Study: Range of Pharmaceuticals in Fish Across US

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/25-10

This charming story refers to a recent study covering the incidence in American water – “Pharmawater”, no less – of pharmaceuticals. Reassuring to know that a new generation of fish won’t become depressive. And I love the term "pharmawater", that's a keeper!

The author, possibly two.

The author, possibly at three. Or four?

Victim of Dreams - Civil War in the Soul
By
Jeremy Gluck

ISBN: 978-1-84747-613-5
Published: 2008

“I've read your book and I am impressed - and obviously I relate. I hope it sells well because I am sure it will help many people.” - By Katy-Sara Culling, The Bipolar Foundation

Description

Novelist, poet and musician Jeremy Gluck draws on his experiences of growing up in post-War Canada in a breath-takingly beautiful and poignant account of his battle with bipolar disorder (manic depression). He contrasts a depiction of his descent into depression and madness with the narrative innocence of his childhood.

Victim of Dreams can help others to understand what it is like to develop, have and/or survive a severe and enduring mental health condition. More than anything else service users want empathy: Manuals and guides are essential, good medical support crucial, medication crucial of course, but those with serious MH conditions are so plagued by feeling misunderstood and isolated that empathy is the key. Exploring in anecdotal and lay terms the genetic and environmental genesis of the disorder in me, the book is written in a highly professional literary style, including vivid memoir and especially penetrating accounts of depression and manic delusion – drawn largely from journals kept at the time and therefore vivid in their evocation of mania and depression - and is a new kind of survivor book that eschews “misery” for memory and asks, again and again, searching questions about the nature of our lives, minds, memory and capacity to endure what is, after all, a part of ourselves seemingly set to destroy another, more benign part.

The book is in three parts or "lives". The first part is my innocence, when the illness lies dormant but shadowing. In the second part, I wrestle with madness as the illness reveals itself. Coming from a more balanced and objective viewpoint, in the final part I review both having brought myself back. I can now show myself as someone different, neither the innocent nor the madman, and importantly not the person I have been accused of being.

A Definitive Guide To Mental Health Recovery

A Definitive Guide to Mental Health Recovery by Jeremy Gluck is a unique, experiential guide to recovering mental health. Based on trainings to mental health services staff, supplemented by thoughtful and very original reflections and explorations of this momentous new development in attitudes to the successful transformation of mental health, and including new and unusual articles and interviews with mental health professionals and service user mavericks, this book is indispensable to a more profound and penetrating understanding of what it is like to recover, what it means to recover and why recovery is necessary and indeed the right of services users.

About the Author

Jeremy Gluck is an expatriate Canadian who, with a parallel, successful life in the arts, is now working in the voluntary mental health sector in Wales as a mental health information and research worker. His lifelong experience as a published writer and author has equipped him ideally to write this companion volume to his memoir “Victim of Dreams”.