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Javier E

Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder - WSJ - 0 views

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climate climate change obsession disorder wsj denial psychology anxiety response

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are
  • Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.
  • it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.
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  • Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.
  • “climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”
  • yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.
  • according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.
  • A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried
  • The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions.
  • Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another
  • These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential.
  • A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.
  • The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis
  • Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”
  • there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.
  • Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children
  • “First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”
  • Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.
Javier E

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan B. Peterson) - 0 views

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philosophy religion mythology social science history lifelong learning

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
  • “I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”
  • Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”
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  • the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
  • And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.
  • Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.
  • Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.
  • unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.
  • for an egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves,
  • These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.
  • I was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.
  • Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand.
  • The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.
  • this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.
  • We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
  • And he felt he had to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same behaviour: killing their own citizens.
  • Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
  • Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
  • Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
  • To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have occurred.
  • I saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher (not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories.
  • Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering.
  • chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
  • focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.
  • Jordan
  • views of his first YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.
  • the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.
  • morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical…
  • The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a…
  • So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and…
  • for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can…
  • That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an…
  • And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually…
  • professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “…
  • They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears…
  • The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was…
  • Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something…
  • By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no…
  • Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called…
  • Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are…
  • But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass,…
  • So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies…
  • Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself
  • so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given…
  • (But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay…
  • For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.
  • Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (…
  • it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.
  • given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it.
  • Far better to integrate the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency to obliterate.
  • these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.
  • Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
  • if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.
  • And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.
  • Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs.
  • Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’s entire life without ever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point in Civilization and Its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”1 In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.
  • I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act.
  • I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come
  • to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
  • Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine.
  • Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.
  • As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction,
  • Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
  • For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.
  • trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.
  • People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
  • Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.
  • It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone
  • There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.
  • We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
  • Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.*2 We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.
  • So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places:
  • loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.
  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
  • While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century.
  • I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.
  • It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
  • How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.
  • We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.
  • the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless
  • individual—is clearly worse.
  • a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.
  • We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
  • I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.
  • RULE 1   STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK
  • Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.
  • It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.
  • This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.
  • Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top.
  • The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
  • dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.
  • evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-forms over the eons.
  • But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt?
  • Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.
  • But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense.
  • As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly.
  • Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music
  • It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest.
  • It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically.
  • Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.
  • It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation systems and growing food and generating power.
  • this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.
  • It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.
  • The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
  • We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
  • The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.
  • The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources.
  • It will leave you far more likely to live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.21
  • If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive
  • You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.
  • Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with its various parts,
  • needs
  • to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
  • It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day?
  • The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars,
  • I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.
  • Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy.
  • There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
  • If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.
  • With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.
  • Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of
  • individuals who are genuinely malevolent.27
  • I have had clients who were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing
  • terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful (or else).
  • When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise,
  • There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
  • even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school28—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number.
  • the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.
  • Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space.
  • If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.29
  • To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
  • It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
  • So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
  • Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.
  • RULE 2   TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING
  • People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That
  • It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves?
  • To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel).
  • those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.
  • Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.
  • subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.
  • In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality.
  • The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters
  • the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.
  • Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time,
  • It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
  • Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
  • Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.
  • Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.
  • But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.
  • In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we
  • understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.
  • When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work for starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt.
  • Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand.
  • Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.
  • Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances.
  • Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.
  • Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.
  • Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent.
  • This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.
  • The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been…
  • the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are…
  • Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were…
  • From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A…
  • as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective…
  • “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with…
  • when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere…
  • Our most…
  • category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and…
  • Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary…
  • Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
  • In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road.
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
  • Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.40
  • Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”
  • Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.
  • And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act.
  • The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
  • We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.
  • To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.
  • Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both.
  • you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
  • The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm.
  • The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake.
  • We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls.
  • The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.
  • I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no
  • business being there.”50
  • Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
  • What does it mean to know yourself naked
  • Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves.
  • In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.
  • Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.
  • He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s merely descriptive.
  • women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.
  • then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
  • Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
  • so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?
  • Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?
  • We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world.
  • Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.
  • with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.
  • Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?
  • The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.
  • The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.
  • Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.
  • here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.
  • The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?
  • And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
  • Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted
  • We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
  • If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.
  • If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for.
  • We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
  • Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it.
  • It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.
  • But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.
  • Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others.
  • To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.
  • I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.”
  • The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions.
  • If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs.
  • there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else.
  • you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others.
  • metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His image.
  • We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.
  • In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running.
  • It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish
  • You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.
  • To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.”
  • You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?
  • You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.
  • You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
  • Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your
  • own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that.
  • You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence.
  • That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.
  • RULE 3   MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU
  • It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it’s not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us tried to organize. Doing anything wasn’t cool.
  • When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things. I thought this was just a natural development. I thought that every person who moved would have—and want—the same phoenix-like experience.
  • What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives? Was it inevitable—a consequence of their own limitations, nascent illnesses and traumas of the past?
  • Why did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places that, were not good for him?
  • perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past
  • People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.
  • It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly…unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
  • People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
  • it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting.
  • When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
  • But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. And you’re you.
  • How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?
  • The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
  • maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace. Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
  • Or maybe you have no plan, genuine or otherwise, to rescue anybody. You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
  • You know it. Your friends know it. You’re all bound by an implicit contract—one aimed at nihilism, and failure, and suffering of the stupidest sort.
  • Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
  • Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well).
  • It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation.
  • failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation. It’s not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy.
  • Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today,
  • Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
  • I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract someone
  • from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep. And there’s not much left of the body at the bottom.
  • Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The
  • none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.
  • Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
  • You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.
  • It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.”
  • Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person.
  • RULE 4   COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
  • IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor.
  • Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
  • No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
  • We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.
  • People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.
  • It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined:
  • Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.
  • There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
  • Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action.
  • Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. To do anything at all is therefore to play a game with a defined and valued end, which can always be reached more or less efficiently and elegantly.
  • We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success” or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing.
  • There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.
  • there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—
  • if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. I
  • and athletic pursuits. You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.
  • When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary.
  • As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being.
  • We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.
  • What is it that you actually love? What is it that you genuinely want? Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself. What
  • Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life.
  • Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up.
  • Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise.
  • Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life.
  • We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it.
  • We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
  • The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be.
  • The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
  • Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure.
  • “Excuse me,” you might say to yourself, without irony or sarcasm. “I’m trying to reduce some of the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help.” Keep the derision at bay. “I’m wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I’d be very grateful for your service.” Ask honestly and with humility. That’s no simple matter.
Javier E

How the climate emergency could lead to a mental health crisis | Anouchka Grose | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...l-health-environmental-anguish

emergency mental health climate change

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • The Greenlandic Perspective Survey tells us that 90% of Greenlanders accept that climate change is happening. More than that, it’s making them anxious and depressed.
  • we might be well advised to take their thoughts and feelings seriously. Where they go, we may very well follow.
  • To many it seems we already have one foot planted in an unbearably dystopian future. How long will it be before political systems collapse and we turn against one another in a frenzy for the last scraps of sustenance? (Or any other imaginable form of mass-inflicted horror?
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the anguish caused by environmental alterations due to droughts and destructive mining. Taking the Latin word for comfort (sōlācium) and the Greek root designating pain (-algia) he gives us a neologism that sums up the devastating effects of finding unease where you used to look for relief.
  • Where you used to be able to sustain yourself by hunting, fishing and foraging, now you may have to supplement this with trips to the newly established supermarket. But how are you supposed to pay for the food? And what if you can no longer afford to feed your dog?
  • we also have the more self-explanatory “ecological grief” and even the idea of a kind of post-traumatic stress linked to the state of the planet
  • people are finding the need for new words to describe the mental health issues linked to environmental change.
  • To others this sort of scenario is delusional, a symptom of media-fed panic
  • Some people are inclined to catastrophise while others prefer to blot out the possibility of unpleasantness. Both tendencies could be said to be attempts at self-preservation
  • Should you act pre-emptively to avert disaster, opening yourself up to accusations of being pathologically anxious, or keep calm and carry on at the risk of seeming at best obtuse or at worst selfishly destructive? Is it mad to mourn something before you’ve lost it?
  • It can sometimes seem that the only reasonable response is melancholia, anger and helplessness
  • “The intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.”
  • Before climate change became an established concept, one could look to the world around one as a source of joy and it gave a sense of something permanent and bigger than oneself. It had that quality often ascribed to god. With the crisis now unfolding, we must contend with two mortalities, the personal one and the death of nature. On top of that is the sickening worry for one´s children. We naturally worry for their future but this was often in terms of their fate and place in society. Now we can wonder what grim future they have if water shortages, economic and political breakdown get ever closer. So, yes, climate change is a heavy blow to the psyche. Anyone who is not worried is not paying attention.
brookegoodman

Why it's healthy to be afraid in a crisis | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...althy-to-be-afraid-in-a-crisis

crisis us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As a mental health professional, I disagree with the message in Paul Daley’s article (We face a pandemic of mental health disorders, 24 March). We’re not facing “a pandemic of severe mental health disorders”. We’re all facing entirely normal fear, anxiety, despair and confusion about a truly terrifying situation that challenges our whole way of life. Never has it been clearer that so-called “mental disorders” make sense in context. In fact, many professionals would argue that this applies to the whole range of experiences that are labelled as clinical depression, personality disorder, psychosis, and so on.
  • We can come out of this crisis in a better state than before by staying connected with our feelings and the urgent threats that have led to them, and taking collective action to deal with the root causes. These include climate change, environmental degradation, wildlife trafficking, insecure employment, the structure and funding of public services, and the neoliberal values that have driven us for far too long.
  • Unlike many news organisations, all of our reporting is free and available for everyone – during this time of crisis and beyond. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Our journalism relies on our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
Javier E

Is President Trump Mentally Ill? It Doesn't Matter - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-mentally-ill-it-doesnt-matter

trump mental health mental illness Crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • It’s really only the behavior that matters to us as citizens. A diagnosis would only be helpful to learn about behavior we don’t know about or predict future endangering behavior. Since we know about the behavior we’re talking about, none of that matters or applies. In common sense, every day rather than clinical language Trump is clearly unstable, erratic, impulsive. In a word, he’s nuts and not well.
  • As citizens, we are entirely able and entitled to make these determinations. They are ordinary English language descriptors that the psychiatric profession doesn’t control and shouldn’t want to control. The entire debate over whether Trump is “mentally ill” is simply a diversion, premised on the idea that we need either permission or dictation to say he is not able to safely or competently fulfill the job of President.
  • We don’t. The observed behavior is really all that is necessary and all that matters. It’s very clear.
mattrenz16

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
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  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Is America So Depressed? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...depression-america-trump.html

depression mental health epidemic culture

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The American Psychiatric Association reported that from 2016 to 2017, the number of adults who described themselves as more anxious than the previous year rose 36 percent.
  • In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had at least one major depressive episode, as did three million adolescents ages 12 to 17. Forty million adults now suffer from an anxiety disorder — nearly 20 percent of the adult population. (These are the known cases of depression and anxiety. The actual numbers must be dumbfounding.)
  • Among all Americans, the suicide rate increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2017.
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  • The frightening environment helps cause depression, depression causes catastrophic thinking, and catastrophic thinking makes the environment seem even more terrifying than it is.
  • Out of this dark cast of mind arose the hunger for a strong, avenging figure whose arrival has sent even more mentally harrowing shock waves through society.
  • Particular instances that make it possible for me to climb out of despair I imagine as pitons, the iron spikes mountain climbers drive into rock to ascend, sometimes hand over hand. Work is a piton. The enjoyment of art is a piton. Showing kindness to another person is a piton. Helping to raise our two children — our son is 13 — is the strongest piton of them all.
  • Freud famously said that depression was anger turned inward. We know now that depression is a result of numerous factors: social environment, economic pressure, cognitive misreading, a random event, trauma, neurobiology and genes.
  • The real national division, as I see it, is between people who have the resources, inner and outer, to survive their mental illness and those who don’t.
  • We need a national leader who will, as President Carter tried to do, address the urgent issue of mental illness, not with piecemeal legislation but with a national crusade
  • I know what I rationally expect in a president: reason, character, dignity. But I will not feel hopeful about anyone who does not respond to my turbulent unconscious, to my brute, irrational need to be the object of empathetic concern as an individual and to be affirmed as a person.
  • There are positive and negative means of appealing to that almost biological desire to be protected and empowered. Sadly, Mr. Trump has known how to make that appeal better than anyone on the national stage so far
Javier E

Why America's Institutions Are Failing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...613078

institutions history crisis response pandemic CDC federal reserve FDA police

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • “The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.
  • Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020?
  • We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change.
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  • our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s
  • We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.
  • Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.
  • Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,”
  • As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality.
  • Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.
  • The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people.
  • The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.
  • The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters.
  • calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.”
  • the CDC had waited “its entire existence for this moment,” but it was so unprepared to deal with COVID-19 that the group initially in charge of the response, the Division of Viral Diseases, had to cede responsibilities to the Influenza Division, despite the fact that COVID-19 is not caused by any kind of influenza virus
  • Police aren’t just trained to feel like warriors; many are armed for war
  • Over time, SWAT itself served as a gateway drug for police militarization, as equipment once reserved for special teams, such as AR-15 rifles, were made available to ordinary officers.
  • the War on Drugs has been roundly discredited as a trillion-dollar failure that incurs thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it has bequeathed us a world where police bearing semiautomatics are armed with the wrong tools for the actual job
  • “The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,”
  • the U.S. mental-health crisis has been effectively outsourced to the streets, where police who aren’t trained as social workers or behavioral therapists must perform the ad hoc duties of both.
  • Rather than respond to the drastically changing nature of American life, our cities and counties use police as a civic Swiss Army knife to solve problems such as homelessness and mental-health emergencies that have little to do with police training.
  • the failures of American police are not unique, but rather a symptom of a broader breakdown in high-quality governance.
  • Before it stood for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC was founded as the Communicable Disease Center in the 1940s. Its original mission was to stop an epidemic. The organization’s first 400, Atlanta-based employees were tasked with arresting an outbreak of malaria in the Southeast
  • Today, the center’s 14,000 employees work “at the speed of science”—that is, slowly and deliberately—to understand an array of health issues, including cancer, obesity, and vaping.
  • its mission creep has transformed what was once a narrowly focused agency into a kaleidoscopic bureaucracy with no fast-twitch instinct for achieving its founding mission to protect Americans from an epidemic.
  • The CDC’s recent failures are well known, but worth repeating. It failed to keep track of early COVID-19 cases in part because of a leaden-footed reliance on fax machines and other outdated record-keeping technology. It failed to compile accurate case counts, forcing private actors—such as The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project—to fill the void. It failed its most basic coordination functions as an agency
  • Violent crime plays a minuscule role in the day of a modern officer, who spends most of his or her time driving around, taking ho-hum radio calls, and performing the tertiary duties of traffic patroller and mental-health counselor.
  • Most important, the CDC failed to manufacture basic testing equipment. Its initial test kits were contaminated and unusable, which allowed the disease to spread undetected throughout the U.S. for weeks.
  • Compare the situation in the U.S. with the one in East Asia, where several countries have navigated the pandemic far more deftly. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam all updated their infectious-disease protocols based on what they learned from 21st-century epidemics: SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and MERS in 2012. These countries quickly understood what artillery would be necessary to take on COVID-19, including masks, tests, tracing, and quarantine spaces. Yet the CDC—armed with an $8 billion budget and a global team of scientists and officials—was somehow unprepared to read from the playbook.
  • The FDA fumbled just as tragically. In January, Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, was prepared to build an in-house coronavirus test
  • By the time Greninger was ready to set up his lab, the calendar had turned to March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sick, and the outbreak was uncontrollable.
  • the White House cannot be entirely blamed for the ponderous incompetence of what ought to be the greatest public-health system in the world.
  • Not every American institution is trapped in amber. For a perhaps surprising example of one that has adapted to 21st-century needs, take the Federal Reserve.
  • Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair during the Great Recession, used his expertise about the 1930s economy to avoid a similar collapse in financial markets in 2008. Today’s Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has gone even further, urging Congress and the Treasury to “think big” and add to our already-historic deficits.
  • the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.
  • what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed
criscimagnael

As a Crisis Hotline Grows, So Do Fears It Won't Be Ready - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hotline-mental-health-988.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — the number posted on student identification cards, atop Google search results and in warning labels on television shows — is about to get a major reboot, casting it as the 911 for mental health.
  • starting in July will have its own three-digit number, 988, and operators who will not only counsel callers but eventually be equipped to dispatch specially trained responders.
  • But there are growing concerns that the 24-hour hotline, already straining to meet demand, will not be able to deliver on the promises of the overhaul unless states supplement the federal money with significant funds for staffing, according to interviews and government reports.
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  • But after the number changes to 988 — a shift that involves upgrading telecom infrastructure and bringing more call centers online — use of the hotline is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. (The current number is 800-273-8255.)
  • The only call center in South Carolina, for instance, until recently operated out of an old, dark basement, near a boiler room. The last remaining one in Louisiana has struggled to keep up with an influx of calls after another center closed and its replacement went offline during the pandemic. Minnesota and Wyoming have had periods with no centers at all. When local centers cannot pick up, calls are pushed to national backup centers, where counselors are less likely to be familiar with local resources and wait times can be too long for people in crisis.
  • As a teenager, she made dozens of late-night calls to the Lifeline. A volunteer named Chris, who worked the late shift, usually would pick up and talk her to safety. But during the last several years, she has found it increasingly difficult to reach a counselor. Several times, she said, she hung up and harmed herself.
  • A woman from Michigan, who said she waited twice for over an hour before hanging up, likened the experiences to calling airline customer service — except that she was seeking suggestions on “not killing myself.” A teenager from Mississippi recounted calling three times one night without getting through, and then overdosing.
  • For 988, such fees could also help pay for mobile response teams that can be dispatched to people in crisis, as well as for specialized triage centers — both significant, and costly, elements of what advocates see as a watershed opportunity to recast the delivery of mental health care.
  • “Our concern is very much about whether there will be someone to answer that call when someone is in crisis,” said Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
  • “There are thousands of users — many of whom may be in suicidal crisis — who seek assistance and are unable to get the lifesaving help they deserve,” the report said.
  • Paying for 988, and what comes with it, has emerged as a contentious issue for states. Some lawmakers are wary of adding what they see as a new tax. Others think 988 is redundant with other resources. And telecommunications lobbyists, while broadly supportive of 988, have pushed back on some proposed fees.
  • “It is just like the United States Congress, though, to send us something like this” — with instructions that “you are going to fund it,” he said.
  • “With all due respect, 988 is going to save the taxpayers a whole lot of money,” he said.
  • “The crisis centers are like, ‘You don’t get any of those other things if people aren’t here to answer the phone,’” said Ms. Battle, director of access at the Harris Center, which provides services for mental health issues and developmental disabilities.
  • One goal of 988 is to eventually answer 95 percent of all incoming calls within 20 seconds. The data analysis showed that only two states had Lifeline answer rates above 95 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. Thirty-three states had more than 15 percent of their calls abandoned.
  • “People call in their most dire state of need.”
  • West Virginia’s lone call center answering the Lifeline, First Choice Services, also answers more than 15 other numbers, including ones for gambling, tobacco and drug and alcohol addiction, most with volume rising during the pandemic.
  • “We have a very real fear that without funding our program in a substantial way,” she said, “our West Virginia callers will suddenly be facing what has been a problem nationally.”
Javier E

The Age of Distracti-pression - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-depression-anxiety-adhd.html

depression anxiety stimulants history culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • First, the broad strokes: In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8 percent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health.
  • We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions.
  • according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication.
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  • Antidepressants continue to be the most commonly prescribed of these medications in the United States, and their use has become only more widespread since the pandemic began, with an 8.7 percent rate of increase from 2019 to 2021, compared with 7.9 percent from 2017 to 2019
  • At the same time, life in the digital age means that people expect immediacy: immediate replies, immediate delivery, immediate improvement. “We have no tolerance for slow change,” he said. “But many of the problems we are faced with demand slow change.”
  • For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019
  • Part of the uptick could be explained by the fact that, stuck at home, people finally had time to seek out the health care they had been delaying. But patients seeking help are doing so against a backdrop of isolation, restriction, uncertainty and grief.
  • Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers
  • “The 1950s and ’60s were widely framed as the age of anxiety,” said Anne Harrington, the author of “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness” and a historian of science at Harvard. “And the ’80s and ’90s became the age of depression. And yet it’s unclear that people’s symptoms actually changed.”
  • Prozac was developed to answer what was then the prevalent theory of depression: that it was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically too little serotonin. Prozac and similar drugs are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning they block the reabsorption of serotonin in the brain.
  • “Prozac was on ‘Nightline’ when you went to sleep and on the ‘Today’ show when you woke up.” Within the first two years of Prozac’s existence, 650,000 prescriptions were written for it per month.
  • Prozac, and its cousins like Zoloft and Lexapro — given out to treat depression but also anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and other disorders — are now a banal sight in American medicine cabinets,
  • “I think the reason doctors are more blasé about prescribing these medicines is that they’ve now been around for a long time and they can prescribe them without getting into trouble,”
  • t there’s one more reason, too, he thinks: our growing “intolerance” for “more mild levels of depression and neurosis.”
  • the writer P.E. Moskowitz, echoing a longstanding concern of some prominent skeptics, points out that antidepressants are much more difficult to get off than advertised and that the chemical-imbalance theory of depression on which it all rests has never been proved.
Javier E

Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine - 0 views

magazine.hms.harvard.edu/...climate-anxiety

climate anxiety harvard magazine youths mental health climate change

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily functioning.
  • Since young people expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says.
  • Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.
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  • Nearly three quarters of the child and adolescent population in Pakistan experienced learning difficulties after widespread floods devastated the country in 2010.
  • For many young people, worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms
  • And those feelings are often amplified by a pervasive sense that older people aren’t doing enough to fix the climate problem. “There’s a feeling of intergenerational injustice,” says Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, DC, who specializes in the mental health effects of climate change. “Many young people feel invalidated, betrayed, and abandoned.”
  • Research on effective interventions is virtually nonexistent, and parents and other people who want to help have little to go on. Professional organizations are only now beginning to provide needed resources.
  • News reports and researchers often refer to these feelings collectively as climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, but Pinsky admits to having misgivings about the terms.
  • “Many people interpret anxiety as a pathological response that needs to be treated and solved,” she says. “But it’s also a constructive emotion that gives us time to react in the face of danger. And anxiety in the face of climate change is a healthy response to a real threat.”
  • others become progressively hyperaroused and panicky, Pinsky says, or else fall into a sort of emotional paralysis
  • Some people manage their climate-triggered emotions without spiraling into distress
  • These reactions can be especially debilitating for people who already struggle with underlying mental health disorders.
  • anxieties over climate change can interlace with broader feelings of instability over the pace of technological and cultural change,
  • “Technology is accelerating faster than culture can keep up, and humans in general are unmoored and struggling to adapt,” she says. “For some people, climate change is psychologically the last straw. You realize you can no longer count on the stability of your planet, your atmosphere — your very world.”
  • Van Susteren describes that anxiety as a type of pre-traumatic stress disorder, with few existing precedents in the United States apart from fears of nuclear annihilation and the decades-ago experience of living through classroom drills on how to survive an atom bomb attack.
  • Talk therapy for anxiety typically aims to help people identify and replace irrational thoughts, called cognitive distortions, with alternative thinking that isn’t so stressful. But since climate anxiety is based on rational fears, this particular approach risks alienating anyone who might feel their worries are being dismissed.
  • Younger people were increasingly arriving at Bryant’s office frightened, depressed, and confused about how to manage climate-triggered emotions. Some were even wondering if they should bring children into such a world.
  • “We’re not saying that anxiety is good or bad,” he says. “We just want to bring those feelings out into the open. It’s more about validating that climate concerns are reasonable given what we’re reading in the news every day.” Ann-Christine Duhaime
  • Emerging evidence suggests that young people do best by cultivating a sense of agency and hope despite their climate concerns.
  • getting to that point involves talking through feelings like despair, grief, or rage first. Without doing that, he says, many people get stuck in maladaptive coping strategies that can lead to burnout, frustration, or hopelessness. Bryant describes jumping into an urgent, problem-focused coping strategy as “going into action mode so you don’t have to feel any grief.”
  • Problem-focused coping has a societal benefit in that it leads to “pro-environmental behavior,” meaning that young people who engage in it typically spend a lot of time learning about climate change and focusing on what they can do personally to help solve the problem
  • But climate change is far beyond any one person’s control, and problem-focused coping can leave people frustrated by the limits of their own capacity and make them unable to rid themselves of resulting worry and negative emotions
  • she and her colleagues describe emotion-focused coping, whereby young people ignore or deny climate change as a means of avoiding feeling anxious about it. In an email, Ojala notes that people who gravitate toward emotional distancing typically come from families that communicate about social problems in “pessimistic doom-and-gloom ways.”
  • Ojala
  • Ojala and other experts favor a third coping strategy that balances negative feelings about climate change with faith in the power of social forces working to overcome it. Called meaning-focused coping, this approach takes strength from individual actions and climate beliefs, while “trusting th
  • her societal actors are also doing their part,”
  • since meaning-focused coping allows negative and positive climate emotions to coexist, young people who adopt it have an easier time maintaining hope for the future.
  • The overall goal, she says, is for young people to achieve more resilience in the face of climate change, so they can function in spite of their environmental concerns
  • When people find meaning in what they do, she says, they have a greater sense of their own agency and self-efficacy. “You’re more empowered to take action, and that can be a powerful way to deal with strong negative emotions,”
  • Duhaime cautions that anyone taking action against climate change should know they shouldn’t expect a quick payback
  • The brain’s reward system, which forms a core of human decision-making, evolved over eons of history to strengthen neural associations between actions and outcomes that promote short-term survival. And that system, she says, responds to the immediate consequences of what we do. One problem with climate change, Duhaime says, is that because it’s so vast and complex, people can’t assume that any single act will lead to a discernible effect on its trajectory
  • young people may benefit from seeking the rewards that come from being part of a group or a movement working to advance an agenda that furthers actions that protect the planet’s climate. “Social rewards are really powerful in the climate change battle, especially for young people,
  • Recognizing the mismatch between how the brain processes reward and the novel challenges of the climate crisis may help people persist when it feels frustrating and ineffective compared to causes with more immediately visible effects. Even if you don’t see climate improvements or policy changes right away, she says, “that won’t diminish the importance of engaging in these efforts.”
  • Malits adds that she wasn’t overly burdened by her emotions. “I’m an optimist by nature and feel that society does have the capacity to make needed changes,” she says. “And what also helps me avoid climate anxiety on a daily basis is the community that I’ve been lucky enough to connect with here at Harvard. It helps to surround yourself with people who are similarly worried about these issues and are also engaging with you on solutions, in whatever capacity is meaningful to you.”
  • “Climate anxiety is an important catalyst for the work I do,” Malits says. “I think you need avenues to channel it and talk about it with loved ones and peers, and have communities through which you can process those feelings and come up with remedies.” Collaborative activism dampens the anxiety, Malits says, and gives young people a sense of renewed hope for the future. “That’s why it’s important to roll up your sleeves and think about how you’d like to tackle the problem,”
  • Malits says she worries most about how climate change is affecting marginalized communities, singling out those who live in urban heat islands, where inadequate green space intensifies extreme heat.
  • nearly 30 percent of Honduras’s population works for the agricultural sector, where rising temperatures and drought are contributing to a mass exodus, as documented that year by PBS NewsHour.
  • Researchers are finding that young people with the most extreme fears over climate change live predominantly in the developing world. The Philippines and India, for instance, are near the top of a list of recently surveyed countries where young people report climate-driven feelings that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”
  • Nearly a year after Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, 18 percent of children living in the area were still struggling with PTSD-like symptoms, and nearly 30 percent of those who lived through Hurricane Katrina in 2005 wound up with complicated grief, in which strong feelings of loss linger for a long time.
  • Even when people are not uprooted by disaster, a variety of climate-related mechanisms can affect their mental health or the safety of their mental health treatment. High heat and humidity worsen irritability and cognition, he points out, and they can also exacerbate side effects from some common psychiatric medications
  • Levels of lithium — a mood stabilizer used for treating bipolar disorder and major depression — can rise to potentially toxic concentrations in a person who is perspiring heavily; they can become dehydrated and  may develop impaired kidney funtion, potentially causing tremor, slurred speech, confusion and other dangerous effects
  • “I believe the fundamental and best treatment for youth climate distress is a rapid and just transition from fossil fuels,” Pinsky says. “I genuinely consider all that work to be in the area of mitigating climate anxiety.”    
rachelramirez

ERP for OCD Works, But It's Expensive and Hard to Find - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...505538

OCD US

shared by rachelramirez on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
  • She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.
  • Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.
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  • there are no psychologists who specialize in exposure and response prevention, the specific kind of therapy she and many others with OCD require in order to break their crippling thought cycles.
  • At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.
  • Along with medication, exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems.
  • a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.
  • Because the symptoms can be entirely mental, it can take years for either patients or therapists to recognize OCD for what it is.
  • ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”
  • some studies estimate it takes OCD sufferers 17 years to find proper treatment from the onset of symptoms. Seeking certain forms of talk therapy can make them worse, not better. In the meantime, some experience symptoms so debilitating they are confined to their homes.
  • Most moderate OCD cases get at least partly better if the patient receives two or three months of ERP.
  • There is no mandatory number of hours that psychologists must spend training in either cognitive-behavioral therapy or ERP, said Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. Bufka did not know what percentage of psychotherapists provide ERP, but she suspects it’s “small.”
  • Between 3 and 7 million Americans suffer from OCD at some point—a substantial number, but still far fewer than the vast multitudes who seek therapy for anxiety and depression.
  • People obsessed with not offending God might hold a satanic ritual. Those assailed by persistent (and baseless) fears they will molest their siblings might read the incest tome Flowers in the Attic.
  • Access to ERP therapists is compounded by the already profound shortage of psychotherapists in rural areas. More than half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals at all.
  • ERP specialists might feel no need to take insurance, since they are so rare they often have no shortage of clients, Szymanski, of the International OCD Foundation, pointed out.
  • But the treatment was so expensive it contributed to the family’s decision to sell their house.
Javier E

Trump's erratic first week was among the most alarming in history - The Washington Post - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-a453-19ec4b3d09ba_story.html

trump mental health crisis

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • my lament about the week is largely devoid of ideological content.
  • That is not because his policy moves are not appalling — they are. But you don’t have to disagree with Trump’s policies to be rattled to the core by his unhinged behavior.
  • Many congressional Republicans privately express concerns that range from apprehension to outright dread.
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  • There have been reasons to worry about other presidents’ mental health.
  • other presidents’ outbursts occurred behind closed doors, and there was some hope that aides would intervene.
  • Trump’s inner circle seems divided between enablers and inciters.
  • In a meeting last week with The Post editorial board, Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight Committee, said he was weighing legislation to require presidents to undergo an independent medical examination, including for mental health.
  • Chaffetz cautioned that he wasn’t “talking about some of the rhetoric that’s flying around” about Trump. Still, he said, “If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in.”
Javier E

Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssionals-warn-about-trump.html

mental health trump

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Silence from the country’s mental health organizations has been due to a self-imposed dictum about evaluating public figures (the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 Goldwater Rule). But this silence has resulted in a failure to lend our expertise to worried journalists and members of Congress at this critical time. We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.
  • Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).
  • In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.
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  • Dr. Dodes is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schachter is a former chairman of the Committee on Research Proposals, International Psychoanalytic Association. The letter was also signed by 35 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.
malonema1

Trump's one piece of gun-related legislation undid restrictions aimed at mental illness... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US trump policy

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN)The President had three things to say on Twitter about the Parkland school shooting in the 18 hours after it occurred.First, condolences for the victims and a lament that no child or teacher should feel unsafe at school. Second, assurance that the federal government would work with authorities in Florida and the governor there. Third, blame that there were clues missed as to the shooter's mental fitness and his ability to legally buy the AR-15 used to go on the rampage.
  • A little less than a year ago, on February 28, 2017, he signed a measure nixing a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people. It's critical to note that it's not at all clear it would have applied to the shooters in Florida nor Las Vegas, and there's no reason to believe it would have stopped the massacre.
  • There is no panacea piece of legislation to keep guns out of the hands of just the people who would go on a murderous spree. The shooters in mass shootings seem to share the problem of being troubled, but the clues missed by those around them are different. In the coming days and weeks, we'll learn why this one slipped through the cracks.
anonymous

White House proposes arming teachers, backpedals on raising age to buy guns - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US crisis trump culture policy

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration on Sunday night proposed providing some school personnel with "rigorous" firearms training and backed a bill to improve criminal background checks on gun buyers, but backpedaled on the idea of increasing the minimum age to buy certain firearms -- a policy President Donald Trump had said he would support.
  • The proposals, which come more than three weeks after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, also include a plan to establish a commission chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that will recommend policy and funding proposals for school violence prevention, including possible age restrictions on some firearms purchases. The commission does not have a set timeline of when it will report its findings, although an official said it would be within one year.
  • Trump first floated the idea of arming teachers and school officials after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month -- an idea that was met with immediate criticism.
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  • Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, also will partner with states and local governments to support a public awareness campaign modeled on the department's "see something, say something" anti-terrorism campaign to encourage the awareness and reporting of suspicious activity, the administration announced.
  • Trump is proposing an expansion and overhaul of mental health programs, including those that help identify and treat those who may be a threat to themselves or others, the administration announced.
  • Trump is also calling for a review of the statutory and regulatory privacy protections to determine if any changes or clarifications are needed to improve coordination between mental health and other health care professionals, school officials, and law enforcement personnel.
  • The commission plans to focus on several areas, including age restrictions for certain firearm purchases; current entertainment rating systems; youth consumption of violent entertainment; best practices for school building and campus security and threat assessment and violence prevention; plans for integration and coordination of federal resources to help prevent and mitigate shootings at schools; and opportunities to improve access to mental health treatment, including through efforts to raise awareness of mental illness and the effectiveness of treatment.
  • While the congressman says the recommendations for congressional actions would be "a small, positive first step," he said he believes they are "insufficient."
anonymous

The End of the Two-Party System - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-republicans-scarcity.html

new york times politics US culture

shared by anonymous on 14 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The End of the Two-Party System
  • Today, after the financial crisis, the shrinking of the middle class, the partisan warfare, a scarcity mind-set is dominant: Resources are limited. The world is dangerous. Group conflict is inevitable. It’s us versus them. If they win, we’re ruined, therefore, let’s stick with our tribe. The ends justify the means.
  • it’s really a shift from a philosophy to an anti-philosophy. The scarcity mind-set is an acid that destroys every belief system it touches.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Now, Donald Trump leads the Republican Party, the personification of the scarcity mind-set.
  • Trump’s scarcity mind-set demands has been a disaster for conservative governance. He insists on perpetual warfare — against all comers. Stuck fighting his wars with him, Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
  • The fact is that the scarcity mentality and the perpetual warrior style it demands are incompatible with any civilized political creed.
  • Under the influence of this mentality, evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist. Under the influence of this mentality, liberalism goes from a creed that values individual rights and deliberation to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Javier E

Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...america-psychiatrists-weigh-in

trump mental illness psychopathy

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • depending on which of these books you trust — and their persuasive powers vary considerably — you might conclude that Trump is of unsound mind, or that we’re the deranged ones for electing him, or that America has always been disturbed, with Trump’s presidency just the latest manifestation.
  • These options are not mutually exclusive.
  • Trump displays signs of “extreme present hedonism,” the tendency to live in the moment without considering consequences, seeking to bolster one’s self-esteem no matter the risk. Or he exhibits “narcissistic personality disorder,” which includes believing you’re better than others, exaggerating your achievements and expecting constant praise. Combine hedonism, narcissism and bullying, and you get “an impulsive, immature, incompetent person who, when in the position of ultimate power, easily slides into the role of the tyrant,”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Others suggest that Trump shows indications of sociopathy, including lack of empathy, absence of guilt and intentional ma­nipu­la­tion. Put it all together and you have “malignant narcissism,” which includes antisocial behavior, paranoid traits, even sadism.
  • “Mr. Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable,” retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes concludes. “They create a profound danger for America’s democracy and safety. Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism producing more paranoia, more lies, and more enraged destruction.” And when the president stands before the U.N. General Assembly and threatens to “totally destroy” an enemy country of 25 million people, enraged destruction seems on point.
  • Allen Frances wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder used in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and he doesn’t think Trump qualifies.
  • In “Twilight of American Sanity,” Frances says the diagnosis requires the patient to experience significant distress because of his condition. But throughout his life, Trump “has been generously rewarded for his Trumpism, not impaired by it,” Frances writes. “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad, but because he is very bad.”
  • Frances’s judgment proves even more damning. He trashes Trump as a “secular antichrist,” a “two-bit, would-be Mussolini,” even an instrument of divine vengeance. “If you were assigned the task of punishing humanity for its original sins,” he thunders, “you could do no better than invent a Donald Trump and give him extraordinary power.”
  • Kurt Andersen is here to tell us that America has featured magical thinking and nutty impulses for centuries. Thanks to our mix of religiosity and Enlightenment values — plus the do-your-own-thing vibe of the 1960s and the super-powered distribution channel known as the Internet — Americans have developed a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue,”
rerobinson03

Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-psychosis-mental.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 28 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children.
  • At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking.
  • “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus
  • Beyond individual reports, a British study of neurological or psychiatric complications in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.”
  • Medical experts say they expect that such extreme psychiatric dysfunction will affect only a small proportion of patients. But the cases are considered examples of another way the Covid-19 disease process can affect mental health and brain function.
  • Although the coronavirus was initially thought primarily to cause respiratory distress, there is now ample evidence of many other symptoms, including neurological, cognitive and psychological effects, that could emerge even in patients who didn’t develop serious lung, heart or circulatory problems.
  • Experts increasingly believe brain-related effects may be linked to the body’s immune system response to the coronavirus and possibly to vascular problems or surges of inflammation caused by the disease process.
  • Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,”
  • Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped.
  • Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for brain fog and memory problems bedeviling many Covid survivors,
  • How long the psychosis lasted and patients’ response to treatment has varied. The woman in Britain — whose symptoms included paranoia about the color red and terror that nurses were devils who would harm her and a family member — took about 40 days to recover, according to a case report.
dytonka

Walter Wallace Shooting - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

BLM Politics US

shared by dytonka on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Two Philadelphia police officers shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man holding a knife on Monday afternoon as his mother watched nearby. Protests in the city have raged in the nights since.
  • Simpson said a person who he later learned was Wallace's mother told police that Wallace had mental health issues.
  • Wallace suffered from bipolar disorder and was in crisis during the time of the shooting, his family said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Johnson said that Wallace was suffering and in a doctor's care, and that he was receiving treatment for his mental health issues.
  • "It's emotionally taxing to think about how you can call for assistance and wind up with the people who you called killing you," he said.
  • dytonka on 29 Oct 20
     
    Black man shot in Philadelphia that had a mental illness
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