SMACKDOWN: You know how sometimes we read an article and want to punch someone in the mouth? This happens regularly enough that we’ve decided to create an entire ‘category’ just for smackdowns, called Automatic Smackdowns. We’re still deciding how to apply this label retroactively, stay tuned.
We’ve been known to practice a bit of journalistic medicine around here; suggesting diagnoses for Brittany Murphy, Tila Tequila and Lindsay Lohan, among others. We’re all about breaking down the stigma around mental illness and the smack talk that haunts young women in the public eye, where it’s easier to talk shit than to address real issues at work (case in point: Britney Spears!) to a truly heartbreaking degree.
We know that we’re not doctors, and should probs stop, but we’re often related to doctors or perhaps visit doctors regularly (and some of us are, invariably, experiential experts with mental health topics TRUST ME there are a lot of orange bottles at our family picnics), but you know who’s really not a doctor?
ROZ ZURKO.
who the hell are you roz zurko
Who’s Roz Zurko, you may ask? Is that like another Dr.Phil person? Not it is not. It is just a bitter human talking crazy about Our Mother of Jesus Savior of the Hemptemple Haus of Eternal Sexytime Loveface Ticklecorn LADY MOTHERFUCKING GAGA.
According to The Zurk, Lady Gaga is “exhibiting text-book symptoms of Bi-Polar Manic Phase.”
Gaga often displays manic traits in her claims and actions; she may very well be bi-polar and cycling through manic stages at times. We have seen this in other statements she has made. In her interview with Vanity Fair, she went on about her “vagina being the heart of all her creation.” She also said that “she did not like to have sex because she fears the person will steal her creativity through her vagina.”
Oh god, really? You mean Lady Gaga is crazy? Lady Gaga says crazy things? GET OUT! OMG.
Sure, I appreciate the insightful diagnosis and it’s brave for the author to assign the oh-so-popular “bipolar” label to Lady Gaga’s eccentric personality traits, as her behavior occasionally does match the information about bipolar disorder available on Wikipedia.
But that’s about all I can say for this article, which seems more like a reason to state homophobic opinions and umm… really, what was the point of this again?
Let’s address these gems first:
“Lady Gaga goes gaga again with a few of her new claims. She is taking an online course to become an ordained minister so she can perform same-sex marriages for her fans on-stage. This somehow does not seem fair to all her fans who are not gay.
It is too bad Gaga wasn’t taking each and every couple in love into consideration. Gaga has been adamantly against California’s Proposition 8, which rules against same sex marriage. Maybe this is just her way of celebrating its banishment.”
Ugh, GOD I HATE PEOPLE WHO CELEBRATE GETTING EQUAL RIGHTS. Like come on, I just killed two rabbits with one paintball gun, where the fuck is my party.
Anyhow Duh! Of course, that’s exactly what she’s doing, and that’s ok!
But you know what? I’ve had enough of Justin Timberlake bringing a random audience girl on stage to serenade her at their concerts. What about a little bit of love for the gay men in the audience who want to be close to JT? That just seems awfully discriminatory.
The entire world celebrates straight couples getting married, can’t we have one overpriced pop tour all to ourselves? Don’t we deserve it?
I’m surprised that the author even knows about Prop 8 and what it means for history/civil rights considering the amount of ignorance spewed from every sentence in the first two paragraphs.
Also I thought we removed “loves gay people” from the DSM? Is this the new thing now — since homosexuality isn’t its own mental illness, you’ll assign mental illness diagnoses to everyone who happens to be queer or support them?
Onto the diagnonsense:
“All of these traits she exhibits could very well fall under a bi-polar diagnosis. A few months back, Gaga needed to cancel a few nights of concerts due to shear exhaustion. When people who are manic crash, shear exhaustion is what they will feel, along with feeling depressed.”
I don’t think the author even believes what they are saying at this point. It’s fun to diagnose mental illnesses! Pssshaw that’s a Saturday night in for us. I did it to myself in high school – I had borderline personality disorder. Sure, why not. There are websites for that.
No but really, often the internet is a useful tool for friends & family seeking to understand what’s happening with a loved one, but in this case I think we can safely assume that Gaga was “shearly exhausted” because she was working a really exhausting tour schedule. The only thing crazy about that situation is that she’d booked such an exhausting tour to begin with and planned a high-energy stage show every night.
Here’s my problem: I’d like to think that Gaga’s level of crazy is way more interesting and complex than a mental illness which, for most people, eventually leads to medical treatment lest it become unmanagable and destroy one’s life. There’s nothing wrong with being bipolar (the Autostraddle team collectively sports an impressive roster of mental health issues, for example), but Zurko seems to be using this as a way to write Lady Gaga off. Calling her “bipolar” is just a distraction.
Because to some degree, you have to be completely bat shit crazy to be a pop star in this world. And if you’re not crazy, you’re going to start acting crazy, because the reason so many delusional manic people claim to be Jesus or Bruce Springsteen is because manic behavior IS rock-star behavior or prophet behavior.
“According to the DSM-IV, the criteria for a Bi-Polar manic stage include inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, flight of ideas, increase of goal-directed activity, along with many other symptoms that could fit Gaga’s behaviors.”
You know who else fits that criteria? Me, and I’m 100% stone-cold sane. Except you can omit the “inflated grandiosity” part… which is fine cause Gaga is, in fact, the biggest pop star of the moment and therefore her inflated self-esteem or grandiosity is not at all a delusion but actually completely justified. I wish people would write about real stuff, not just play doctor with WebMD.
All I know is Lady Gaga makes me wanna get married.
Automatic Smackdown is win.
Also, shear = scissors. SHEER = SHEER EXHAUSTION. Good thing Zurko uses it wrong twice, along with some syntactical awkwardness with commas. Can we get a mental illness diagnosis from that?
I think this point is ten times more valid than Zurko’s. You should write an article about his possible mental illness and share it with us.
Is shear exhaustion what happens after too much scissoring?
LOL
i love you.
LIKE
LMAO… if so, I want to suffer from it.
The only thing that happens when I go to WebMD is I come away convinced I have six to ten types of incurable cancer. Wait, does that make me a megalomaniac? Is that terminal?
What a load of twack… for lack of a better word.
Entirely unbelieved wod of nonsense (?Zurko).
Doctors study years to diagnose illness and other aberrations from the norm… and still, as one (in traing)myself – you can’t ralf it all over the ‘interweb’ to sound… clever. What is normal anyway? – if you can define that, call me – I’ll pay you for the answer…because there isn’t one.
Pathology, whether mental or physical, needs to be found on proof… not speculatory differential diagnoses (MMSE).
If anyone told me I was crazy for long enough, I’d believe them too. So I’m gonna develop a little bit of a ‘f#@k it’ attitude for all those lame people trying to do so to the people who are part of our progressive youth movement! I mean where do they get off. Go back to school and develop an IQ above 50!
Anywho, great call on the new category. Love Gaga to bits.
“This somehow does not seem fair to all her fans who are not gay.”
????????
i feel as though his article doesn’t even deserve a response, it’s so full of crap.
What a load of crap. I had to google bipolar and I’m pretty sure we’re all a little bipolar: it only becomes an illness when the symptoms interfere with functioning but hey, Lady Gaga seems to function quite well, what does this guy think? Not sure about him though.
My impression is that – as the world becomes a better place for creative people to live in – this will not be an illness anymore and will be taken off the DSM list. Much like happened for hysteria and homosexuality. Like for other “illnesses” with social causes, they disappear as society changes. Sexual liberation healed people from hysteria, and acceptance of gayness allows gay people to live healthy lives.
I disagree. While I do think a lot of illnesses like bipolarism (technically the official name for it now is “manic depressive”) can be overdiagnosed, it is an actual disorder and people do suffer from it. There are very serious cases of manic depression, much more severe than the way Zurko trivializes it in this article.
Yes but it gets serious only when it interferes with functioning, right? Now I wonder how much that has to do with society. A lot of factors influence functioning, so.
I’m sort of confused as to what you’re getting at here. Regardless of how society is or isn’t, someone who can’t sleep and stays up for days at a time and suffers delusions during a manic episode clearly is suffering from something in their head that would be no less diminished if only the society they exist in could be changed around. (Excluding treatment or drug therapy availability and effectiveness, since we’re not discussing those.)
Maybe my ultimate disagreement is with your statement that “maybe all of us are a little bipolar” and what I read as an insinuation that manic-depressives are just creative people stuck with a bogus diagnosis.
I don’t believe that manic depression will one day be taken out of the DSM (or if it is, it will be because it is grouped with other disorders in a new place or given a new name). Someone who is SEVERELY manic-depressive doesn’t suffer wholly because of the society they live in, though they may partially because of improper care or access to care (i fully admit), they suffer because they have symptoms that inhibit them.
I don’t think it’s a condition with a social cause.
I’m not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist but I’m not sure you can say that a bipolar suffers because of symptoms. Symptoms are effects rather than causes. What is the cause of bipolar disorder? Honestly, I don’t know, but I imagine that if a bipolar were less frustrated and allowed to express their creativity and were less stigmatized they would feel a little better.
Maybe I’m wrong. But women affected by hysteria do not suffer from the somatization of sexual frustration; they suffer because of sexual frustration that is somatized in specific ways / symptoms. Physicians in the 1910s cured the underlying cause of the symptoms with vibrators and pelvic massages. But I guess most drugs used today to treat psychiatric illness do not address the causes, just the symptoms. So basically they do not heal, just alleviate.
I do not say we’re all a little bipolar to dismiss the most serious forms of the disease; I say that in an attempt to remove the causes for stigmatization. It’s not us and them, we are similar but some have more serious and dysfunctional symptoms than others.
its not a creativity thing. Its the feeling that your mind is racing, its very difficult to explain. The closest u can get to it is like being jacked up on caffeine.. but honestly its no where near that. You cant sleep, even if you drugged yourself with SO many sleeping pills.This could last for a very long time, my friend once functioned on 3 hours of sleep everyday for a long time. You get a race of ideas and think u can do this or that, which is generally illogical, you could sometimes spend thousands, you could sometimes do incredibly stupid things. Their are varying degrees of people with bipolar, there is hypo mania and mania.
Anyway, thats a description of bipolar manic episode just some random examples. It then fluctuates to depressive episodes, with extreme depression.
Bipolar has been heavily researched and has come up with several neurological reasons for how it works, people with bipolar have their brains wired different. so everyone is not a “little bipolar”. It is nice that you are trying to remove this stigma.. but it feels more like you are undermining the illness by implying that its not a big deal, while on the contrary people are unable to work because of it. If you didn’t intend it that way, that’s good, but that is what it sounded like.
Saying everybody is a bit bipolar is like saying everybody is a bit diabetic.
Er, wait — it’s possible the medical community has reverted to “manic depressive disorder” and I didn’t notice, but the last time I checked it was “bipolar disorder” as of the late 1950s, and never “bipolarism.” Manic depression is the term that was used in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th, when bipolar disorder was less understood. Right? Or did I miss something?
True, I think I made up “bipolarism”, so that’s my bad. But I learned in an intro-to-psychology course I took (which by no means makes me an expert!) that the official name for bipolar disorder had been changed to manic depressive.
Hm. I don’t know. I guess I’ll go fact-check.
The NIMH website refers to it as bipolar disorder but references that it may also be called manic-depressive. So apparently my class misinformed me! That’s embarassing…
i’m going to completely ignore this article and simply say that i’d like to be gay married by lady gaga to whoever invented the word “ticklecorn”
“she went on about her “vagina being the heart of all her creation.” She also said that “she did not like to have sex because she fears the person will steal her creativity through her vagina.”’
Sorry, this is an indicator of mental disease how? Men think with their dicks all the time. Possibly what makes them men, thinking with the other head (I’m not really trying to diss men, I promise). They aren’t diagnosed. Quite unfair.
So yeah. I personally find that tying in our girly bits with creativity is admirable. Even if the second sentence is kinda funny.
famous/rich people are allowed to say crazy shit- sometimes i think that’s how they amuse themselves. i mean, artists in general are allowed to say crazy shit! similar to how after you become a published author you can ignore conventions/grammar/punctuation and do whatever the hell you want.
I promise I’m not trying to cause trouble, but I actually googled Roz Zurko…
[[[SIDE NOTE: This was her biline — “Roz is a published freelance writer originally from Milford CT, a bedroom community for New York City. She writes full time from home in MA. She attended New Haven University and Graduated with a degree in Psychology from Westfield State College. Her articles reflect life in New England in places such as Westport CT, Portland ME, Newport RI, Stowe VT and Boston MA, along with many other quaint New England locations.”
Oh, the things I’d love to say, but I’ve got to stick to what my point was]]]
The article was short, and I simply got the feeling that Roz is attempting to be snarky the whole time but is failing miserably. I agree completely with your Smackdownage insofar as the first two paragraphs which do contain strong homophobic language, but I guess after seeing her article, I’ve got to wonder why you two bright women would waste your time with her. She has no credentials, writes terribly, and she makes extremely piss poor connections. In fact, much of her other “publications” are total crap, too. She actually cites the National Enquirer. And maybe she’s right, even though in the end she doesn’t truly have the slightest clue if Gaga’s mentally sound or ill.
I guess alllllz I’m sayin’ is that I know how kick-ass you ladies are, so maybe take on some bigger fish! We all know you could fry them.
Also, Roz only has 142 fans after just over a year of being a contributor. That’s what you get for zero creativity paired with ignorant viewpoints.
*Byline.
HOW VERY DARE HE!
But for serious, I have so many issues with DMS-IV mental disorders classifications, I can’t even begin to explain.
Bipolar isn’t just a label that should be thrown around by ill-informed journalists like Roz Zurko.
To be diagnosed with bipolar by medical professionals is difficult enough. Any eccentricities become symptoms, your behavior is monitored constantly, criticized and debated.
To be quite honest, Zurko’s need to label and diagnose Our Lady Gaga, because she does not fit the journalists preconceived “norm”, could probably be found to be a mental disorder if we skimmed through the DSM-IV. People in glass houses, etc.
I’m really angry and upset by this, I should probably take my meds.
I feel like roz and I go way back;
people get diagnosed with things based on illogical fucked up reasoning alllllll the time.
at least this is just some woman who has no power to ACTUALLY diagnose anyone.
IADORE U LADY GAGA ALL GAGAS FANS ADD ME ON MY FACEBOOK : CHRISTINE BOGHOSIAN TC ALLLLLL XOXOO TO ALLL MY LOVELYYYYY FRIENDS..!