Things That Suck: Trauma, Work, Depresh... Awareness?
And look! It's Paul Scheer! Who doesn't suck at all!
Paul Scheer on the podcast
We got Paul Scheer! You know, from everything!
And I gotta admit, I fell for it again. Knowing Paul a little and being familiar with his work, I figured he couldn’t have anything going on negatively in the mental health department. Even though, as someone who’s been doing shows like mine since 2016, I should know better that all kinds of people have all kinds of things going on.
In Paul Scheer’s case, a thing he’s had going on since he was a kid was living with traumatic experience, a result of some severe child abuse committed by his stepfather Hunter, when Paul was between the ages of 5 and 12. The incident that jumped out at me was when Paul was playing Monopoly was with his stepfather, who landed on a property Paul owned and then owed Paul $325. To avoid being charged the rent, Hunter literally strangles Paul. Over a Monopoly game.
He hasn’t talked about it much since then, other than with close family members and therapists but he would often allude to a rocky childhood on his podcast, How Did This Get Made. He’d tell anecdotes that raised eyebrows among his co-hosts. When Paul sat down to try to compile some of these stories, he found that they inevitably pointed to these traumatic incidents. Writing about them - and this happened with me and my memoir, as well - helped to build an understanding of what they meant, how they connected, and how they formed the person he became.
In the interview, we also get into Paul’s relatively recent diagnosis of ADHD and what that has meant to his understanding of his world.
There are six types of depression but they don’t have catchy names. Yet!
Some really interesting research is happening at Stanford University to get a lot more precise when it comes to pinpointing depression and doing something about it. They’ve categorized six different types of depression as “biotypes”.
Around 30% of people with depression have what’s known as treatment-resistant depression, meaning multiple kinds of medication or therapy have failed to improve their symptoms. And for up to two-thirds of people with depression, treatment fails to fully reverse their symptoms to healthy levels.
That’s in part because there’s no good way to know which antidepressant or type of therapy could help a given patient. Medications are prescribed through a trial-and-error method, so it can take months or years to land on a drug that works — if it ever happens. And spending so long trying treatment after treatment, only to experience no relief, can worsen depression symptoms.
“The goal of our work is figuring out how we can get it right the first time,” Williams said. “It’s very frustrating to be in the field of depression and not have a better alternative to this one-size-fits-all approach.”
Maybe awareness isn’t always a 100% great thing?
I’m going to eventually have to do an episode of the show about this topic because I’ve been reading about it more and more. The idea is that the increase in reports of mental health conditions is tied to an increase in public awareness of mental health conditions. Which is fine. But! People aren’t highly skilled at separating an actual clinical problem from normal human experiences that are unpleasant.
British psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues the trends for rising attention and prevalence are linked. Her “prevalence inflation hypothesis” proposes that increasing awareness of mental illness may lead some people to diagnose themselves inaccurately when they are experiencing relatively mild or transient problems.
Foulkes’ hypothesis implies that some people develop overly broad concepts of mental illness. Our research supports this view. In a new study, we show that concepts of mental illness have broadened in recent years – a phenomenon we call “concept creep” – and that people differ in the breadth of their concepts of mental illness.
Work, as we know it, today, in America, is some bullshit
Roxane Gay signs off her Work Friends column in a way sort of like Eisenhower going out by warning of the military-industrial complex.
We shouldn’t have to suffer or work several jobs or tolerate intolerable conditions just to eke out a living, but a great many of us do just that. We feel trapped and helpless and sometimes desperate. We tolerate the intolerable because there is no choice. We ask questions for which we already know the answers because change is terrifying and we can’t really afford to risk the loss of income when rent is due and health insurance is tied to employment and someday we will have to stop working and will still have financial obligations.
Chris Fairbanks on Sleeping with Celebrities
Comedian Chris Fairbanks joined us from his boyhood home in Missoula to talk about skateboarding and golf and whether Carroll O’Connor was a good babysitter. He was. All of this will help you sleep.
What do standup comedy, golf, and skateboarding have in common beside high degrees of difficulty and opportunities to humiliate yourself in public? Well, they have veteran standup comedian Chris Fairbanks, who walks us through the experiences of all three ventures. Chris, one of the hosts of the podcast Do You Need a Ride?!, joins us from his hometown of Missoula, Montana where he first learned to skateboard and where he golfed (golved?) with his father just the other day. Drift off to sleep hearing about these leisure activities without the rigor of actually participating in them.