Persnickety

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch be my homeward dove And dance me to the end of love .-- Leonard Cohen and this made me think that this could easily be a Sufi poem, something like S uddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door. She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side. Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.-- Rumi [Translator: Shahram Shiva] Mary Blye Howe's book, Sitting With Sufis, instructs us that: "For the Sufi, Love is the path to God. Rumi tells us that only the person whose garment is 'rent by the violence of love' can be be wholly pure from covetousness and sin." And this love is not the "agape" love that protestants like to portray it as, or rather, it is and it isn't. Agape love is a general term, one that can also include the passion of a lo...

Emil Kraepelin, who in the 1880s helped cement how the West deals with schizophrenic individuals (he is called the father of biologic psychiatry), eventually came to see psychotic thought not as merely a "nature" problem, but also as a "nurture" issue. He saw culture not as causative, but as contributing, especially in its treatment. Nev Jones, PhD , has begun to delve into the ways in which culture exacerbates the lives of individuals with mental disease.  Jones, who herself has had schizophrenic episodes, is now the leading advocate for re-thinking how the West must treat these individuals. Rather than simply rounding these people up and locking them away in a padded room, or--not much better--walling them off from friends and family and employers and classmates via society's ostracism, she sees a reinventing of treatment to allow for inclusion of the individual into their current culture. She isn't, as far as I know, an advocate for eliminating pharma...