When I was at rock bottom, I’d joke that Dementors were trailing me. It was the only explanation for my waning ability to feel. I carried around bars of Dairy Milk like pocket-sized Patronuses. It was easier to joke about it than to name it.
In the first version of her story, Grace Costa says that, on the night after Christmas, in 2012, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house, hid behind her bedroom door, and then attacked her as she and her two grown children—a son and a daughter—were about to eat dinner. In the second version, it’s still the night after Christmas, but it might be 2013, and only her daughter is at home with her. There’s a half-eaten apple on the floor of the kitchen; she remembers asking her daughter if she’d thrown it toward the garbage and missed. She also remembers thinking that she’d left the outside light on and then it was off.
NEARLY 20 years ago, I was a social worker in a county jail where I first began to understand just how frequently the police deal with people with mental illnesses. Run-ins with the police were a regular occurrence for many of my clients, with officers often knowing them by name. They were overwhelmingly poor, and poor people with mental illnesses are also likely to experience homelessness andsubstance abuse — issues that place them at increased risk of police contact and incarceration.
When Jack O’Connor was 19, he was so desperate to beat his addictions to alcohol and opioids that he took a really rash step. He joined the Marines.
Last year at this time, I laid to rest, a young man at the cusp of his young adult life. He had been driving along a secluded backwoods road and had decided to text his girlfriend that he was on his way home from work. In so doing, he veered over into the oncoming lane as he crested a hill. Unfortunately, a man of middle age was traveling on his way to work and crested that same hill at that same moment. They collided, both died.
“Pssst!” With that one syllable, Dave Hamrick can tell how his wife is feeling. It might be a confident “pssst” if she’s happy; a quiet, deflated one if she’s feeling sad. “An enthusiastic one would be like pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst,” he demonstrates, in a psst that lasts several seconds. “That means she’s interested in a little more than just cuddling,” Hamrick says with a smile.
Help is needed for a retired Golden Valley police officer who has fallen on hard times.
“Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in 1999, in the New Yorker piece that would lead to his magnum opus Kitchen Confidential. He proclaimed the professional kitchen “the last true refuge of the misfit,” and while many would argue that still holds true nearly two decades later, even now there pervades an unfortunate double standard in which the sort of so-called dysfunction that often drives people toward cooking as a profession is still too heavily stigmatized to talk about.
When I fall prey to the black dog, it’s easy to tell. My depression manifests in baking: jars filled with rapidly aging cookies, racks of untouched cupcakes, freezers glutted with brownies. Typically I find baking soothing, but there’s nothing soothing about this frenzy of activity. It’s a Hail Mary attempt to wrest a little accomplishment from life, the last of my energy reserves wasted on food whose presence, whether it’s a success or failure, becomes another reproach. Baking is about the triumph of precision over creativity, but in these moments my approach is slapdash and the results uneven. If cooking can be a means of nourishing and communing, this is the opposite, a sort of gingerbread fortress of solitude.
If someone suddenly collapsed and appeared to be having a heart attack, you wouldn’t just walk on by, right? You’d at least call 911. You’d likely stay with the person while the ambulance was coming. And if you were trained, you might even start CPR. Chances are that human decency would motivate you to do something.
The little, round robot is on display at the global consumer electronics and technology tradeshow CES 2016, in Las Vegas. According to Leka’s makers, the interactive robot can help to stimulate children with developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and Down’s syndrome, or multiple disabilities.
About 1,000 people die each year in North Carolina from prescription drug overdoses, but addiction experts say less than 10 percent of the people who need help get it.
The movie “Concussion” opened on Christmas Day. I haven’t seen it yet, but I will, because I’m immensely fascinated by the brain. One thing is certain — I don’t need to see the movie to know it will be a divisive film.
The brains of children who suffer clinical depression as preschoolers develop abnormally, compared with the brains of preschoolers unaffected by the disorder, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
For Justin Six, the nightmares started after Kosovo.
“We were doing a maneuver and I was about to shoot an 8-year-old. That and working the mine fields,” said Six, a soldier living in Springdale, Arkansas, with post-traumatic stress disorder.