom gets me a laptop, I'll pass around the hat for an iPod.

Also, that article made me cry. Psychosis is better than a few extra pounds? WTF kind of attitude is that?

[pauraque]

C'mon, fandom, we need cheering up. Make with the electronics!

[misentropic.livejournal.com]

*gawps*

Oh, Faustian pact my ass. A Faustian pact would be if treatment replaced the schizophrenia with, I don't know, severe muscle spasms or facial paralysis, as some of them have been known to do. But, oh noes, gaining weight?

People are revolting.

[pauraque]

I know, I know. There are so many genuinely disabling side effects of anti-psychotic medications, and they choose this to do a story about? Waste of time.

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

The writer of the article seems to see Nia's beauty as her sole measure of intrinsic value. Or perhaps he's just gawking, starry-eyed. That's the only way I can understand his interpretation of the stalking boy, as if he were observing a male species through the rosy lens of some naive idealism.

They were 'found together'. Undoubtedly, had he been Nia, he would have found another way to describe this incident. That the staff allowed this to happen, and that they then put her under observation, is apalling.

And in the end, though regaining her sanity, she's lost, to the writer's male perspective, her true validity.

::sigh::

[pauraque]

I completely agree. Couldn't have said it better.

[very-improbable.livejournal.com]

I was going through adjectives like "appalled" and "astonished," but really, I am lumpenly homicidal. Broken culture PLUS broken mental health care system! "Faustian pact," which doesn't just imply that gaining weight was a horrendous trade-off but that she in some way sacrificed her own integrity of character and/or her SOUL by getting fat![1] It seriously ends with that moronic passage, as if that question actually had some kind of a point!

I hate everything.


[1] Although this implication may be unintended, since I assume the writer doesn't really understand what the phrase "Faustian bargain" MEANS other than having something bad happen when you get something good.

[pauraque]

but that she in some way sacrificed her own integrity of character and/or her SOUL by getting fat!

Indeed! Fat people look like they're mentally ill, AND like they have no soul.

[ani-bester.livejournal.com]

Fandom chats would be a wonderful thign! I'd love to do something like that. Sadly, Whenever I get on AIM no one is on (wel no, Laverinth is usually on, and sometimes Nasubionna and a few others, but not many)

As for the article, *thank you.* Peopel were talkinga bout this at work, but no one had the actually thing.

God that is infuriating. I think I'm gonna forward it to NEDA's (eating disorder group) media watchdog address -_-

[pauraque]

At least people are talking about it and getting some outrage going!