Word: mentality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tower Commission merely confirmed and documented what all of us knew and too many preferred to dismiss for some time: that Mr. Reagan is a mental absentee; more than detached, he is disconnected from reality and the Administration he inhabits...
Among the afflictions of old age, Alzheimer's is a particular affront. The degenerative mental condition, which affects some 2 million people in the U.S., robs its victims of their dignity and renders them helpless. They become confused, lose track of time and are eventually unable to recognize spouses and other loved ones. Physiologically, Alzheimer's manifests itself in the form of abnormal protein deposits in the brain. But the reason these insidious tangles and plaques build up remains unknown...
...scientists had focused on chromosome 21 because of its connection with Down's syndrome, a genetic defect that is the nation's leading cause of mental retardation. Most Down's victims have three copies of this chromosome rather than the normal two, and by age 40 their symptoms often include the now familiar protein deposits in the brain...
...tangling with the romantic notion of insanity as a kind of anti-societal enlightenment. Besides already having been flogged to death, the notion of the insane as somehow lucky is grotesquely unfair to real-life residents of psychiatric institutions, who suffer the completely unromantic, destructive, and painful effects of mental illness...
...hand. One of the benefits of having all one's characters lunatics is that virtually any parenthetical comment may be expanded into a foolishly profound discourse. Richard Grusin, playing a sleazy motel desk clerk, launches into an elegy on stains and their makers, while Thomas Derrah portrays a straightjacketed mental patient and Middle American T.V. set simultaneously with equal conviction and vigor...