It wasn't until I had a profound personal experience with mental illness in my family that I started covering psychiatry and psychology. In the late 19905, my son, Alex, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A few years later, my daughter, Alicia, began suffering from repeated bouts of severe depression. Even after they became ill, I resisted turning my reporting to mental health. But as I continued to experience the suffering that these illnesses can cause, I finally succumbed. If I was going to help my children, I needed to learn a lot more about psychiatry, both research and treatment. With a background covering research, I could have confined my reporting to published studies and conferences, the bread-and-butter of science coverage. But I quickly realized that by taking that approach, I would be getting only a small piece of the story. For one thing, research in the behavioral sciences is, as I had always suspected, at a rather primitive stage. Researchers know far more about the heart, the kidneys, and tumor cells than they do about the brain. That's understandable; the brain is a far more complex organ. The scandal, however, is that what is known about the brain is rarely taught to psychiatrists. “Most of the more advanced training for psychiatric residents is really apprenticeship training in which brain science plays little or no part,” write the Harvard psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson and the writer Jonathan A. Leonard in their book, Out of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis (2002). “The brain science knowledge of many practicing psychiatrists remains mostly informal or even anecdotal, leaving psychotherapy and psychopharmacology separated, isolated, and diminished at a time when brain science has the ability to nourish and combine them in an empowering fashion.” The message to reporters is that if we are to understand psychiatry, psychology, and mental illness, and write capably about them, we must do more than peruse the scientific journals and attend the neuroscience meetings. We need to get out there in the trenches, by which I mean the homes and the minds and hearts of the families who are suffering from mental illness.
STAGE PERSONA, STAND-UP COMEDY AND MENTAL HEALTH: ‘PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE’