ADHD superfocus with Sarah Marshall, crisis, crisis, Reddit, Prince
Yeah, that covers it. Lots of videos in here.
I don’t charge for this newsletter and heaven knows you can listen to the Depresh Mode podcast, for free if you so choose. That’s because the whole thing is donation-driven. It’s public radio style, depending on people recognizing that to make this stuff costs money. If enough people donate, we can exist. If they don’t, the whole thing will shut down. Would you like it to keep happening? Go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
This is what you’re wrong about when you’re wrong about ADHD
You can be excused for being a little bewildered by attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). First of all, it’s a long acronym. Second, maybe you’re old enough when it was just called “hyperactive”. Then people used the term ADD. Then an H got in there instead. Hell, if you’ve been around for a long time, maybe you remember people with this disorder just being called “bad” or “spacy”.
Generally, I support the evolution of terminology because it tends to improve and get more specific.
You might also be confused when I tell you that this week’s Depresh Mode episode is about people with ADHD having enormous attention spans in certain areas. I talk about this guy John who could type 220 words per minute because he concentrated on it all the time. The disorder part was that he did so while neglecting other things.
Our guest is Sarah Marshall, who hosts the indispensable podcast You’re Wrong About, which sprung originally from her incredibly focus on the story of Tonya Harding. Sarah cared about that story, and how everyone misunderstood it, a LOT. Her writing about Harding led to a show where she and others pick apart what people were wrong about on topics like the OJ Simpson trial, Y2K, and even clowns in the woods. And yeah, Sarah was diagnosed with ADHD at an early age. She was given what she calls “homework pills” at the time.
Sarah and I talk about how and why the atypical mind is punished in the school system, how her show came about, and what she’s expecting as she starts therapy for the first time. And what I think she’s wrong about when it comes to therapy.
A very good book I thought of when I wrote that headline:
A very good song from our own Rhett Miller inspired by that book:
You can find cleaner versions of the song all over the place but I like this messy one.
Gay gay gay gay gay gay. Gay. Gay? Gay.
Homophobia is bad.
Education is good.
Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law is going to mess kids up.
Two-thirds of LGBTQ+ youth said debates concerning the state laws have had a negative impact on their mental health, according to a poll from the Trevor Project, an intervention and suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth.
And transgender people, in particular, already often face greater psychological distress than the US general population. The National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 US Transgender Survey found that 40% of transgender respondents had attempted suicide, which is nine times the rate of the general population.
“We have governors – that have no education or basis or expertise in child mental health – that impose such laws that are going to have horrendous impacts on kids,” said Natasha Poulopoulos, a pediatric psychologist in Miami.
Let’s talk about crises because there are so many
God bless Psychiatric Times for asking a question in a headline that, my god, I sure hope they already know the answer to:
Psychiatric Care in the US: Are We Facing a Crisis?
Yes. Yes, we are.
The article goes to a lot of places. There aren’t enough providers. Seniors are the most likely to receive mental healthcare but still have a high rate of people in need not getting it. Maryland has the best overall mental healthcare, Mississippi has the worst.
And this:
“The state of child and adolescent mental health in America reflects 2 overlapping pandemics, a mental health pandemic existing before and worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an acute and chronic situation, where we already had a silent pandemic of children not being able to receive the mental health care that they need and deserve. The pandemic has only worsened that,” Warren Y.K. Ng, MD, MPH, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, told Psychiatric Times™. “It has really exposed many of the inequities and disparities that existed beforehand, exacerbating the experiences particularly of the racial and ethnic minoritized youth who are disproportionately impacted from all social determinants of care.”
Reddit: It’s not just for 17yo boys who make you uncomfortable!
In fact, it’s full of mental health categories (subreddits) that you might find useful. It’s all in how you use Reddit. Kind of like you can use a hammer to build a house or kill someone. You can use Reddit to lose all hope for the world or learn more about dialectical behavior therapy or trauma recovery. Neat.
There’s always more Prince in the vault
So there’s this video going around where WCCO, a TV station here in the Twin Cities, stumbles across a previously lost clip of an 11-year-old Prince talking (cryptically, of course) about teachers. It was found when the station’s newsroom was looking for video from previous teacher strikes because Minneapolis just had one last month.
It’s a remarkable video but also remarkable what the station does with the story, tracking down a friend of Prince’s from back then who knew him since kindergarten and played in his first band. They also talked to a fan/historian. Because WCCO could’ve just introduced the clip and played it. Instead, they presented the whole situation in a way that brought out both the fame and the deeply personal connections.
As great as it is seeing a grade school Prince being sly and sassy, the choked up reaction of his friends are what makes this so beautiful.
I’m sure every community holds their cultural icons close. But Minnesota, more than other places I’m familiar with, feels their music and musicians on a deep level. Prince was something well beyond a brilliant eccentric musician here, in a way that I can marvel at, if not feel on as deep a level because I’m not from here. It’s in the same way that I think the Replacements are a great band but I don’t get choked up just talking about them in the same way that people here do. But I can appreciate how people celebrate his life all the time around here.
I type this in Minnesota, in April, and there’s fresh snow on the ground.