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[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

[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.