Thinking Bloggers

I've just received a 'Thinking Blogger Award' from D at Bipolar Chicks Blogging and Breaking My Own Rules. I've actually received one before, from Gianna at Bipolar Blast, but as I was so out of it at the time thanks to Zoloft withdrawal that it kind of failed to register. Thanks guys.

I'm told the rules for accepting the award are as follows:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

It's actually hard to nominate 'a top five', with so many blogs, written in so many styles, offering so many perspectives, so I'm going to do what I always do, and interpret the rules in my own way. At the moment, there are blogs I check almost every day, and have done so since I began blogging four months ago, and blogs that I'm just beginning to delve into, usually as a result of recommendations / comments made at my more regular haunts.

Stuff I always read:

Bipolar Blast

Gianna at BB was the first person to comment on my blog, and gave me heaps of encouragement and advice when I was beginning to feel as if I was talking to myself in the bath in the dark with a roaring hairdryer threatening to topple off the sink and fry me in my own random ruminations.

Her blog is unique in the way that it beautifully captures her day-to-day engagement with all the issues involved in reconceptualising herself and her 'illness': drug withdrawal, the damage done, finding things that work for her, and all the ups and downs that go with it. It gives her blog a freshness and immediacy that the blogs of a more polemic nature lack.

Furious Seasons

Apart from Philip Dawdy's investigative reporting that the rest of us wouldn't have a clue about doing, and long 'windy' reflective pieces that inspire so many comments and/or posts elsewhere, this blog is a bit like a giant cyber-coffee shop such that if you don't stop by at least once in a while you run the risk of being seriously out of the loop when it comes to what's hot and what's not. The recent 'Media Madness' posts have proved especially useful in netting new blogs a readership and provoking debate among the regular commentariat.

Just last week Philip suggested that he may expand the scope of the blog by posting on gender relations as well as mental health issues. Whether or not this will work is yet to be seen - such posts are likely to provoke more emotionally charged and diverse responses from the rank and file, and it will be a challenge for everyone involved to remain open to new ideas and to respond in an intelligent and engaging way to those with very different opinions. (Thus far, the clientele of this cyber-coffee shop have tended to agree on most of the broader issues - that the tactics of Big Pharma suck, that shrinks who put small children on cocktails of absurdly powerful drugs suck, etc - so I would expect to see some interesting 'side-effects' if this status quo is disrupted.)

Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look

This is great for a non-bitchy, no-bullshit analysis of Big Pharma, academic psychiatry and the implications of the latest of either's policy statements, research 'results' and marketing ploys. Read this before swallowing that.

Stuff I've looked at occasionally for a while but am now starting to read more closely:

Polarcoaster: This is a relatively new blog that is intelligent, straightforward and thoughtful by a young Canadian woman who was diagnosed as bipolar in her late teens.

Writhe Safely: A blog written by someone very smart and very pissed off. That should go a long way to explain why I like it. Some really interesting stuff about PTSD went up last week that I intend to reflect upon and post about here.

Depression Introspection: A blog with a great layout that combines personal pieces and useful information on topics such as suicide and anti-depressants, with a dash of investigative journalism. It had a terrific post yesterday on the Virginia Tech shooting. Otherwise, there's perhaps a bit too much religion for my taste, but then again I'm not from the States, so my tolerance levels are low!

Breaking My Own Rules: I'm looking forward to all those posts you've been promising, 'specially the dark-humoured psych ward story, D!

Soulful Sepulcher: Precise, prolific and poignant, and as Stephany says: "Knowledge is your best weapon".

And what ever happened to:

Neurotransmission? This is less a daily 'random thoughts' kind of blog than a series of lengthy, less frequent essays that explore topics such as the construction of DSM and the psychology of evil in great depth. Hopefully, Jason, the author, will post again soon.

Off topic: but here's a link to a blog whose author has just survived yet another near-death experience, this time as a result of a surgical error compounded by less-than-ideal post-op monitoring. OK, time for some statistics:

2.5 million people die in the US annually. The murder rate in 2004 was 5.5 per 100,000, which equates to approximately 16,500 murders. Now here are some estimates of the death rates as a result medical errors (full references here):

44,000 to 98,000 deaths annually from medical errors (Institute of Medicine)

225,000 deaths annually from medical errors including 106,000 deaths due to "nonerror adverse events of medications" (Starfield)

180,000 deaths annually from medication errors and adverse reactions (Holland)

7,391 deaths resulted from medication errors (Institute of Medicine)

Which kind of puts our fears of death by terrorist attacks or mass murder sprees into perspective, I think. But then again, I'm a thinking blogger!