Last week, the Phoenix Symphony performed my favorite choral piece, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This is a musical treat that is all about the triumph of the human spirit. I still hear the chorus ringing in my ears, and it’s a week later. It was spectacular, and I was smiling afterwards as I climbed a 4four-story garage to retrieve my car. On the way up the stairs, I overhear this guy tell his wife the music was just too romantic. I almost said something but kept it to myself thinking how could there be too much romance. I think romance is God’s gift that lets us be free to express our passions. Romance to me is a boy sitting alone fishing on a dock lost in his dreams; or little girls dressing up for an imaginary tea party; a paraplegic on the dance floor in a wheelchair; or a double amputee finishing the New York City Marathon.


I am an incurable romantic who also happens to be a psychiatrist. My predecessor Sigmund Freud, however, did not believe in romantic love. Freud declared romantic love “an overestimation of the erotic object.” He thought romantic love a neurotic appetite that needed to be curbed: if you let yourself be dominated by those primitive Id impulses, you would ultimately become consumed by the loved object.

What Freud believed is that human beings are always divided and tormented by internal conflicts. People are always struggling because the Id (the agent, the pure desire, that part of self that wants what it wants when it wants it and won’t take no for an answer) is always up against the Superego, that internal agent of authority that looks harshly upon the Id as a hopeless out-of-control child.

That said, however, Freud acknowledged that a powerful Id could take over the controlling superego . . . at least for awhile. He knew that romance, even if it existed in a small window of time, could fill the soul with magical intoxication. But such a state is destined to collapse because the underlying conflicts (shoulds, wants, fantasies, prohibitions) always rear their ugly head The best you could hope for was to get psychoanalyzed and learn how to see the struggle more clearly and hopefully not get sucked in.

Freud also didn’t believe in God; he was a lifelong atheist, which makes sense to me. If you don’t believe in romantic love, you can’t believe in God because both require a willingness to let yourself free-fall in the magic of its presence. You can’t see the face of God if you can’t fall in love.


We need to expand our definition of Eros (romantic love) to encompass all passionate expressions of the soul’s freedom (music, animals, landscapes). Anything that can seduce you into experiencing awe is always a gift . . . you can never be too romantic.

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Mother’s Day this year provided the perfect antidote to my growing despair over the state of the world. Mother’s Day weekend, I spoke to a Healthcare Symposium in the Napa Valley with its exquisite landscape — everywhere, the splendor and bounty of the Earth Mother’s blessings.


The landscape is dotted with more than 300 wineries that offer tastings and informative tours. Elaine and I toured the Mumm’s champagne winery and sipped champagne while strolling through the art gallery which featured original photographs of Ansel Adams and a new exhibition of photographs by Robert Fulton, whose photos of natural beauty took my breath away. A couple of glasses of champagne in the Napa Valley, looking at Creation’s magic and you don’t see the blemishes, only the awe of the Earth Mother.

On Sunday, we strolled the streets of San Francisco and went down to the Farmers Market at the Embarcadero. I ate a fresh, organic raspberry turnover so stuffed with berries, it dribbled down my cheeks and fingers, and I licked off every last remnant. As we walked amidst the stalls of artists, craftspeople, caricaturists and street performers, I found a necklace in a booth called “Good Ju-Ju Jewelry.” It was a small stone-carved turtle dangling from a black string. I spoke to the artist, John Ndoli, about my affinity for turtles and their symbolism. He then told me he is a Rwandan Tutsi who travels the craft market circuit selling his jewelry that is always accompanied by good blessings. He put his hand on my chest and gave me a tribal blessing that was summarized as “may you plant good seeds, and your bad omens eaten by crocodiles.”

As he blessed me, I saw this heavily-accented African survivor of genocide talking, but it was my Mother’s voice I was hearing. She had the same message, “plant good seeds, you are not here for yourself.” Afterwards, I told John about my mother being a survivor of genocide and that while he was talking I heard my Mother’s voice blessing me. He smiled and said, “I’m telling you, this is good ju-ju jewelry.”

After a couple of hours, we took a break on a bench overlooking the Bay, where I sat and read the Sunday New York Times (my hopeless addiction). Our daughter called to wish her mother a happy day and suggested we go down to the Mission District which was in the midst of gentrification with funky shops. We stumbled into a place called “The Marsh,” a nonprofit community organization that is a breeding ground for new performance artists (www.themarsh.org). We arrived a few minutes before a group of Bay Area playwrights and actors who performed their works. It was a wonderful presentation of talented performers telling stories that ranged from painful to poignant and hilarious.

We were told the best Indian restaurant in the neighborhood was a six block walk but well worth it. “Don’t get scared, it’s a little dingy,” they warned. The Pakwan turned out to be the perennial winner of San Francisco’s “best cheap eats” award, but dingy was an understatement. We found a table outside on 16th St. where we were treated to what can only be described as a Halloween parade on Mother’s Day with all the colors, clothing, tattoos, and body piercings. A group of street musicians even arrived on skateboards to play for us. The food was wonderful, but the best part of the meal happened before we dug into it when an old Pakistani man, inside the restaurant behind a plate glass window just in back of us, smiled and blessed us.


The world is filled with blessings, and it’s the real reason we are here. May the blessings of our mothers be upon us; let us not drown in the reminders of despair but spend more time loving each other, eating good food, and laughing.

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It’s an extraordinary experience to go back 50 years in time and visit the place where you spent your adolescence. I was speaking to the American College of Health Care Administrators, the people who run long-term care and assisted-living facilities. The meeting was held in a Catskill Mountains resort in upstate New York.


The Catskills are the heart of the “Borscht Belt,” the legendary launching place of comics and entertainers, where Patrick Swayze dazzled Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing. I started working there when I was15 as a chambermaid assistant delivering sheets and cleaning toilets. The next year, I was promoted to busboy and the year after, a waiter. In these mountains, I became captivated by the woods, learned how to stream fish, hunt rabbits, and I discovered love.

I’m here again in the last weekend in April and the woods are alive with the sound of music. The birds are chirping, buds blossoming, butterflies darting, the streams are full and the trout are rising. Again, I feel the magic of these woods envelope me. When I take a break, I sit down on a thick carpet of fallen maple leaves, and I am reminded that it might be spring in the air, but it’s autumn on the ground. The last time I was here, my adolescent hormones were raging; now, the urgency comes from my prostate’s calling, but still I feel the power of these woods, the wonder and the peace that comes over me.

When my leaf falls, I’d like it to rest in a place like this. Don’t box me in the ground by the roadside, just sprinkle me here, or some other place of wonder that gave me peace and healed my divided soul. Have my relatives sit and smell the flowers, listen to the waters, feel the caress of a butterfly’s wings, and let me sit by their side and see it again.

I thank you god for this most amazing day.
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
and for everything which is natural
which is infinite
which is yes.

— e.e. cummings

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Soaring numbers of American children are being prescribed drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and there aren’t enough child psychiatrists to treat these kids. There are an estimated 4 million children being medicated with potent drugs even though we know (Ambulatory Pediatrics, March-April, 2006),that these medications are being used for large numbers of children for whom they don’t work.


ADD and ADHD were not even diseases in the official psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM IV) 30 years ago. Either lots of doctors missed this “disease” or it’s a creation of our culture which tries to explain every uncomfortable manifestation of human behavior, as representing a disease. From fidgeting to bullying, you may be suffering from a disease caused by a genetic, traumatic, infectious, or autoimmune problem, but one that cannot be defined by any laboratory test or genetic marker. As soon as you declare some behaviors a disease, you take what is an ordinary manifestation of our humanity and create an epidemic. How can there be, in just one generation, 4 million kids suffering from a disease that requires them to take dangerous drugs with serious side-effects. By labeling these behaviors as illnesses, it also implies that we know how to treat them, which legitimizes prescribing drugs.

It’s not just “Big Pharma” that’s pushing this model of treatment. Psychiatrists are deeply involved in creating this epidemic. They rate the diagnostic manual that defines behavioral disease. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), is the basis for disease diagnosis, insurance payments and psychiatric treatments including drugs. The DSM is written by 107 medical experts who are members of 18 DSM preparation panels. In a study in the last months journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (April, 2006), researchers discovered that over the last 20 years, 56% of those DSM experts had one or more financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry from whom they received research funds, consultancies, patents, and other gifts or grants.

The ADD/ADHD epidemic is the result of creating a disease that is not well-defined and therefore indiscriminate in its application. We need to get away from a culture that defines unacceptable behaviors as psychiatric diseases, and then promotes drug taking and chemical straitjacketing to set limits.

The shortage of child psychiatrists is not the crisis, the crisis is the:
. legitimization, easy access and demand for drugs in our culture
. absence of extended families and supportive communities that help set limits and enforce them
. shortage of teachers to whom we pay pittance salaries

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