WEIRDLAND: Mental Illness on the rise, Suicidal ideation, Jim Morrison: The White Blind Light

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Mental Illness on the rise, Suicidal ideation, Jim Morrison: The White Blind Light

An estimated 8.3 million American adults — about 3.4 percent of the U.S. population — suffer from serious psychological distress, an evaluation of federal health data concluded. “Mental illness is on the rise. Suicide is on the rise. And access to care for the mentally ill is getting worse,” said lead researcher Judith Weissman. She’s a research manager in the department of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “Earning and sustaining a living is getting harder for people, especially for men,” Weissman said. “The loss of jobs could mean there’s a loss of community and a loss of role as wage earners and providers.” “In the past, you may go out and meet with your friends and talk about something, but when you got home you’d go to sleep,” Dr. Trivedi said. “The difficulty now is you can’t really turn things off. We don’t necessarily have downtimes to recharge and get our bearings straight again.” The study was published April 17 in the journal Psychiatric Services. Source: www.cbsnews.com

Therapists have long been aware of the connection between media depiction of suicide and a spike in suicide rates. An Australian survey of over 20 relevant studies from 2010 concludes: “There is good reason to expect that entertainment media depictions of suicide could lead to imitation acts: Such portrayals are widespread, often send a message reinforcing suicide as a course of action, often include graphic footage of the method of suicide, and often appeal to young audiences.” “I can almost guarantee that within the next year there will be a student we hear about on the news that actually does this exact process with the tapes,” said Katie Rutherford, a family therapist in Manhattan. She works with at-risk youth in the child welfare system, who have high rates of suicidal ideation.  90% of people who commit suicide suffer from mental illness. While external circumstances such as bullying can contribute to suicide, the show misses the opportunity to discuss the underlying cause. Source: www.indiewire.com


Patti Smith performed her debut album, Horses, and received a standing ovation on the first night of the  Byron Bay Bluesfest festival, on Thursday, 13 April. Released December 1975, Horses fused rock and roll structures and Smith's free-form, and was hailed by music critics as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of the American punk rock movement. Smith performed Gloria, Redondo Beach, Birdland, Free Money. Break It Up, Land, and Elegie. Before singing Break It Up, Smith explained to the audience that she wrote this song about The Doors frontman Jim Morrison, and based on her recollection of her visit of Morrison's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, as well as a dream in which she witnessed Morrison stuck to a marble slab shaped as an angel, trying and eventually succeeding in breaking free from the stone with Morrison donning 'big white wings.' Source: www.northernstar.com.au


Around the time Waiting For The Sun was released, Morrison became discouraged and then drank some more. Sometimes he'd have a fight with Pamela and say, "Well, you don't love me anymore, so I'm gonna jump." Then he'd crawl out the window and hang from the ledge. He'd just hang there and after a while he'd say something like, "You better be nice to me or I'm gonna let go." Jim wasn’t concerned about Pam’s expenditures, even though he would complain about it in a good-natured way to his friends. “He’d complain about, ‘God, all the money she’s spending on that place!’” says Babe Hill: “But he said it in such a way that you could tell he was really proud of her. Like a man talking about his frivolous wife. He loved her very much.” Morrison had Max Fink draw up a will in which he made Pamela his sole beneficiary. Jim signed it and had Paul Ferrara witness the will on February 12, 1969. “Pam was the all-inclusive person he would leave anything he had to,” says Ferrara: “His will was intended to prove to Pam that he did love her.” Seventeen days after signing this legal love letter, Jim Morrison committed professional suicide. He had screamed Wake Up! a thousand times and only a few eyes had even flickered. Maybe what destroyed him was their refusal to let him set them free. ―"Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison" (2014) by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky


"I've become obsessed with Morrison. In his own way, he was very much on the front line. He was a warrior," Oliver Stone said of Jim Morrison. "He was an outlaw rebel pushing at boundaries. A searcher who wrote about sex and death, two things any guy who'd been in Vietnam could relate to." Morrison had come to personify what French philosopher Camus once said: "Nihilism results when clinical despair is permeated by a sense of life's absurdity." Ray Manzarek believed Stone's film The Doors portrayed Morrison as "a violent, drunken fool. That wasn't Jim. All you see is Jim as a drunken hedonist. The tragedy is that fame consumed him. But that wasn't Jim's message. He was intelligent. He was loving. He was a good man who believed in freedom and in questioning authority." Manzarek felt the lavish, re-created Doors concert footage was "brilliantly filmed, although over-amped and sensationalistic." Source: articles.latimes.com


Your home is still here. Violet, uncertain. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. Jumped humped, born to suffer... Made to undress in the wilderness. All of us have found a safe niche where we can store up our riches and talk to our fellows... in the same premises of disaster. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. Let me tell you about heartache in the loss of god... wandering, wandering in hopeless nights. Moonshine night, mountain village insane in the wood and the deep trees. ...and the deep trees... and the deep trees... Your home is still here. Violet, uncertain. Oh, I want to be there, I want us to be there, oh, I want to be there...beside the lake, beneath the moon.... Woolen, swollen... drinking its hot liquor... I want to be there. Thank you, oh lord, for the white blind light. A city rises from the sea. Let me tell you about heartache in the loss of god. Wandering, wandering in hopeless nights. Let me show you the maiden with rot iron soul. Out here in perimeter there are no stars. Out there we are stoned... Immaculate...

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