What can you say about a woman who was created to take the world by storm, but who was faced with family difficulties from her youth that plagued her through her teenage and adult years. Still, giving up on herself, her family, and her life never became an option for her.

Though affected by mental illness as a youth and into her young adulthood, Linda learned to advocate for herself in ways that not only made her feel like a whole human being, but also led to her becoming an overcomer and a strong advocate for others with mental illness. Through bouts with psychosis, the loss of love interests and close family members, including her own mother, she made sound decisions to keep herself surrounded with people who could help her fashion her mind into a healthy state in times of crisis.

For Linda, being dually diagnosed with more than one mental illness was in short a heavy blow. However, she relied on professional therapists and psychiatrists and medication to guide and heal her on her way to recovery. Recovery became possible for Linda and she found love and married someone who also lives with a mental illness. Her supportive marriage helped give her the strength to face death in her family, shame and loneliness. Linda used her intelligence and determination and what she had learned from certain life experiences to help her to overcome many of the mental illnesses that had plagued her thoughts for far too long. Due to Linda’s breakthrough with her mental illness, she is now able to give back to the world and to many others who are also suffering. She shows us in her memoir that mental illness is not a death sentence nor is a diagnosis a reason to crawl up in a hole and rot and die. Linda shows us that there are resources for those in that situation, as entire professions specialize in helping people with mental illness.

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Peter & Lisa

A Mental Illness Children’s story

By Charles Katz & Linda Baron Katz

To every problem in life there is always a great resolution.

In this small read about two people battling two different mental illnesses, we can see that it’s not a death sentence and nothing to be ashamed of but it is a most common thing that occurs in many humans: men, women, boys and girls. I think that anyone who is suffering from a sick mind, unwanted feelings or thoughts but who is able to recognize these abnormal feelings and thoughts is already on the road to recovery.

Mental illness is something that many people are ashamed of. For many people mental illness can be apart of their genetic makeup, or developed during traumatic life events and occurrences, or through one’s environment and life experiences. This book shows us how two brave individuals had the courage to seek help after struggling with mood swings and sadness for long periods of time. After proper medical treatment these two characters in the book, Peter and Lisa, were able to live healthy and normal lives.

Through self-awareness and education, the battles that many humans face with mental illness can be won. People can go on to live healthy lifestyles with the support of medicine, family and supportive friends. People with mental illness or who have suffered from them in the past can go on to live productive and healthy lives.

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Drawing from Tony Glamortramp LeTigre

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OF BELIEF and what we have made of IT

I mounted the rostrum in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the League of Nations and to appeal for relief from the destruction which had been unleashed against my defenceless nation, by the fascist invader. I spoke then both to and for the conscience of the world. My words went unheeded, but history testifies to the accuracy of the waning that I gave in 1936. Today, I stand before the world organization which has succeeded to the mantle discarded by its discredited predecessor. In this body is enshrined the principle of collective security which I unsuccessfully invoked at Geneva. Here, in this Assembly, reposes the best-perhaps the last- hope for the peace of mankind. Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie)

If to be “imprisoned” were solely the concerns of social and judicial institutes, as some sort of inimitable consequence of justice and its process, then one should think the world would be better off. But the world as a giant essence finds ways to imprison itself beyond the familiar confines of fetters, chains and regimented penitentiaries. Possibly because its bounds is of a kind different from that which has been mentioned. Be it through eccentric ethos, ideological oddities, religious extremism or misguided popular sensibilities, we as thinking beings, defined by decades of urbane scholarship, constantly imprison ourselves—by constantly deceiving ourselves (and one another) with misguided faiths in bodies of deceits, falsehood and falsities. We seal our fate as a race of peoples, and as individuals, with that which is the enemy: the enemy which is the world; the world which regrettably is us.

History has revealed man and faith/belief as two constancies (one an entity, the other a concept) in steady relationship with each other, as both cannot in extant independently be. Sadly this is the founding basis for two prospects: of which one is the indispensible actuality of belief. And the other, the configuration of such belief and how it (the mechanics of it) aligns with our varying degrees of Innatism (if we are to momentarily suggests the tenets of Subjective Impressions are non-existent), presenting itself nonetheless as a sine qua non for successful epistemological, ontological, material and metaphysical pursuits. This faith could present itself as of a diversified reality to man: faith in intellectual and physical exertions, faith in some higher understanding, faith in a ‘seemingly crude definition’ of true purpose, faith in material determinism, faith in a thought system or faith in a noumenon. Regardless of which ever reality this amorphous totem chooses to commend itself to us, it is widely accepted that the set of man’s actions are to an extent ordered by how he chooses to work this unsubstantial, and as certain non-believers would tag ‘unsubstantiated aspect of human reality’ (bearing in mind the common noun ‘non-believer’ is of a nomenclature encompassing in the light of the material and metaphysical). Continue reading →

SOME THOUGHTS ON ROALD HOFFMANN’S NEW PLAY

By SHELBY STEPHENSON

Roald Hoffmann: Something That Belongs to You: A Play (Dos Madres Press: 2015) settles into two memories, one in 1943, Gribniv, Ukraine, another, 1992, in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia. The horrific beauty of the dialogue you can imagine:

“HEATHER: She never wants to talk about it. I have a project at school, about the Holocaust …

EMILE: Who can blame her, Heather? She lost her father, her husband, her young sister. Let her be.”

I have a friend whose father and family came over from Kiev when the father was sixteen. I said, Manny, you must have family there, do you visit them?

He said, No, Hitler took care of that.

And that was the end of the conversation.

In Hoffmann’s play, the memories blur and shape like children going fast around a flagpole.

As a boy I remember seeing the KKK. Here’s a scene from Something That Belongs To You:

“FRIEDA: (Maybe a little insulted.) A shtetl? Is Philadelphia a shtetl? It was a town, 12,000 people –Ukrainians, Jews, Poles. It was a good Polish town. (She is quiet for a moment.) The Poles didn’t like us much either. When Daniel … your grandfather… went to school at the Polytechnic, the Polish students beat him with razor blades on sticks.

HEATHER: Why?

FRIEDA: Because he was Jewish; they made the Jewish boys sit in ghetto benches.

HEATHER: I don’t understand.

FRIEDA: Like blacks in the back of the bus? You’ve heard about that?

HEATHER: Yes, a long time ago, in the South.

FRIEDA: At the same time, in Poland, The Jewish students had to sit on special benches. (Bitterly.) It was the nice Polish students who made them do it. They made a law.”

Tamar, a psychologist, says: “Memories have a way of coming back.”

Something That Belongs To You is an autobiographical drama of survival. Good and evil live in the hearts of the characters and work to instruct instinct to live and forgive and to try something as impractical as Love.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, then Poland. I met him some years ago when he accompanied the poet A. R. Ammons to Wake Forest University. Hoffmann is a poet and a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. He is Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, Cornell University.

Shelby Stephenson

Poet Laureate of North Carolina