"Celebrity" Murders, Teen Angst, Mental Health Diagnoses

I'm still hoping the Jodi Arias trial will disappear. It won't, obviously, but still one  can hope. One of my blogging correspondent, Paul,   commented that nothing gets media juices flowing like a celebrity murder. I agree  wholeheartedly, and cases such as O.J. Simpson's trial have proven this to be true.. 

Yet while a person's death at the hand of another is no less significant because the person who killed or the one accused of the killing or both are not famous people, I refuse to call a killing a "celebrity murder" simply because it contains sufficiently titillating details that Nancy Grace and her ilk choose to give the case major air time.  I refuse to grant Jodi Arias celebrity status. I'm not sure what it is that I would call her, but there is a difference, however subtle, between fame and infamy. Jodi Arias, if she did half of that even to which she has actually confessed,  has crossed the line to infamy.

On a totally unrelated topic, I have mental health diagnoses. My primary diagnosis is PTSD, which came on  as a result of an incident when I was attacked by a male and two females in a school restroom. The planned attack was intended to be rape with perhaps oral sodomy as an addition of insult to injury. The full sexual intent of the attack did not work out quite as the attackers had intended, as a particular physiological response on the part of a male is necessary to successfully rape someone. Just before the rape was to occur, one of those aiding and abetting my attacker  stepped on my leg where it had been badly broken and was not fully healed. This caused me to throw up, which caused the would-be rapist to fail to maintain the required physiological response. I suffered injuries at the hands and feet of all three attackers, including a kick from the would-be rapist to the place where he likely would have conducted his sexual assault had it been physically possible for him to do so.  My psychological response to this assault was initially "Acute Stress Disorder." when therapy and medication couldn't undo the damage and the manifestations of anxiety continued, the diagnosis became "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."  Cutting to the chase, that's considered my primary mental health diagnosis.

The mental health professionals by whom I've been treated mostly agree that I have a very minor case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  My primary mental health care professional says that not one of us is without his or her quirks, and a tendency to obsess and be a but compulsive happens to be my major quirk, and that I should not take it all that seriously. There may be some wisdom in what he said. For decades or even centuries, there were the bona fide crazies, many of whom were locked up, and then there was everyone else, few of whom were without idiosyncrasies of some sort, with some being more idiosyncratic than others.

One diagnosis that has never been suggested for me by anyone other than my father, who is, for a variety of reasons, about as far from being a psychiatrist as any physician could ever be, is that of bi-polarism. My dad likes to suggest that I'm bipolar. I don't take it too personally, as he accuses others, including President Obama, Mark Spoelstra, the wife of the oldest brother on Duck Dynasty, Bob Saget, Betty White, Jon Gruden,  Celine Dion, and many others of being bi-polar.  It seems that I'm in relatively good company.

My father's quackerous diagnoses notwithstanding, I have felt my emotions fluctuating to a greater degree than I remember  experiencing in the past. Maybe I have PMS. Maybe the barometric pressure is at an extremely high or low level.  Perhaps there was something to  the whole idea of the Mayan calendar, and whoever calculated the whole thing happened to be off by a few months. maybe I'm reacting to the upcoming end of the world.

It all reminds me of an old Billy Joel song, "Summer at Highland Falls,"  except that Jared and romance  aren't a big part of my emotional pendulum swing.  I'll quote the song for the benefit of your cultural intelligence and/or trip down memory lane. 


Summer at Highland Falls

They say that these are not the best of times, 
But they're the only times I've ever known, 
And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. 
Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes, 
And I can only stand apart and sympathize. 
For we are always what our situations hand us... 
It's either sadness or euphoria. 


And so we argue and we compromise, 
And realize that nothing's ever changed, 
For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same. 
Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity, 
Our reason co-exists with our insanity. 
And though we choose between reality and madness... 
It's either sadness or euphoria. 

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies 
Perhaps we don't fulfill each other's fantasies. 
And so we'll stand upon the ledges of our lives, 
With our respective similarities... 
It's either sadness or euphoria
                                                       --Billy Joel


Exactly what is it about teen angst that causes us  to feel that it is unique to each of us as individuals?  In our minds, no other generation has ever experienced it, or at least not to the degree that we, the present generation, are feeling it.  Is it narcissism?  Or human nature? Or truth?