crazy people and philosophers (and other academics)

We were at a philosophy conference this past week. It was good.

A couple of papers dealt directly or indirectly with mental illness, which led to a discussion of mental illness among faculty. The group there assented generally to the idea that academics "are all OCD" and many are more significantly sick. This was amusing to all.

Meanwhile, I was reading Jung during respites from the conference itself, and came across this passage:

So the difference between [the sick person] and Schopenhauer is that, in him, the vision remained at the stage of a mere spontaneous growth, while Schopenhauer abstracted it and expressed it in language of universal validity... A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation. But the sick man's vision is an impersonal value, a natural growth against which he is powerless to defend himself, by which he is swallowed up and "wafted" clean out of the world... The golden apples fall from the same tree, whether they are gathered by an imbecile locksmith's apprentice or by a Schopenhauer. ("The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," The Portable Jung, 90f.)

I know a lot of academics who are quick to self-diagnose. I also know a lot of academics who are the objects of bona fide psychiatric diagnoses, myself among them.

Now that I'm reading Jung's account of the extraverted personality and its unconscious, I'm seeing this behavior in a different way. There's something weirdly self-inflating about the self-diagnosis. It places one on a strange kind of pedestal, I think. It creates a status, a twisted status no doubt, but one prevalent in academia and one with related echoes.

Academics constantly speak of how busy they are, how frenetic their work schedules are, how many deadlines they are under, and how seldom they meet deadlines because they take on too much work. We chortle to one another about our poor social skills, poorer social lives, often our poor health and eating habits, chemical dependencies, and other marks of malaise.

This is a bizarre expression of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, according to a value system we adopt to be full-fledged members of the academy. Sickness, self-imposed sickness, physical, social, and psychological deformities, are virtues in this system.

And so, we recognize ourselves and one another (to the extent we do recognize one another--see social deformities, supra) as super-functioning pathological cases, in a gesture that expresses astounding antipathy for the truly and severely ill, and profound alienation from ourselves, one another, our communities, our humanity, and, yes, our work.

I may start to experiment this fall, responding to all the myriad expressions of this habitus, by saying something about my health, well-being, and free time. I suppose that means I'll be telling stories of cycling, guitar playing, and writing music.

diagnosis: chest pain

Here's how I ended up spending 24 hours in Emanuel hospital.

Tuesday morning, after Lauren drove off to work the day in Modesto, I started my bike ride to campus, right around 10:15. Going up Del's Lane, I started to notice it was taking more effort than usual, riding into a gusty headwind. By the time I reached the philosophy department, I was sweating heavily and a bit more out of breath than normal (I usually ride at high intensity and velocity, as many on campus can attest).

After maneuvering my bike into my office, I mopped the sweat from my forehead and drank some water, cooling down as usual. I didn't feel right. My heart was still beating fast, and the tightness in my chest seemed worse. I sat, made final minor preparations for my 11 o'clock class, added a couple short paragraphs to something I've been writing, and then headed to class. I had to mop my brow again.

I walked over to my classroom, a hundred yards, if that, from my office, upstairs in the Bizzini building. The stairs were very hard to climb, and I was overheated when I got to my class.

Class was short. I had a spell of lightheadedness about halfway through, but while discussing the whodunnit portion of Aristotle's Ethics and students' term papers due on Thursday, I felt okay.

By the time I returned to my office, I was having trouble catching my breath, and the chest pain was still worse than before. I sat, trying to calm down, trying to let myself cool down, but it seemed like my heart was racing. I decided I needed help. I told our department assistant I was going to the health center, and set off for it.

I was unaware that, for liability reasons, the health center will only see students. I tried to say it was an emergency, and the receptionist referred me to same-day care across from the hospital. I said I couldn't get there, because I rode my bike. Eventually, the doctor on call saw me in an exam room, "as a courtesy," he said, and took vital signs. He did a lot of frowning, and said he thought I should go to ER.

While he called for an ambulance, a nurse took my blood pressure a second time, did some more frowning. The doctor came back in and told the nurse to give me an aspirin and a sublingual nitro tab.

It seemed like this was taking forever. Finally two campus police came in, and asked me, like the doctor had, what was going on, and my basic stats - name, age, etc. Then two firemen came in and did the same thing. They took my bp and asked more questions. Then the ambulance came, and the EMTs asked me the same questions all the others had, hooked me up to a portable EKG and an electronic bp monitor. They didn't frown, but they looked very concerned. I couldn't see the EKG, but when I glanced at the bp monitor, it said 155 over 110 or something like that, with a pulse of 105. I overheard them radio in that the EKG was irregular - I think.

Off to the ER. The EMT placed an IV line, gave me another aspirin, asked me about the nitro tab, declared that the health center's nitro was no longer potent, and so he gave me another.

We reached the ER, where a series of nurses, technicians, and doctors all came and went, asking exactly the same questions, frowning, and so on. At 1, I felt like I could try to call Lauren at work (at her former boss' house, actually), and proceeded to find that I didn't have the number. Eventually I reached Lauren, and she came down.

While she was on her way, a cardiologist arrived, looked at my EKG, and told me I was not going to die of a heart attack, because he was pretty sure it wasn't a heart attack. He wanted me to stay overnight, because, it turns out, to rule out heart attack definitively, you have to have three clean EKGs six hours apart, and three blood draws that test negative for a particular enzyme, also six hours apart. The cardiologist ordered a stress test and echo-sonogram thingy for this morning.

The pain in my chest had waned considerably, especially after Lauren arrived. By the time I was in a room, the pain only felt bad when someone asked me how the pain was.

This morning, after a good 3 hours of sleep, I reported for the stress test. The nurse got me all hooked up, and said she didn't like the bp reading at all: it was 137 over 95 or so. I told her I was anxious, have anxiety and depressive disorder, and that being around anything medical was my major phobia. Yet another doctor arrived. I did ten minutes on the treadmill, reaching 4.2 miles per hour (around my typical walking pace on the jaunt to school), at 14% incline, before I reported I was getting a little tired.

I got off, and within five minutes my bp was 130 over 79. I did not say, "told ya!"

The echo was just an echo.

We waited back in my room for another doctor to free me. I got to eat something. We watched an episode of "30 Rock" on my iPad (it was our "unchallenging, unlikely-to-mention-medical-stuff" choice for entertainment, plus neither of us had seen more than 2 minutes of any episode).

Whatever happened, it was not a heart attack. My official diagnosis is, in fact, "chest pain." I am 99% certain it was the worst panic attack I've ever had, and about 91% certain it was the worst physical experience I've ever had. The echo turned up a slightly dilated aorta they think I should check on yearly. Otherwise, aside from being a basket-case after this academic year, I'm fine.

And now all I have to do is grade 120 term papers, approximately 60 additional short papers, and write two conference paper commentaries, before we head off to Canada on 27 May.

terminally tired

We went to our fourth Bridge School Benefit concert Saturday night, through the kind auspices of our pals Jennifer and Andrew. It was, as every year, jammed (the grass seating area was entirely full), chock-full of excellent performances, and very long. It was also rainy at the beginning.

After seven hours of Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, David Lindley, Lucinda Williams, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Idol, Modest Mouse, Grizzly Bear, and, oh yes, Buffalo Springfield, we walked as we have done every year the couple miles back to our hotel. We got to our room at 1:40 AM. We didn't get really properly to bed for another hour.

Up at 9 to grab breakfast and drive home, home by 1 PM, to spend the rest of the day in a muddled state of consciousness. One thing I don't like about Bridge School is that after that much stuff in one evening, I lose the impact of individual performances. The other thing is the exhaustion the next day.

I'm still tired this morning, and just about my first conscious thought this morning was to wonder if exhaustion could be terminal in a literal, medical sense. To the internet I've hied self, then, to find what wisdom I could on the subject.

According to this exchange on Yahoo! Answers, indeed, exhaustion can be terminal. We might, however, question whether the diagnosis of death by fatigue is correctly applied by the, um, roofer who answered.

Something called "Wrong Diagnosis" offers the tidbit that exhaustion death is actually a misnomer for Bell mania. I find this disappointing, because Bell mania is a symptom-related syndrome, rather than a proper diagnosis of death caused by exhaustion. Plus, I'm personally just not that into bells.

I found an online test for an EasyDiagnosis (presumably TM) to determine, from the comfort of your own keyboard, whether you are about to die from exhaustion. The disclaimer uses large bold fonts to tell you, repeatedly, that this diagnosis software, whatever it does, doesn't diagnose. Which may or may not cover the EasyDiagnosis people's asses legally speaking, but sure as heck doesn't answer my question, which is why the hell anyone dying of fatigue would spend their last moments on earth trying to get a computer program to confirm it - or, really, to do anything.

I still, therefore, have no trustworthy information on whether a person in ordinarily fine health can (as they say in the South) up and die from fatigue. I suppose this is the kind of thing I should really ask qualified medical personnel. I'm sure my Kaiser Permanente GP will be happy to hear from me, for the first time in five years, when I email him to ask. Maybe I should ask for a referral.