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first i'm really sorry to read about what you and your wife are going through dk. i wish it were otherwise.
i agree with the direction dk's posts were going in--i said as much very early in the thread--not for the same reasons--but nonetheless. i don't think it is other than presumptuous for us, who are elements of a messageboard community, to make psychological diagnoses of other based not on who or how they are but on what and the way in which they write. this because what and how folk write are mediated by the patterns of their usage of the board, when they choose to write for example. and as much as we collectively operate as if this was a 3-d community, fact is that it is at best **like** as 3-d community, but it is **like** one because of the way in which we write within it. so you can't erase the fact of it being written and you can't by extension erase that this writing fits into larger patterns that shape it. and you can't erase the fact that these names we work with are to one extent or another personae--self-conscious or not, it's still the case--personae or masks. whether the sentences that you generate through that persona are understood as you make them to refer directly to your 3-d self or not, the fact remains that these sentences are translations and not direct mappings of states of mind. and these states of mind acquire a certain momentum as written maps--know what i mean? when roachboy "speaks" it is often the case that what he says comes from the action of making him speak, of filling a box with sentences--this is much more frequently the case than the contrary, a situation in which i--the 3-d person--know beforehand exactly what i am going to say and simply transcribe it.
so the information you are working with is heavily mediated, like it or not.
and it may be the case that writing is a way of exploring rather than reproducing an affective state.
and it may also be that writing is an action that is in itself therapeutic in that it forces a distance into what otherwise might seem immediate.
and you can't. no matter what you'd prefer to believe, simply reach around a sequence of sentences and *know* what's going on with the 3-d person who made them. not even in the context of this post, which i am writing as i am thinking about a proposal for a residency--this proposal fills up the space between clauses and i am writing this in part in order to allow that other project to stretch out a bit in my mind before i start writing it out and trying to figure out a budget on that basis. stuff like this happens all the time.
therapy in the sense of a talking cure is a relatively benign intervention and IF you are motivated to play the game of therapy it can be helpful--but you have to be motivated to play it--therapists are not always particularly smart, for example, and it is often the case that if you know about how various schools of therapy operate, you know what the moves are going to be before they happen--so it's VERY easy to short circuit the entire ritual (because that is what therapy is, more than anything else--a ritual).
it comes down to sf's understanding of what's going on with him really, his evaluation of the amount of room that takes up in his life, of whether that life which includes these dark periods is functional for him--not for any of us---and whether, following from that, it makes sense to participate in the rites of therapy in order to bring about a kind of change in that overall arrangement.
we can advise, but it's nothing more than that.
personally, i think snowy's position is good and is about as far as any of us should actually be willing to go.
psychotropics are another matter. i am personally opposed to them--ibut i understand that they can have a place--but that is REALLY not up to anyone but sf and the people who he might interact with in a therapeutic context--and should be only an option if the level of functionality is REALLY disrupted so that a chemical intervention can function to stabilize the situation--and that only so other forms of therapy can get started.
and there should be help available for stopping. but that's another rant.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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