White Cedar is one of the best ones. Compassionate and generous, and beautiful. Who ever writes songs about this stuff?

A Mountain Goats interview in Pitchfork includes this:

Pitchfork: “White Cedar” sounds like one of the darkest songs on the album– the lyrics seem to address a sort of finality.

John Darnielle: The song’s about accepting the permanence of one’s condition. The narrator is a guy who’s in and out of hospitals a lot. I’ve worked with people who’ve experienced that, and I always assume there has to come a point where it’s really hard, but then you try to find some way to be OK with it. There’s a lot of sadness in that song.

What I’ve been learning over the course of my life is that diagnoses exist to help get people services they need– but there’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill and we’re all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don’t wind up needing extra help. So I think that “mental illness,” as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people “crazy,” we exclude them from our circle. That’s bogus– you’re in the same boat as they are! Maybe some people are better at pretending they don’t harbor all kinds of issues, but, really, everyone has them. Everybody experiences reality in a way that’s only true for them.