Friday Sprog Blogging: a chat about mental illness

Assuming the post title hasn’t already scared you away, I wanted to share a conversation I had with the elder Free-Ride offspring about a potentially scary-to-talk-about subject. As you’ll see, it went fine.
And, as a bonus, there’s a cake recipe at the end of the post.


Dr. Free-Ride: (trying to get the blue sparkle hair stuff that someone put in elder offspring’s hair for “Crazy Hair Day” out of elder offspring’s hair) What are you doing there?
Elder offspring: I’m making crazy faces in the mirror. Do I look crazy?
Dr. Free-Ride: You know, I’m not totally comfortable using the word “crazy” to describe people.
Elder offspring: Why not?
Dr. Free-Ride: “Crazy” has kind of a mean tone to it. It sounds like taunting. Being mean to people with a mental illness is just as wrong as being mean to anyone else.
Elder offspring: What’s “mental illness”?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, you know how your body can get sick, or hurt if you bang it up?
Elder offspring: Yeah.
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, your brain is part of your body. It’s made of body stuff, too.
Elder offspring: Uh huh.
Dr. Free-Ride: So, the same way that breaking a bone might make it hard for you to walk, hurting your brain–
Elder offspring: Might make it hard to think?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, and ’cause the brain is involved in coordinating a lot of the stuff the other parts of your body do, hurting your brain could also make it hard to smell, or to see, or to remember things, or even to walk. And brains are more complicated than bones — they’re sending and receiving a lot of signals with chemicals.
Elder offspring: I knew that.
Dr. Free-Ride: But what that means is that if the levels of those chemical signals get messed up, or if the parts of the brain that send them or receive them aren’t doing it quite right, that can affect how you feel or how well you can do some of the thinking-activities you might want to do.
Elder offspring: If the signals in the brain get messed up, can you fix them?
Dr. Free-Ride: Doctors know a lot more about how they work than they used to, and that means they have more ideas about how to fix them than they used to. The brain is pretty complex, though, so there’s a lot that hasn’t been totally figured out.
Elder offspring: So is mental illness the hardest thing to fix that can go wrong with a body?
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know. Some things the doctors are pretty good at treating, others they’re still working on.
Elder offspring: Is it harder than giving someone a heart transplant?
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. In theory, a heart transplant is probably easier, because you’re just taking one pump out and putting a different pump in. But, do you remember how your body deals with germs?
Elder offspring: The white blood cells go ARR ARR ARR ARR ARR and chomp them up.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, because your immune system is pretty good at recognizing the germs as not being part of your body. But the cells in organs like hearts also tell your immune system whether they’re your cells from your body, or whether they’re from outside your body.
Elder offspring: And?
Dr. Free-Ride: That means if you’re giving someone a heart transplant, you have to make sure their immune system doesn’t look at the new heart and go ARR ARR ARR ARR ARR and chomp it up.
Elder offspring: That would be bad.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yup. That means transplant patients have to take medicine that keeps their immune system from rejecting the transplanted heart. The problem can be that then their immune system doesn’t go ARR ARR ARR ARR ARR and chomp up actual germs that could make them sick.
Elder offspring: So it is harder to do heart transplants than to help people with mental illnesses.
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know that it’s a straightforward comparison.
Elder offspring: We could ask doctors who do each of them and see what they say.
Dr. Free-Ride: They might not agree on which one is harder, either!
* * * * *
“Crazy Cake” (which is a traditional name for the type and method of incorporation of ingredients and, at least in our household, has no stigma attached to it)
Preheat your oven to 350 F.
In a 9 inch by 9 inch square pan, stir together:
1.5 cups flour (we use 1 cup whole wheat and 0.5 cup unbleached all purpose flour)
1 cup sugar
0.25 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
0.5 teaspoon salt
0.5 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Add and stir in:
5 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon vinegar (white or cider — no fancy schmancy red wine or balsamic vinegar)
Add and stir until uniformly incorporated (with no pockets of dry ingredients left unsoaked):
1 cup water
Before putting it in the oven, you can sprinkle on top any combination of the following (or none of them):
1 cup chocolate chips (Guittard is our favorite brand — they get so nice and melty, even when cooled)
1/2 cup chopped pecans (or other nuts)
1/2 cup dried cherries
Bake for about 25 minutes, or until the cake is springy to the touch.
This is very easy for a kid to assemble (although a grown-up should help with the oven). It’s a nice opportunity to talk about chemical leavening (baking soda + vinegar makes bubbles), and you can also sneak some math into the measuring. (I tend to use only a single measuring cup — a quarter-cup — to measure all the ingredients for which the teaspoon or Tablespoon would take too long.)

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Posted in Kids and science.

8 Comments

  1. You might also discuss results of brain injury from stroke or trauma causing some similar problems with brain-body connections and control. The brain can overcome some injuries more easily than others (concussion and mild stroke vs. severe head trauma or severe stroke). [Insert a discussion of the need for protective headgear, seat belts, etc. EVERYTIME the child participates in pertinent activities.]
    Just like a leg needs therapy to work well after a bad break or sprain, so the brain may be able to work better after an injury (and some rest) with the right therapy. Connections need to be reactivated or rebuilt.
    Thanks (also from Duke).

  2. I use “crazy” a lot to explain instances of hard-to-understand behaviour. Like why my nine-year-old should talk to me if someone he doesn’t know threatens him at Neopets or wants to meet him. And I also explain that “crazy” means “something not working quite right in a person’s brain”.

  3. In an amusing coincidence, I read this post while consuming a piece of “Wacky Cake”, which appears to be a very closely related species to “Crazy Cake”. It’s a handwritten recipe, and I have no idea where I got it from. (My home is a very mutagenic environment for recipes, and my Wacky Cake usually has mashed bananas replacing the oil, and often includes grated zucchini.)

  4. I’ll be sure to try out that crazy cake with the kids soon. Please let me know when someone’s figure out how to do brain transplants to fix serious brain issues.

  5. Ah, my family would call that “wacky cake” though my mom could never explain why. I went looking one day on the web and found that it was supposedly a Depression era fave, because no milk or eggs) and found somewhere a suggestion that the name comes from wacke, ” A soft, earthy, dark-colored rock or clay derived from the alteration of basalt.” But I don’t know if that’s the case.

  6. I’m not crazy, I’m merely insane.
    Some people see things that aren’t there. Some people hear things that weren’t said. Still others take news stories at face value. We call people like this liberal democrats.

  7. It’s called wowie cake in my family. I got it from my mother who I assume got it from Granny. (Though I’ve come to suspect that my mother did not like her mother’s cooking. The summer I lived with the grandparents, I was not familiar with any of the meals and Deedee tells me they were the same meals they ate as kids down to the day of the week they were served.) Anyway I like wowie cake cause it isn’t too sweet. Try it with peppermint stick ice cream. Way back in the day Lisa S. took the recipe to use with her students.

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