Armchair psychoanalysis of cartoons and mental health tips from the deeply sexy
Also, depression has been solved. Which, hey, cool.
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We had a funny idea that hopefully won’t make people mad
Different kind of show this week. Funny one too, I think.
It was in an editorial meeting some weeks ago when the topic came up of whether to do anything for a Christmas/holiday episode. And we started talking about how many mental health disorders start emerging when you look at the behavior of popular Christmas characters. Santa is totally compulsive, perhaps obsessively so. Rudolph is treated like garbage but places that trauma aside to please others. The Little Drummer Boy, good lord, what’s going on there?
The idea emerged to perform some analysis of these characters, with the emphasis on “perform”. To do it all tongue-in-cheek, to have some laughs, and to emphasize that it’s not real analysis because a) we’re not actual psychiatrists and b) the characters are not actual people.
So we invited some pals we thought would be fun to join us.
Hal Lublin from Tights and Fights and We Got This,
Broti Gupta, a writer for The Simpsons, who has appeared on our show very recently,
and Carolina Hidalgo, co-host of No Dogs In Space, and a guest on a FUTURE episode of Depresh Mode that was already taped but hasn’t aired yet.
I hope no one gets mad at us.
Because, yeah, when you look at Rudolph’s catalog of behavior, it matches up really well with borderline personality disorder. And in this episode I point that out. AND I know that there are real actual people out there for whom BPD is a genuine thing for humans and not stop motion gimmick reindeers.
By positing the existence of various disorders in make believe figures, I’m hoping to convey the idea that these behaviors and these characters are all over the place. Let’s recognize them and address them.
The harsh but fair take on Santa
We take pains in this episode to point out that the Santa we analyze is the Santa portrayed in popular holiday entertainments, NOT the real one at the North Pole, whom none of us have met. Essentially, we’re going after Jed Bartlet and not Joe Biden.
Broti, Hal, and I all come down on the guy pretty hard. Yes, he delivers toys all over the world. But just because you don’t pay money for something doesn’t mean it’s free. In Santa’s case, there are so many strings attached. You have to believe in him. You have to make sure other people believe in him. You have to be “good” according to his own secret standards and he watches you constantly.
We also touch on whether his North Pole colony is a workshop or actually a cult. There’s uniformity of dress, a charismatic leader, a compound veiled in secrecy. We don’t know if there’s an end-of-world scenario he promotes but honestly would anyone be surprised?
Among the four of us, only Carolina Hidalgo stands up for the allegedly jolly old elf, which means she’ll get better presents because that’s how narcissists operate.
An alternate, kinder take on Santa, this time with Jesus
My son Charlie is 21 now but when he was very young he had this belief about Santa and Jesus, that they were brothers. He still doesn’t know if he imagined on his own or if it was a dream that somehow stuck around as a concept of back story.
We wrote about it for McSweeney’s last year.
As the group adjourned, Jesus pulled his brother aside. Jesus was not smiling. “Santa Claus, listen. There are guys coming for me and it’s going to get bad. I don’t want you getting mixed up in all this. You have your whole life ahead of you, which might be eternal because your dad is Satan. You need to get out of town. As far away from Jerusalem as you can, and make toys there.”
Pick Your Own Headline:
This is incredibly funny
We’re all doomed
Why the choice? Because I couldn’t decide when I saw the headline
6 Sexy Men on How They've Maintained Their Mental Health During the Pandemic
This from Ryan Phillippe:
"There's times where you go up and down, and then also during the pandemic, everybody was at a bit of the loss for how to keep up their routines and that. Between my mental health needs and my own personal vanity, I stay in pretty decent shape."
Caeleb Dressel, who dressels for successels, says:
“I definitely had some breaking points during quarantine, a hundred percent, but my coach always had a plan. We moved forward how we could. We found pool time when we had it. I feel like we executed the best we could with the cards we were dealt. Definitely credit to Coach Troy for that.”
There’s your answer, everyone. Listen to your own personal Coach Troy. The Coach Troy that lives in your heart.
Depression is cured!
Well, sometimes. For some people. Maybe.
Some great results are being reported from rTMS treatment trials. It’s a more accelerated versions of transmagnetic stimulation treatments that are already in use.
A coil on top of Emma’s head created a magnetic field that sent electric pulses through her skull to tickle the surface of her brain. She says it felt like a woodpecker tapped on her skull every 15 seconds. The electrical current is directed at the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that plans, dreams and controls our emotions.
“It’s an area thought to be underactive in depression,” said Nolan Williams, a psychiatrist and rTMS researcher at Stanford. “We send a signal for the system to not only turn on, but to stay on and remember to stay on.”
Nolan says pumping up the prefrontal cortex helps turn down other areas of the brain that stimulate fear and anxiety. That’s the basic premise of rTMS: Electrical impulses are used to balance out erratic brain activity. As a result, people feel less depressed and more in control. All of this holds true in the new treatment — it just works faster.
I know there have been celebrations in the streets or Twitter feeds about this already. It is exciting. But please remember it’s meant for people with depression that has resisted other treatments and that it’s still in the trial phase. With regular TMS, some people feel better for a while but then slide back and we don’t know yet how rTMS plays out in the long run.
Still, though: yay.