If this enterprise can’t raise enough money from listeners/readers, I swear to God, I’ll turn this show around. And we’ll never get to Grandma’s. If you’ve already donated, thank you. If not, go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
Time… what now?
So I’m going to try this thing I keep hearing about called Taking Time Off. Have you heard of this? Apparently it doesn’t involve throwing away your watch but rather just not doing work. Like you fill your day visiting with loved ones or reading books or… something? Weird, right?
So next week, no newsletters. Back again on the second of January. Until then, here are things…
Kim-Joy on the pod on Monday!
Kim-Joy was a contestant on The Great British Bake-Off where she gained a lot of popularity for making meticulous baked treats that were also brain-shatteringly cute.
What didn’t come up so much on the Bake-Off was that she had a long and bumpy mental health road to get to where she is. She grew up in a house with her mother, her father, two brothers, AND her father’s ex-wife and THEIR kids. It was not harmonious and she doesn’t have a lot of warm emotions toward her dad and the various things he put his families through over the years.
In school, Kim-Joy stopped talking. Selective mutism. She would talk at home but at school she would not say a word to anyone and invent reasons to not go to class when it looked like talking would be necessary for presentations and such. This continued through about age 16 when she went off to what the British call college, the two years before going to university. From there, she eventually did talk but was still painfully shy, a situation she tried to address through that classic mental health treatment, excessive drinking.
She studied psychology and entered mental health as a profession but didn’t really feel grounded until she met Nabil, the man who would go on to be her husband.
Then she goes and tries out for the Bake-Off! Which she gets! And which airs when she’s 27 years old. So in just over ten years Kim-Joy goes from not speaking at all in public to being a TV star.
Of course, it helps that the Bake-Off isn’t an American “I’m not here to make friends” kind of reality competition show. It’s collaborative and supportive and is very much about making friends who cheer you on while you make cakes and treats.
Anyway, it’s a great talk so check that out on Monday.
Ducks wins award!
Yes, that’s the correct grammar. I’m not talking about the birds known as ducks winning an award for cutest animal here. Though they certainly deserve it.
No, I’m talking about Ducks, the graphic novel, which has won a Publisher’s Weekly award for Best Graphic Novel.
Kate Beaton’s book is all about life in the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada where Beaton worked after university to pay off her student debt. In the book, she’s one of a very small handful of women in a series of massive colonies of men isolated from the world. It’s compelling stuff. I interviewed Kate Beaton about it and that’s on an upcoming episode of our show.
The ducks in the title refers to a flock of ducks who get stuck in the oil, an incident that garners a lot of media attention to the plight of these poor birds mired in oil and what reforms should be made. Meanwhile, much like the ducks, the people working there are depressed, they abuse substances, and they generally wither in the oil as well.
Whoosh. Okay, how about another cute duck?
Pitchfork gives, like, a 3.2 rating to the state of musicians’ mental health
Not a great review. The music site gives an in-depth look at the pretty desperate situation musicians often find themselves in.
A 2019 study found that 73 percent of independent music makers experience anxiety and depression in relation to their work. In 2021, the Journal of Psychiatric Research published a peer-reviewed report titled “Mental health issues among international touring professionals in the music industry”—based on a pre-pandemic survey of 1,154 individuals—that showed “greatly elevated” rates of clinical depression and stress in comparison to the general population, and levels of suicidality that are five times the average rate of the U.S. population. Musicians have historically gone widely without health insurance, but as with all of these longstanding problems, more research is needed.
The article profiles artists including Santigold, Courtney Barnett, and Jeff Tweedy about their mental states and how their health has held up through careers in the biz. I interviewed Tweedy about this very topic on my old show. You can go find that interview if you want but I’m not going to link to it because I have a hard time letting go of grudges. The grudge isn’t against Tweedy, whom I quite like.
Want to feel terrible about yourself for not knowing more about African geography?
Well, bless these rains: a game called You Don’t Know Africa.
I did very, very poorly.
My performance was about as good as this version of the song: