Further Reflections on Translators: vital but unappreciated

Constance Garnett
Constance Garnett

I was delighted at the good response to my most recent post re: the challenges translators face, the essentiality of their calling and, alas, their neglected status.

I took up as well the specific arduous skills necessary to literary translation, concluding with Edith Grossman’s telling reminder that the translator’s ultimate task in literary matters is to get readers to “perceive the text emotionally and artistically in a manner that parallels and corresponds to the esthetic experience of its first readers” (Why Translation Matters).

In regard to Grossman’s rejoinder, I want to bring up an illustration of what happens when translators fall down on the job, which may have happened with regard to Constance Garnett, who almost singularly put Russian literature on the map for English readers, translating 71 volumes of principal writers including Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev.

In doing so she merits high praise, for Russian, and I say this first hand, doesn’t come easily to most of us, even with linguistic acumen, given its heavy inflection, shifting stress, many exceptions, absence of cognitive vocabulary, and vast repertoire of idiom.

In the matter of style, she wrote an ornate Victorian prose.  While often eloquent, it doesn’t reflect the robust nature of the Russian vernacular, thus violating our fundamental axiom that translation achieve authenticity, or reenactment of the native text.  As I pointed out, this poses the ultimate translator challenge, requiring a translator to exercise a creative dexterity in her own right, and even more so in rendering poetry.  Done well, as Grossman does in her painstaking translations of Cervantes, it merits our highest praise and deserves far more accolades than it, sadly, receives.

Literary translation is fraught with the land mines of replaying rhythms, rhyme schemes, syllabication, and nuances. It’s no place for the faint-at-heart.

I grew up on Constance Garnett’s translations and am grateful for her opening the door for me to the golden age of Russian literature.  But then I was very young and didn’t know the way of superlative translation as its own creative enterprise, transcending the verbal and recreating the dynamism of the original.  I didn’t know how much I had still missed, for the reader’s link with a translator lies salient in trust, since few of us achieve such intimacy with a second language.  As such, translators become our filters into knowing.

We should listen carefully to Joseph Brodsky, emigre poet, and Nobel Laureate, in his admonition we approach Garnett cautiously:  “The reason English-speaking readers  can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one.  They’re reading Constance Garnett” (Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English).  Often she would simply omit or treat difficult passages superficially, working quickly.

We should choose our translators carefully whenever we can, based on reputable sources, often scholarly.  In reading Russian literature I recommend the husband-and-wife couple Richard Pavear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  Both offer impeccable credentials and are recipients of the highly esteemed PEN Translation Prize for their interpretations of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina.

The lot of the literary translator isn’t an easy one as The New Yorker reminds us:  “Poor Mrs. Garnett!  Translators suffer a thankless and uneasy afterlife…Translators are, for eternity, sent up, put down, nitpicked and, finally, overturned” (David Remick, “The Translation Wars,” November 7, 2005).

In closing, I would add another caveat:  Translation, even when done well, lends you this strange after taste, or belaboring; a sense of lingering nuance I may have missed or syntax I may have put better.  But then this is a good thing, too, indicating a conscientiousness intrinsic and defining of all good translation.

Do good.  Be well!

rj

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Translators: vital but unappreciated

translationIt’s one thing to learn to speak another language, quite another to really show mastery.  For example, a speaking vocabulary of the most frequent 2500 words along with a hundred or so primary phrases will likely enable you to converse adequately in every day situations.  Even more so, if you acquire vocabulary by way of topic categories you’re likely to use, say computer or  newspaper vocabulary.

If you really want to ease your way, though it takes considerable discipline and putting it to use, a vocabulary of the right 7000 words from daily life will give you ease, not only in speaking, but over most intermediate level reading matter in your chosen language.  There’s a good book out there you might look at:  Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language: an Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, which lists essential words in nine European languages.

By the way, the CIA and the military operate expedited, or crash programs, for quick acquisition of oral fluency, usually consisting of 6-8 hour sessions daily over a six month period for the more difficult languages like Chinese, Arabic or Farsi.

It’s quite another thing to be a translator, and here I’ve in mind two kinds:  first, the oral or playback kind you find in the UN General Assembly when you put on your headphone set and, bingo, there it is, instant playback in your own language.  There are schools for this kind of thing too, of which the Monterey Institute is among the most notable.

School can only do so much.  You need an excellent ear and ability to focus and retain, along with a nearly native facility requiring foreign residency for at least a year to get the real hang of the second language and, maybe, the plus of leaving your accent behind.  I remember meeting a sixteen year old Russian  girl at the prestigious Moscow State University doing precisely that as a result of a one year stint as a high school exchange student in Arizona.

If you do a really good job of it, you’ll have a leg-up on other applicants for positions with the government, courts, and medicine (e.g., patient interpreter), and in the travel industry and more.

The second kind of translating skill I’ll call “textual” in that it doesn’t require oral facility, but rather analytical skills and a huge range of specialized vocabulary for reading in a chosen area like medicine or law.  Again, this has its occupational value for auspices involved internationally such as government, banking and business.  After all, somebody has to put product directions into another language, nowadays usually Spanish in North America.

There’s a species here of textual translation that I’ll dub “literary,” or dealing with the literary arts and, I think, the most challenging form of language mastery.  Paradoxically, it’s under-appreciated by those benefitting most from it, not only readers, but publishing houses.

I started reading the classics as a youngster, reading through much of Hugo, Stendhal, Mann, and especially Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the latter two invariably translated by Constance Garnett, whose life story I’ll perhaps recount in a future post, since it’s quite remarkable.  While I devoured these writers, I took translators for granted, as nearly all of us do even as adults.

My awareness of the translator’s role, however, became an increasing corollary of my academic career teaching many non-English writers in translation.  My curiosity grew especially with poetry, for here we’re dealing especially with matters of rhythm, rime,  dictional resonance, and syntactical ordering.  How faithful is the English rendition to the artist’s conception in its native version?

I also became intrigued as to the inveterate number of translations contemporary English language poets were undertaking.  For example,  one of my favorite poets, W. S.  Merlin, is widely known for his translated renditions of Spanish verse.  Then there is Northern Ireland’s Seamus Heaney with his translation of Beowulf from Old English.  Did Heaney really master Old English, or did he simply draw upon extant translations and fashion a synthesis?

In all honesty, I don’t know the answer as to whether some translators simply transpose.  In short, do some “translators” cheat?

On the other hand, Garnett was genuine and put the Russian classics on the map for English readers.  And I suspect Merlin is genuine, given his academic training in Romantic languages and experience living abroad.  I could name others, especially with regard to translators of classical authors like Allen Mandlebaum.

But to my main point again, true finesse at literary translation requires consummate sensitivity to language as an almost organic entity with a life of its own.  Imagine the mountain a translator must climb to translate authors like Proust or Borges.  And the other way, too, like rendering Joyce into Russian, while remaining faithful to his stylistic innovations.  And even with a writer like Flaubert, for whom le mot juste was the bottom line of his aesthetic approach  along with cadence, and–voila–what a formidable challenge for the translator whose skill must always be measured in proportion to her fidelity to preserve not only his narrative, but the methodology that housed it, authenticating the individuality of the genius behind it.

To do this requires a similar creative capacity in the new language, for genuine translation is really about paraphrase and not word-by-word rendering, and even more than that.  True literary translators are indeed artists in their own right as guardians of their sacred texts, granting admittance only upon maximum surveillance.

In this, we’re a long ways from the increasing vogue for cut and paste technologies that give you an instant read-out of a foreign text.  Their fault lies in their absence of the human factor behind language use, with stilted language and sometimes absurd concoctions reminding us of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock with his “No, that’s not what I meant at all.” When it comes to literary translation, it may give you sense, but not the artistry of the source text.

In all of this, what boggles my mind is the talent required to translate well, compounded by the translator’s frequent absence from general regard even among our leading publishers who are likely to conflate translation with narrative, omitting the authorial presence that gave it birth.

By the way,  a good read into the exigencies of literary method is Edith Grossman‘s Why Translation Matters.  A renowned Cervantes translator,  she reminds us that “the grand goal of the translator” is to have “the readers perceive the text emotionally and artistically in a manner that parallels and corresponds to the esthetic experience of its first readers.”

In sum, the challenges are many for the dedicated translator and the payoff generally not financial but in a job well done.  Not a bad goal for any profession

Do good. Be well!

rj

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Love as a many splendored thing

Recently one of America’s favorite singers, Rihanna, reconciled with her on and off again boyfriend, Chris Brown.  You’ll remember he had beaten her up several months earlier.

In a similar vein, about a year ago I got to know a girl in her early twenties who complained of her uneasy, abusive relationship with her boyfriend. While she didn’t tell us of any violence, she made it clear she was undergoing daily verbal abuse.  All of us, puzzled by the dynamics, wondered why she didn’t bang the door shut on the guy.

When it comes to this kind of thing,  I can be pretty sensitive.  My mother, after all,  endured an abusive relationship with my father across the years that sometimes included violence.

The poet Sylvia Plath, shortly before her suicide,  wrote famously of the masochism underlying such manacled couples as “a love of the rack and the screw.”  As a professor who taught this poem for many years, I take it she had in mind the role of culture in nurturing feminine subservience in a patriarchal world, the “for better or worse” syndrome of  the traditional marriage vow.   Women, however, were the only ones taking it seriously, as may still be the case.

But I think Plath’s conclusion errs in its reductionism.  In those days, few women had access to employment and thus independence.  And then there is evolution’s maternal instinct that still kicks-in, the children to be protected at all costs.

Today’s scene, however, is vastly different and still changing as women have secured options earlier women perhaps never thought about, since they were precluded possibilities.  And yet a good many women, and some men, still cling to demeaning liaisons.

The truth is that many relationships should never have had their genesis.   We live in a culture that dilutes love by conceiving it falsely, with our movies, harlequin novels, and music playing out the theme of lovers “as the luckiest people in the world.”

Romantic love, or ”being in love,” has a fixity about it, a must have it now and abundantly; a possessiveness centered in emotional absolutes.  Root bound, it cannot grow and lacks a future.   At best, it turns habit.

“Loving,”  on the other hand, is like a fine vintage that gets better with the years.  Here lies the advantage of postponing life choices until the grapes are ready.  I was raised in a world that told me that first love was true love.  This may be so for some, but I think not for many.

Unfortunately, a good many relationships pose a latent psychological component, or dread, that the late psychiatrist Reuven Bar-Levan nailed down persuasively when he wrote that “what holds people in destructive  and humiliating ’love’ relationships, and what makes them plead and even beg to be ’loved,’ is extreme fear of abandonment.  The force of this fear is so great that people degrade and humiliate themselves to avoid it”  (Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings, p. 145).

This dread, overwhelming and prevalent, primarily traces back to our parents and whether they succeeded in making ourselves feel lovable.  When missing, it pursues us, like a shadow, all of our life and through mistrust we prove quite capable of driving genuine love away in wanting rather than giving, demanding and not allowing.

Again, authentic love lacks stasis or rigidity.  As such, it maturates and transcends love’s vicissitudes because, with time, it grows in wisdom, acknowledging flux in all relationships, and allows even for exits, since loving abounds in the context of freedom, or ability to sometimes let go.  Genuine love has its ending ultimately in our mortality if from nothing else; but whatever its source, its loss results in sadness, not fear or anger.  Free from fear,  love thrives.

Removed from anxiety, love is, indeed, “a many splendored thing.”

When media masquerades

Following Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, the Republicans delivered the customary rebuttal, this year, featuring Senator Marco Rubio as their spokesperson.  Then came the now infamous water bottle moment, washing away not only Rubio’s thirst and whatever substantive remarks he made, but possibly notions of his fitness to seek higher office in 2016.  Mind you, I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat either, having voted the Green Party last November.  I do, however, have a sense of fair play and I found the media’s persistent, even gleeful replay of a human moment thoroughly annoying and partisan.

I don’t know  about you, but sometimes I prefer avoiding the mass media altogether, since it frequently seems to thrive on the negative and sensational to the point of hinting at animosity, or an underbelly of petty meanness analogous to an undercurrent of daily life manifesting itself in the personality that enjoys another’s fall, the venom of daily gossip with fondness for spilling confidences, speculation, insinuation, ridicule and invasion of privacy or creeping over every fence and peering into every window. Its dynamics, whether public or private, are worth exploring, since they have a human origin. The media likewise strays when it embraces advocacy journalism driven by concealed biases or panders to special interest groups or omits asking the right questions.

Like many of you, Karen and I have recently caught-up with Downton Abbey, TV’s highbrow soap opera that has hooked millions in Britain and America (second in viewers to this year’s Superbowl).  Weaving its spell through subtle intra-episode suspense played out in a facsimile of Edwardian elegance contesting with working class aspirations, its characters, all of them, major or minor, are remarkably chiseled into a sharpened relief, foregrounding their composite individuality, and avoiding stereotype.  As with Shakespere’s Iago, insinuation rather than outright deed works its scourge among some of them. Thomas and O’Brien come to mind as primary instigators, motivated by malice, fomenting innuendo.

As such, they’re not strikingly different from an errant press.  Appropriately, one of Downton Abbey’s other candidates for “dishonorable mention” is Sir Richard Carlisle, hard-ball, newspaper mogul who thrives on scandalizing adversaries, influence peddling, and unbridled intimidation.  He decides what makes or doesn’t make news, as his personal needs dictate.  We are not far from how real media works to manipulate opinion or affirm its biases or cast its critics into disrepute.

While I fervently believe in a free press, devotee that I am of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), I’ve become wiser with the vintage of my years as to its capabilities for abuse as in outing a CIA operative and endangering intelligence sources in adversary nations; or of unbalanced reporting, whether by design or neglect; or of slanting the news through connotative nuance; or of a more sinister modus operandi of interpretive journalism pursuing an a priori agenda of prejudices.

I wish I had time and space to write more fully on the press, both as to its assets and liabilities; but suffice it to say, there lies a latent psychology underlying its behavior, since it’s so human in its making.  Putting ourselves on the alert, we diminish its power to manipulate us.

Be well,

rj

On the joys of learning Arabic script

Just by way of follow-up on my attempting to learn the Arabic alphabet and fuel my brain, I’ve surprised myself in learning about ten letters already in the last several days since my previous post.  My Apple iPad app helps me a lot, as it groups letters by similarity, and so you quickly begin to recognize that letters fall into families.

Seems to me, this is a good way to learning inventories, whether of vocabulary, birds, trees, flowers, etc.  If you do this with a language with many English cognates like Spanish or French you can actually acquire a reading vocabulary of several thousand words in a matter of an hour since, for example, our –ion ending words are virtually the same in spelling and meaning in those languages, confirming the wise pedagogic axiom of proceeding from the known to the unknown.

I haven’t actually practiced writing the letters at this stage, but see a challenge when it comes to connecting the letters in script.  You also mustn’t make the frequent Westerner mistake of writing the characters from left to right. In its cursiveness, Arabic script reminds me of the now defunct shorthand secretaries learned years ago.

What always amazes me when you start a new interest is its snowball effect, or tendency to get larger as you get into it.  Now I’m becoming aware of just how dynamic and relevant Arabic is in its growing number of speakers and considerable literary heritage. (The Arabian Nights comes to mind).  And of course there’s the sacred Koran, recited in mosques around the world.

I’ve also learned that Arabic script is employed in writing Farsi (Iran), Urdu (India and Pakistan), the latter rivaling Hindi in its vast number of speakers.  Additionally, a score of other tongues use Arabic script.

If you go beyond written Arabic, you quickly learn how important it becomes to choose its dialect version wisely as considerable variations exist between, say, Egyptian versus Iraqi Arabic.  If I were to actually make a stab at acquiring conversational, or everyday Arabic, I’d probably pick the Jordanian variant simply because several of my student friends in France years ago came from there, and I associate them with many kindnesses. I also happen to like Jordan’s progressive royal family.

220px-RichardFrancisBurtonArabic has rekindled my memories of reading the biography  of ebullient 19th century explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), who lived one of the most remarkable lives on record, with a facility for learning languages quickly, including Arabic, without an accent.  (See Lovell’s A Rage to Live).

tresi827And not to be outdone, there’s the extraordinary story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fluent master of Arabic, advisor to kings, and a principal architect of the post-Ottoman Middle East.  (See Wallach’s Desert Queen).

On more familiar grounds to most of us, though I’ve not read his classic work, The Seven Pillars, we have the saga of Bell’s good friend, T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), better known to millions as Lawrence of Arabia via the movie version of his storied life.  By the way, all three acquired Arabic outside the classroom, or without formal study.

In sum, there are so many reasons that can enter into your choice of a language to study:  ease, heritage, utility, etc.  One that’s often missed, however, is distinctiveness.  If you want to find a less traveled path, try taking-up Swedish or even a language drenched in euphonious vowel syncopation like Hawaiian or Maori that always leaves me mesmerized.  You’ll have a leg-up on the herd and find new friends, flattered that you chose their language and culture.

I happen to find this also occurs with a language like Arabic. Though it’s a first language for millions, it’s still a rare acquisition for Westerners.  And among languages, for me at least, it smacks of the exotic.

Be well,

rj

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Learn a new language to keep your mind young

As an older, retired person I’m aware of the need to keep my mind in shape just like my body.  How can I forget when I’m bombarded with all these health memos of a possible tie-in between lack of brain stimulus and dementia, including Alzheimer’s? That’s a frightening scenario I want to avoid, if I can.

Fortunately, my iPad tablet’s a big help via its many learning and game applications.  For me, maybe it’s the professor in me, but I prefer problem activities that test my mental skills rather than dexterity.  Sudoku is my favorite, though I’m also fond of games like Whirly Words, Word Ladder, BrainExl, and N-back Suite, the latter especially challenging.

One thing that’s important in keeping your brain young is adding variety to your mental life by trying new things, not necessarily games, but things like learning bridge or taking-up gardening or starting a blog site, which forces you to be observant and creative.

My primary hobby other than keeping a blog or gardening is studying languages. They say that when you can pair vocation with avocation you’ve punched the right ticket.  In my case, definitely Yes, so I was delighted the other day, though I’ve heard it before, that one of the best exercises to keep your brain young is taking-up a new language.  According to Neuromage (Oct. 15, 2012)), studying a new language intensively “over a short time stimulates the growth of the hippocampus, the brain region involved in learning, memory and spatial navigation.” This study involved new recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy who committed 13 months of study to mastering a foreign language.

Brain scans before and after three months of study indicated “significant” brain growth, while those studying medicine and cognitive science in the university showed static results.  What’s more, and again I’ve seen multiple research studies on this, those who are bilingual or multilingual develop Alzheimer’s disease at a more advanced age.

Applying this research to myself and in keeping with the idea of something new to energize my gray matter, I’ve hit upon giving the Arabic alphabet a go.  We’ll see what happens after that.  I just thought it would be thoroughly brain-stimulating, given its particular challenges as a script you read from right to left and its omitted vowels like its semitic neighbor, Hebrew.  While the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, there are actually nearly three times more than that, as letter forms change according to where they occur–beginning, middle or end.  Apple just happens to have a marvelous application, Arabic Alphabet, to facilitate mastery of this often intimidating script.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?  Well, I did learn ancient Greek many moons ago and, later, the Cyrillic alphabet used in several slavic languages, including Russian.  Anyway, I’ll let you know later as to how this wild experiment turns out.

Be well.

rj

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The folly of being in control

Often life can unexpectedly catch us in a high wave and we lose our balance and may even go down.  Not liking this, we try to lasso life’s randomness through structure or control and spare ourselves surprise.  Though this may help some, it doesn’t always work and, oddly, may even work against us when control assumes our identity.

Some of us are more prone to controlling than others, having been forced out of our nest early to look after ourselves.  I think of children of alcoholics, for example, who must not only escape, but prevent betrayal reoccurring.

Control is a ritual to relieve mistrust and smooth out the winkles.  All of us resort to defense modes from time to time to cope with an often aggressive landscape of human ignominy and nature’s caprice. There exists, too, an existential dread in us, or sense of our impotency against life’s vagaries, resonating vulnerability and whispering our mortality.

But to live this way daily filters life’s joy and shrinks life to a prison cell.  While we need to be wary, we should drop the reins when control becomes its own end and we become its prisoner and it hurts more than it helps.  Control, at its extreme, masks a latent masochism or inverted narcissism that feeds upon its wounds.

We cannot know what each day brings, nor always preempt its events, but changing our thoughts can help ransom our freedom in a world where the surety remains that flowers do bloom and there are people worth loving who will love us.  Experience affirms that we find love only when we extend  our hand to grasp the extended warm fingers of those around us.

I can’t say just how we find the switch that turns on life, nor assure its recompense when we do; but I know that abundant living begins with a giving of ourselves, and not withdrawing and yields release from the confines of our fears.

In sum, we become our choices and when we commit we find life gives back.  William James, one of America’s foremost early psychologists, said it very well:  “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

How do we do that?  It begins with realizing the futility of our attempts to impose order on life, for life has a way of happening.  What matters is living in the Now, one day at a time, one step at a time, finding joy in each other, delight in the canopy of the stars, and the promise of every new day.

–rj

Trust me!

Wingswept FarmKentucky
Wingswept Farm (Kentucky)

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”     –Frederick Nietzsche 

Karen and I were recently visiting our friends’ new horse farm when I spotted a mare and her two young saddlebred foal companions (see photo) and decided I’d saunter over and say hello.  Just wished I’d had some peppermints along.  I started with the mare and took her stillness beneath my hand as consent.  Of course, the foals wanted in on the action, too, though each time I’d reach out, ever so slowly, they’d flinch. In short, they hadn’t yet learned to trust, at least with regards to me. Trust, after all, is one of those life staples you must earn.

In our human world we can be skittish, too, when it comes to trust, especially if memories linger in us of its betrayal as in a broken promise, lying, infidelity, irresponsibility, abandonment and, alas for children, poor parenting.  It’s hard finding an antonym for trust, but deceit comes to mind.  For the great Italian poet Dante, it was the worst of human short comings and he classified its several types into betrayal of family, friends, and nation.

I wish I could say trust has the numbers, or upper hand, when it comes to humans, but I know better and so do many of you, and so I treasure it when, serendipity, I stumble on it.  Being from New England and growing-up along its coast, I think then of lighthouses, rock solid, faithful sentries shredding the darkness with their rotating beams of pulsating light.

I’ve always held the acute test of trust lies in the context of anonymity, or when we think no one’s watching.  If someone runs stop signs, they probably take other short cuts from honor as well, making up their own rules that serve their interests.  Deceit, if you will, is uppermost rooted in narcism, or satiating ourselves, damn our fellows.

Deceit or fraud gets frequently collectivized in power and money conclaves, with near daily sightings of their misdeeds in government and banking. The aftermath, of course, is the bruising recession fallout for the rest of us, instigated by CEO greed and spendthrift bureaucrats that jeopardizes our future.

I hurt when trust gets violated by manipulative charlatans.  I want to believe the ad tells the truth or a doctor’s new book isn’t a facade for making money or that my local car dealer is giving me the best deal.  I want to believe that my friend will keep his word, that my life partner will always love me and my children live honorably.

If love is life’s consummate grace, without trust it will prove tenuous, or like a house built upon the sand, succumb to time’s erosion.  Love may be life’s elixir, but to be trusted may be even better.

Idealist that I am, I want to believe, not doubt; to embrace, not shun.  Like the young foals, I don’t really want to flinch.

Anxiety is not a mental illness: reflections on psychiatry’s abuse

300px-Cover_of_Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_DisordersWell, that’s finally settled!  After months of vociferous debate the American Psychiatric Association has given its blessing to a revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical  Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5th edition), often called the Bible of psychiatric diagnosis.   A vital tool, it facilitates psychiatrists being on the same page.

Unfortunately, the DSM has often been fraught with opinion-based labeling, at times approaching the trendy and political, rather than drawing from established empirical data.  Casting a wide net, it can conceivably draw in most of us.  The inherent danger of psychiatry has always been its penchant for finding motive and making faulty inferences.  It loves labeling.

I’m reminded of a humorous rendition of this syndrome.  Two psychiatrists are talking to each other when a third party passes through the room and says, “Good morning!”  One of the psychiatrists then looks at the other and exclaims, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

Among some of the controversial changes in the revised DSM are the relegating of Asperger’s Syndrome to the expansive canopy of “autism spectrum disorder” (ASD). (No more Asperger Syndrome label.)

It also includes grief as a  clinical disorder, or variant of depression.   Many of us will find this a tough sell.

Better not be into loading-up on newspaper clippings, old photos (baseball cards?).  Hoarding, whatever that is, can get you into the psychiatric liturgy.

Ironically, sexual addiction gets left out.  Go figure!

Labeling is dangerous for its dead-end, stigmatizing write-offs.  An educator, I’m aware of the short-circuiting of a student’s potential when an impatient, frustrated teacher simply writes him or her off as essentially unable to learn.

Psychiatry needs to get at causes, not symptoms, often social (e.g., poverty, prejudice, abuse, etc.), and rely less on medication to address supposedly faulty neurotransmitters.  Increasingly, research has shown that much of the reported success of SSRIs and the like is mere placebo effect.

Lowering the threshold for DSM inclusion becomes reminiscent of the Pharisees with their penchant for jot and tittle inclusion or the sometimes purist application of Sharia law.

Next time you worry about something be careful not to share it with anyone, at least with a psychologist or psychiatrist.  Though anxiety per se is a fact of daily life and hardly rates as mental illness, count on it to land you a high rung in the DSM.

–rj

Something worse than global warming?

We hear much about global warming these days, understandable given its smothering consequences for all life on earth.  Unfortunately, humans have at large remained callous to making lifestyle changes that may delay its full onset or lessen its consequences.  Recent research clearly indicts us as primary contributors to climate change in our dependency on fossil fuels.  Last year was the hottest on record.

Bad as the global warming scenario may be, I would argue we face a greater crisis elsewhere, simply because it’s happening right now and we’ve less than 20-years to find a solution.   I’m writing about the exponential increase in resistant microbes.  I don’t mean to push the panic button, but this isn’t a false alarm.

I wish things were otherwise, but an ostrich stance just won’t do.  Like many of you, I’ve read articles, even books, promising  not only the extinction of many of our primary diseases, but the near abolishment of death itself, or at least pervasive longevity.  This optimism, swelled by genetic research, hints at our finding targeted therapies that can prevent, modify, or eliminate diseases like cancer, diabetes, and dementia.  With dietary alterations, we may even speed the healing.

I’ve read recently that it’s essentially only 25-years and we’ll find medicine revolutionized.  Labs will diagnose your genomes and, like today’s culture specimens, suggest a solution.  No more fussing with finding the right medication and risking their frequent side effects.  We sometimes call it “metric” medicine, treatment individually tailored to get at or prevent what may ail you.

Unfortunately, this heaven-on-earth scenario isn’t likely to happen any time soon, given the inveterate increase of microbes resistant to antibiotics.  Again, its threat dwarfs the crisis of global warming.  As Professor Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, recently shared with parliament members, “It is clear that we might not ever see global warming; the apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20-years, I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics” (“Antibiotic ‘Apocalypse’ Warning”).  www.bbc.co.uk).

By the way, think twice when it comes to a hospital stay.  Currently between 5 to 10 percent of patients develop an infection.  90,000 of them die, up from 13,300 just back in 1992 (www.medicine.net).  The cost impact of infections is enormous at $20 billion annually and eight million additional hospital days (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [April 2011]).

Now the World Health Organization warns that we’ve reached a crucial point in the matter of resistant microbes.  Consider the present situation:

Presently we’re down to just two antibiotics for treating MRSA and one of these isn’t very good.  (MRSA now exceeds AIDS in annual U. S. mortality.)

With highly prevalent gonorrhea, we’re just about out of remedy.

And then there are candida, malaria, tuberculosis, staph and even UTI’s, all of them exhibiting increasing insensitivity to antibiotics.

Like global warming, we’ve done a lot of this to ourselves.

1.  Antibiotics are overly prescribed or treatment isn’t fully carried out.

2.  Hospital staff don’t consistently practice good hygiene.

3.  Cattle are fed antibiotics to inhibit disease and encourage growth.

4.  We’re destroying our rainforests, with their potential for new antibiotic substances.

5.  Ubiquitous use of antibacterial soaps and napkins, etc, increasing germ tolerance.

6.  Increased travel to underdeveloped countries, raising the possibility of Superbug contagion.

Matters aren’t helped by the scourge of HIV and TB raging across Africa, largely due to patient mismanagement of medications.  In India, currently, there’s a new Superbug that’s made its appearance, infecting even the water supply in Delhi. Compounding its threat is widespread travel these days, and the bug’s recent appearance in North America.  The sad fact is that exotic diseases are potentially only an air flight away.

This is always the ultimate threat–that somewhere, somehow, a new infection source will emerge for which we haven’t any remedy.  As Dr. Davis Agus reminds  us, even in the context of his best selling The End of Illness (2011) with its vibrant optimism, “The swine flu scare that occurred in 2009 will some day be dwarfed by a real epidemic that will spread rapidly through virgin immune systems and kill millions in its path (as happened, for example, in the flu pandemic of 1918, when an estimated 50 million to 100 million people died” (p. 277).

As I write, a new TB strain has made its appearance in Papua and like AIDS in Africa,  is badly managed.  Experts fear it may soon defy any cure.

Of course there are optimists who argue we’ll come up with treatment solutions.  We always have.

The reality is we’ve very little time and the research isn’t promising.  As Professor Hugh Pennington of the University of Aberdeen bluntly puts it, “We have to be aware that we aren’t going to have new wonder drugs coming along because there just aren’t any.”