Can you make a gym for mental health?
Would that mean replacing sweat with tears?
So there’s this new… thing… called Coa. It aims to be a gym for mental and emotional fitness. Just as one would go a traditional gym to lift weights or play basketball or take a pilates class, one would go to a Coa facility for classes and, I think?, therapy. It just launched, NBA guy and mental health advocate Kevin Love is involved and serving as a spokesman. The original plan was to open bricks and mortar facilities but with covid the whole thing is starting online with the hope that the buildings will follow eventually.
*** I am in favor of any venture that can make lives better in a safe and honest way. ***
You can go to their site now and try the classes for free, after that you have to pay for them. The site is all earth tones and photos of people doing great.
It’s always a good idea to get into the fine print of any service that seeks to provide mental health services. In this case, Coa says it doesn’t. And if there’s such a thing as screaming fine print…
Coa IS NOT ENGAGED IN THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE OR MENTAL HEALTH CARE, DOES NOT PROVIDE MEDICAL SERVICES OR MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT, AND IS NOT A HEALTH CARE PROVIDER. THE CLINICIAN WITH WHICH YOU ESTABLISH A TREATMENT RELATIONSHIP IS SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR PROVIDING YOU WITH MEDICAL SERVICES. WE ONLY ACT AS A TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM TO CONNECT YOU WITH CLINICIANS WHO MAY BE INTERESTED IN PROVIDING YOU WITH MEDICAL SERVICES.
OKAY THANK YOU FOR TELLING ME BUT YOU ARE SPEAKING VERY LOUDLY.
So it’s positioned to be more like a mall in that sense. It just owns the building, you and Cinnabon are on your own. It’s OK Cupid and you and a practitioner are the couple.
The privacy policy is worth reading too. Being legal boilerplate, it’s pretty dry, but it’s your head we’re talking about and that’s pretty important.
I’ll be curious to see how this does, especially on the bricks and mortar side. I’m dubious that people would flock to a building for something like this. Seems like there’s a pretty big gap between Zumba and serious mental health needs and treatments. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of a lot of therapists giving up their office spaces, intending to not go back to in-person when covid is over. And if Coa stays online with these services, I have to wonder what makes that different from other online services.
But I hope more people find ways to feel better in this mean dumb world so I hope Coa succeeds.
I bet one of the most awkward things about a mental health gym is when you go into the emotional locker room and there are all these old men with totally naked senses of self. Their trauma history just hanging out.
One in ten was always the stat I heard about people being clinically depressed. Now we’re at one in three. Welcome, new members. Please pick up your free T-shirts.
Skip 30 minutes of the news and watch this instead.
Matt Jones had an idea for a trick. As the video begins, he’s far from completing it. His accent is adorable.
From kottke’s list of the steps Jones takes:
4. Failure. You see Jones try this trick over and over again in the video and very few of them are successful — and I bet a lot more failure happened off camera. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of fails. This is the way.
5. Self-doubt. The trial & error, failure, and self-doubt stages all overlap. You can see him struggling with this on top of the tower. He still believes but this trick is dangerous. Body and mind are battling hard.
Apparently, wherever Jones lives, a locker room is called a “changing village” and I have fallen in love with that term and I will make that term my bride and marry it.
I’m a sports fan and I used to listen to sports radio in the car. I don’t anymore because I don’t commute and podcasts are a thing. But I recall that the tone of that platform could swing from very enlightened people with a healthy perspective on sports and society to absolute bricks-for-brains dodo heads who put sports above anything else in the world. The latter would argue that no sports professional should leave their job unless they were dead, that sports is all that matters. I prefer the enlightened.
Bill Bayno recently resigned from his assistant coach job with the NBA’s Indiana Pacers for mental health reasons. I appreciated Kurt Helin’s lede in writing about it:
Bill Bayno is bold and smart enough to do something too many of us are not: Walk away from something we love when the stress of it becomes overwhelming.
Bayno had recently dealt with the death of both parents and was pretty shaken up by the events of the pandemic and the George Floyd aftermath. He also appears to have had some mental health issues in the past.
The NBA and its players have spoken a lot about the need to prioritize mental health in recent years; this is concrete action — someone recognizing what was going on and moving on before things got worse for him. It’s actions, not just words, and the Pacers are doing the right thing backing him.
Here’s a picture of former Pacers player Haywoode Workman. I always liked him because his name is what you would say if you were summoning a carpenter but forgot the word carpenter.
John, firstly, I'm a huge fan of Wits and I'm glad you're still working on projects. Secondly, among other things, I'm very interested in your take on the topic of virtual therapy. Last year, during a particularly rough month, I participated in a bit of virtual counseling. The name of the platform is probably not important but, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, you hear about it often. Anyway, at the end of the day, I decided it wasn't for me and I think it's great that there are folks out there who are thinking about this sort of thing—so, nice work! Lastly, I was wondering if you had any thoughts related to “normies” who might be living with a “saddie” and how they can be supportive without having to have a literal or figurative Ph.D. Maybe a future post?
Love these posts, John, but I have an issue. “Adorable accent” (Full admission - mine is pretty close to this one even after many years in the US). I am so tired of hearing comments like this. Especially since Brits in Britain are categorized and judged by their accents, or they were in my day. For the last 30 odd years I have heard this in the US. It feels like a very personal comment. I know you didn’t mean it like this, but please rethink.