A photo of me, collegiate, carefree and full of hair and hope, from the 1980s
I had it better than youngs have it today. Plus: Quiet Riot.
I’m not going to share all the very very nice tweets I’ve been seeing about the show since we launched on Monday of this week.
Okay. One. From my friend the quiz show host.
If you subscribe to this newsletter… well, first: weird. Secondly, enjoy the luxurious Link Tree page for Depresh Mode where you can find all the different ways you can get hooked up. It’s not a real tree. It’s a web site.
Remember, this is a newsletter and podcast about MENTAL health. It’s not about METAL health. If you have an issue with being driven mad by metal health, please remember to bang your head.
See, all these crude visuals about inmates in an asylum and padded rooms are not offensive because it’s about METAL health. If it was about MENTAL health? Totally offensive.
Or something.
I interviewed Kevin Dubrow once. Total sweetheart. The amount I know about 80s heavy metal may surprise and dismay you.
Washington Post’s Lauren Lumpkin has an article about the mental health impact of covid on college students given that this age group has already been in rough shape for a while now.
Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 for years have struggled disproportionally with mental illness compared to older groups, and experts cite such underlying factors as high expectations, social media and financial pressures. Now, evidence shows college students experienced higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation in 2020 than in 2019.
One student profiled goes to Morehouse and is finally back on campus after an extended period moving back in with his mother and being on social media.
Lockdown made Nolan feel like his life had stopped but, online, it seemed like others were still moving. He would scroll through Instagram and see people taking trips, getting new jobs and buying cars.
“Although those things are positive experiences, you’re looking at yourself like, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” Nolan said. “When you have this overload of positivity, you always feel like you’re behind.”
What Nolan was doing — scrolling and comparing — isn’t unusual, said Ryan Patel, a psychiatrist in Ohio State University’s counseling center and chair-elect of the American College Health Association’s mental health section. The popularity of social media is one of the factors leading to higher rates of anxiety among young people and increasing the pressure they feel to achieve.
“This is the first generation of students that have spent their entire adolescence on smartphones and social media and things like that,” Patel said. “Especially with those kinds of technologies, they may be comparing their average self to the shining moments on social media, and falsely thinking that everybody is like that in all aspects of their lives.”
As the father of a college sophomore and another kid who will be a college freshman in the fall, I’m feeling this one. Less than they are but still. My memories of college - the best ones anyway - are all about the presence of other people. Parties, sure, but lively discussions in seminar classes, hanging out at the student union building, shared casual meals. That this was all taken away on the cusp of adulthood just sucks.
I’m trying to think of a delicate and intellectual way to say this. Here it goes:
GET VACCINATED AS SOON AS YOU CAN, YOU STUPID BUTT.
That went pretty well, I think.
I’m on this week’s edition of Seattle Now, a podcast about Seattle (now) on KUOW, hosted by longtime pal Patricia Murphy. I think it comes out not so much now as maybe tomorrow morning. I, as a person in St Paul, will lend my expertise on what’s happening in Seattle now on Seattle Now. Then.
When I was a kid, there was a nightly news-ish talk show on KING5 called Seattle Tonight Tonite. I never wondered what the f was up with that name. To my knowledge, no one else wondered either. We went to a taping once and Lenny Wilkens was there and smiled at me.
Here’s a video of an episode of the show. Do not watch it. It is very boring.