Ask LemmyKilmister!

17/12/20 LemmyKilmister 69

It’s Thurdnesday afternoon and I’m bored. I’ve lived in five states. I’ve got a PhD in social science and teach at the university level. I’ve worked twenty years in corrections, fifteen with the mentally ill. My kids have played baseball, softball, football (men’s and women’s), field hockey, and rugby (men’s and women’s). I am a heavy metal aficionado. I spent almost three years reading nothing but books on the JFK assassination. I drink more beer and inexpensive whiskey than I should. Ask me a question!

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69 Comments

  1. Lemmy,
     
    I’m having a real problem staying motivated to exercise with the crummy weather, holiday tasks, pointless work issues, etc. What can I do to convince my depressed brain that I need to go out there for a 3-mile run with the dogs when all I want to do is stay inside, eat garbage, drink beer/wine, and play Skyrim for the 270th time?
     
    – SlothWeaver
    …

    • Dude, if you can run 3 miles you’re asking the wrong guy.  I feel you, though.  I once sat in my car for 30 minutes outside the boxing gym, willing myself to go inside.  I went him instead.  In the meantime, here’s some pump-up music for ya:
       

  2. Have you ever seen Linklater’s “Slacker”? It’s an episodic film that follows intersecting lives of recent college graduates–it’s one of my favorite movies. Here’s a good scene about the JFK assassination:
     

    • Dogs are literally my favorite thing.  But I do have cats, too.
      Warm-ish.  Like 75-80.  Fuck all this snow shit.  I’m looking out at about a foot and a half that fell today and not excited.
      Have you ever had salmiakki?  It’s weird.
      Every day I wake up, look at the clock, and my first word of the day is “Goddamnit.”
      I don’t watch many movies because Mrs. Lemmy and I can hardly ever agree on what to watch.

  8. I don’t know if it’s the same as salmiakki but I had salted licorice from IKEA once and I couldn’t decide if it was oddly okay or too gross to eat. I think it was both.
    Of the 5 states you’ve lived in, which was your favorite?

  18. Dr. Lemmy, if you were to be given an unlimited & unending budget, and the magic powers to implement change immediately & wherever you saw fit, what would you change, for people at which developmental stages, and where (maybe why, too?), to help out the populations of folks you’ve worked with in mental health?
     
    Also, how many drums do you feel are the bare minimum, for an adequate rock-band Trap set?
    and Zildjian, Paiste, or other brand?
    also–colors, or plain brass?😉

    • I work with people with serious, intractable mental illness in a state that has few resources.  They end up in jail because there aren’t enough crisis and hospital beds, and because we have weak community commitment laws that let people run around ill because “that’s their right.”  I’d re-frame our thinking to reflect that when people’s illnesses are telling them not to take medicine, they are not making an informed choice in the way you and I do.  There’s no dignity in allowing someone to be naked and smearing their feces all over the walls of their jail cell for two weeks because we don’t want to force medication on them.
       
      And the drummer for Killswitch Engage makes an astounding amount of noise with a 5-piece kit, so I’d say five.  I have no idea of the differences in cymbals, but colors are cool.

      • Do you have any recommendations on memoirs, autobiographies, or not phd level books on mental illness? I just find the subject fascinating. I am currently reading “Madness” by Marya Hornbacher, about her Bipolar I dx. Fucking yikes.

        • …I’m sure Lemmy has better suggestions…& it’s likely not the sort of thing you had in mind…but if you haven’t already you could do a lot worse than the stuff Oliver Sacks wrote…like “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”?

        • I don’t read a lot of books on mental illness and I’m not a clinician, but Ratey’s “A User’s Guide to the Brain”  and LeDoux’s “Synaptic Self” were interesting.

        • Not Dr. Lemmy, but along with RIP’s suggestion of Dr. Sachs (Awakenings–even in the movie form is fascinating, and also heartbreaking!
          And ANY interview/podcast you can hear him in is FUN to listen to–he was a GREAT interviewee!😉😁🤗)
           
          My other Recs are all ASD-related;
          Temple Grandin is another great interviewee, and her books are great reads, too.
          Sometimes the science IS a bit heavy–but the fact that she both talks about the science side of studying ASD’s (like FMRI’s), AND then talks about what the results mean in relation to how she experiences the world around her, is COOL.
           
          I *do* have a couple (minor!) quibbles with her “three ways ASD brains present” theory, because I don’t think it’s *quite* as cut & dry as she posits… but on the whole, ESPECIALLY with the way she’s able to explain “the inside of her brain” her books are–imo–really good reads.
           
          Her mother Eustacia Cutler also has at least one book–i haven’t read it yet, but i WANT to.
          In it, she talks about what it was like on the other end of Temple’s childhood–what it was like to raise her, pushing back against the MD’s who thought she as the mother of a kiddo on the Spectrum was a “refrigerator mother”, etc.
          Cutler is FASCINATING to me, because she basically did what we NOW call Early Intervention (EI) with Temple–decades before EI was a thing, or a known way of working with kids… the fact that she fought for Temple the way she did, and was able to get her started on the path to where Temple IS nowadays, is just COOL as hell to me… ngl,  probably because I had a mom who unknowingly/unwittingly did something similar–but NOT as involved.💖
           
          A couple other books I’ve really enjoyed, and which got passed around through multiple co-workers, to help folks understand where our kiddos were coming from/what ASD’s can be like on the inside are The Reason I Jump–
          There IS some controversy around that book, or at least was… but for us, it gave some useful insight into a couple of the kiddos we were working with at the time.
           
          And I really LOVED Carly’s Voice, too.
          Mostly because I’ve seen & heard interviews with her–both ones where she’s being interviewed, AND where she’s interviewing others. 
           
          She’s AWESOME, hilarious, and she’s got an absolutely wicked sense of humor… she just doesn’t speak with her physical voice to communicate (she uses a communication device–think: similar to the way Stephen Hawking did).
           
          Her book was valuable, because it showed in concrete ways, how–like SO many of our kiddos at work–people can have great(perfect!!!) cognition, and 100% fine receptive language,** but for whatever reason, have absolutely zero ability to use expressive language.***
           
          We had a couple kiddos like THAT, too.
          One little dude in particular, was communication STARVED–he picked up ASL signs in 5-10 minutes–when he observed us teaching them to another child, and was USING them, *appropriately & in context* to meet his own needs,  and was even able to generalize them to other contexts, too!
           
          But for some unknown/undiagnosed reason, his brain & the nerves that connected to the muscles in his mouth, throat, & diaphragm–which ALL must work together to produce speech… just didn’t work together.
           
          Much like Carly’s… 
          He’s an AWESOME little dude, and like Carly, has TONS of thoughts, opinions, & things to say… he just (like Carly!) has issues using the structures in his throat, and  needs to tell folks in a different way.😉💖
           
          **the ability to hear, process, and understand audible language.
          ***the ability to use one’s own voice fluidly, in a way others around them can easily understand.

  21. Thanks for this Brighter,
    I didn’t know about guanacos!!
    We’re working on inclusion stuff in our classrooms, and that share just sent me down some Wikipedia rabbit holes which will add to our classrooms, AND help our program be more inclusive for our kiddos whose families come from South American countries😉💖
    So THANK YOU!

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