Riders on the Storm: Brilliance and mental illness; moods, madness and wellness

Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins Hospital at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who catapulted to fame 25 years ago with a bestseller she wrote about her manic depression, titled “An Unquiet Mind.” Jamison “changed the way we think about moods and madness,” says her publisher, Penguin Random House Books.

Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, In the prologue to “An Unquiet Mind,” Jamison was in a manic grip that sent her running around a parking lot at two in the morning. Later in the book, she described the world going dark when she was unable to get out of bed or make sense of the words she tried to read.

She found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Jamison explored bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

I was working as a part-time reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, finishing writing my master’s thesis (“America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan” ISBN: 0612046591) at Queen’s University when Jamison’s book was first published. I was able to read an advance book review copy of “An Unquiet Mind” at the Whig back in the Summer of 1995.

Aside from being attracted to her elegant and compelling writing, I wanted to read  Jamison’s book for a much more personal reason; my grad school thesis supervisor had told us about his struggles with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness in the autumn of 1993 during a first semester afternoon seminar. I remember the day vividly. While it was a fairly typical overcast and dreary day for that time of year in the Limestone City on Lake Ontario’s north shore, my supervisor was over-dressed in what appeared to be the warmest cardigan in the world, as if he just couldn’t stay warm no matter what he wore or did. At -30°C (-41°C with the wind chill) as it is here in Thompson, Manitoba, as I write these words some 27 years later on Dec. 23, 2020, the cardigan would have been perfect: that day in Kingston so long ago it somehow looked overdone, out of place.

And it would have been just around then, as he was slowly walking around the classroom, that he told his students about how he suffered from manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. In trying to explain it, he put it this way: “I wake up every day and it’s like I’m waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning. That’s how the world looks.” You don’t have to suffer from a mental illness to immediately understand something of how the world appeared to him. Most of us, I think, have a sense of vulnerability, if we’re not blessedly asleep at that hour. Not a lot of good things are known to happen at 4 a.m. in my experience; sort or reminiscent of the dread middle of the night phone ringing with an unwelcome call jarring you out of a deep sleep for what is seldom, or ever, good news. God, grant us sunrise.

I spent the next two years trying to time my meetings and assignment schedule with my supervisor by trying to guess where he’d be in his mood cycle: despondent and depressed, more-or-less “normal,” not overly up or down (a phase that often ran for months, much longer than either his low lows or high highs lasted usually.)  

In the Summer of 1995, I was writing my thesis in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground, and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The hall is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, who was head of mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960. That’s also when I read  Jamison’s just-published memoir, “An Unquiet Mind.” I hoped reading one professor would give me some insights into another professor, my professor. And it did.

As I read the book, I remember handing in the first draft of my thesis on a Friday afternoon. More than 100 pages. I had it back Monday morning from my supervisor with detailed handwritten notations and insightful, penetrating comments and questions. I was speechless that he found time even to read it over the weekend, much less comment with laser-like brilliant questions that clearly hadn’t occurred to me in the writing.

Flash-forward a quarter of a century. Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jamison’s granddaughter, is the arts and culture writer for JewishBoston.com. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Cognoscenti and other venues. And her memoir, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Mandel Vilar Press.

“Almost a century ago, my grandmother was forced into a frigid shower, ostensibly to calm her down during a devastating panic attack,” Bolton-Fasman wrote Nov. 30 at JewishBoston.com (https://www.jewishboston.com/and-then-unquiet-minds-in-a-quiet-time/).. She was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get a hold of herself.’ At one point, Grandma’s physician brother thought she belonged in an asylum. I picture Grandma in that shower rocking back and forth, shivering more from terror than cold.”

“My grandmother’s story came rushing back,” wrote Bolton-Fasman, as I went over my reporting for an event Dec. 7, aptly called “Unquiet Minds in a Quiet Time: Insights on Mental Health, Resilience and Community,” sponsored by the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project (RSIP), a partnership between Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) and the Ruderman Family Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation established and  managed by the Ruderman family, both of which are based in Boston and support synagogues “in creating communities where people of all abilities are valued equally and participate fully.”

Kay Redfield Jamison turned 74 last June. Her latest book, “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Biography in 2018.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The Internet of Things … things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing

 

 

A few weeks ago, I happened to capture from television for my PVR, an airing of the 1983 movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Woods and Ally Sheedy. War Games is a delightful, campy end-of-the-Cold War Ronald Reagan-era science fiction film, which didn’t seem quite so campy when I first saw it at a movie theatre in Cornwall, Ontario, the year the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul, after the flight deviated from its approved route and flew through prohibited airspace near Sakhalin Island at the far eastern extreme of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika and Glasnost, as it turned out, were just around the corner, but not quite yet arrived. Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.

Flash-forward 34 years from War Games to WannaCry.

WannaCry?

Yes. Not because I am one of the unfortunates with a computer infected May 12 with WannaCry, which appears a dozen years after the first documented ransomware attack happened in the United States in 2005.

Rather cry because of the State of the Internet itself in 2017. That should make anyone, Bitcoin pirates excepted, want to cry. If ever their was a swamp needing to be drained, it’s the Internet (so ubiquitous The Associated Press stopped capitalizing it last year), a tangled network that more or less runs the world from up in the Cloud somewhere, while making cyberwar on us down below through a deluge of ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing targeting our computer vulnerabilities; with the words ransomware, malware, spam and phishing so common now in the public lexicon, they no longer challenge my spellchecker and I no longer need to define them.

WannaCry, also known as Wanna Decryptor, WanaCryptor, or wcry, is a specific self-replicating multilingual ransomware type of viral worm malware program that prevents or limits users from accessing their system by encrypting all their data except for two files: instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself.

It is believed to exploit a vulnerability in older and unpatched Microsoft Windows operating systems to invisibly move from computer-to-computer. And unlike many other forms of malware, it can spread on its own: it doesn’t need a human to click on a fake e-mail attachment. WannaCry uses a hacking tool called the Eternal Blue exploit, believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to give American intelligence operative access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. But a mysterious organization called Shadow Brokers, which first came to public attention last year, claimed last month it had stolen a “cyber weapon” of that description from an American spy agency, and dumped it on the Internet for all and sundry to use.

Once installed and the software is locked, WannaCry demands a US$300 ransom to be paid within six hours in Bitcoins, a digital computer cryptocurrency created in 2009 by an unknown person or persons using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, to decrypt the files.

The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, called the May 12 global attack, which has affected hundreds of thousands of files in more than 100 countries by early counts, “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” Bitcoins are encrypted to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds in a decentralized way, operating independently of a central bank, and placing Bitcoin over the last eight years usually beyond the reach of regulatory restriction and confiscation. A single Bitcoin is worth about US$1,734, which is about $500 more than a troy ounce of gold will set you back at around US$1,230.

A decade ago, if you weren’t trolling sketchy sites, knowingly or unknowingly, and had a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program, odds were you could manoeuvre around the Internet OK, plagued by little more than some annoying, but hardly crippling, e-mail spam. Today, for this WordPress blog, I use Akismet,which bills itself as “an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.” Akismet heitpfully tells me it has “protected your site from 11,379 spam comments already.”

If you were an Apple loyalist, working on a Mac, viruses were almost unheard of a decade ago, especially when compared to Microsoft Windows, first released in 1995. Apple Macintosh computer users still are less likely to be infected with a virus than Microsoft Windows users, but as Apple gains market share and Macs are used by more people, virus infections are becoming more common than they used to be.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m  bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, more than 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

While the so-called “Internet of Things” is usually taken to mean the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data, perhaps the definition should be broadened to encompass things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing.

The only solution, at least how I see it, to virtual phishing may be to pull the plug and go fishing in real life.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Who suggests to their online readers they remember to log-off from time to time and bake some chocolate chip cookies IRL (à la Clifford Stoll) or maybe head down to the arena for a kids’ hockey game? Mea culpa

Every now and then over the years I’ve mentioned the pioneering effort in online journalism I was involved in briefly as managing editor from November 1996 to February 1997 in Kingston, Ontario. The Kingston Net-Times was an online-only newspaper going head-to-head with the Kingston Whig-Standard before even the Whig was online (which made competing online kind of easy for the brief time that lasted).

Everyone knows by now the fixed costs of online publications are a fraction that of bricks-and-mortar newspapers, some now with their high-end Goss 96pp Sunday 5000 presses, which weigh in as a total equipment package at about 1,371 tons, with the single heaviest piece of equipment weighing in at 43 tons. That’s bigger than the Goss press out back at the Thompson Citizen, which hasn’t printed a newspaper since January 2007 (but school kids invariably asked more questions about it on class visits to the newspaper than any other aspect of the operation during my seven or so years there).

But there is still a cost to producing an online paper, even if it is from your computer at your kitchen table, which was pretty close to how the Kingston Net-Times was cobbled together. By any measure it was pioneering but also under capitalized. So – and this is often how things go in the newspaper industry – while I was having great fun during an Ottawa CBC Radio Noon interview tweaking the nose of Goliath, in this case the Kingston Whig-Standard, where I had worked as a reporter and copy editor from 1993 through June 1996, when I left to work briefly as a copy editor at the Ottawa Sun, and making some sport of Conrad Black and Hollinger, the newspaper company he built with David Radler, I was also aware the publisher was having some, shall we say challenges, making payroll at the Kingston Net-Times. Ever the pragmatist or mercenary, take your pick, the CBC interview hadn’t aired more than a few weeks earlier when I decamped for a second stint at the Peterborough Examiner, which was not online then and producing old-fashioned ink-on-print newspapers. Oh. Did I mention the Peterborough Examiner was, of course, at that point a Hollinger paper?  Actually, I believe by then it was our sister paper, The Intelligencer, down the road in Belleville, Ontario, that was printing the paper for us, and it was trucked back to Peterborough overnight. The Peterborough Examiner press, too, had been silenced by economics when I returned in April 1997, if memory serves me correctly, although I stand to be corrected on the date, as I’ve been at several papers over the last 20 years, where silenced presses still sit physically in the building as some sort of behemoth over-sized metal museum pieces.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m a bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he  discusses his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kid’s hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22