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Kate Speer on the podcast
So I heard about Kate Speer as being a person who had a lot to say about mental health and dogs. She might be good to have on the show, suggested one of our producers. And after a little looking around online, I had to agree. Especially because she has a hell of a mental health journey to relay, she’s good at relaying it, and she has dogs named Waffle and Tugboat, which I found charming.
Kate has dealt with significant mental health conditions, such as psychosis and panic disorder. At various points, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which she now believes to be a mistaken diagnosis.
Kate has a strong social media presence here on Substack and on Instagram. She writes a lot about mental health and her two dogs and, over the years, she has written a lot about someone called Maura. Kate talked about Maura in a TedX talk that she gave:
Maura, she explains, is someone who she got to know while hospitalized in a psychiatric facility and, Kate says, they became very close. She goes on to tell how Maura checked herself out of the hospital against medical advice and soon died by suicide due to her depression.
I knew all this going into the interview. So I was reeeeeally shocked when Kate revealed something else about Maura that changed everything I thought I knew. I don’t want to reveal it here because I want you to hear the episode because I write this newsletter in part to get you to listen to the episode.
When this M. Night Shyamalan-style reveal was revealed, those of us on the show were completely shocked. Like I had to pick my jaw up off the floor so I could continue to ask more questions.
There’s some great stuff about becoming friends with trees and being chased by ring wraiths also. And a lot about the psychiatric assistance provided by dogs.
Salon takes on the thorny issue of the conservative movement and mental health
We need to be better about mental health in this country. I think most people agree on that score. Between stigma and access to care, I doubt you’ll find a whole lot of people who think things are just ducky. They’re not ducky. They’re unducky.
But writing in Salon, Owen Racer points out where mental health is being used for political gain by those on the right.
Speaking from the stage of the 2023 National Rifle Association (NRA) convention, the now broken-up White House hopefuls Donald Trump and Mike Pence made their point clear: Mass shootings are a mental health problem, not a gun problem. This display of stigmatization is most commonly seen following tragic events, like the unparalleled number of mass shootings we've endured. It is an unrelated tool of distraction. Experts have said that not only are most people with mental illness not violent, but they are also far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.
Racer also writes about GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s leveraging a mental health argument into transphobia as she blames trans athletes for teen suicide:
The former South Carolina governor spewed this factually incorrect and dehumanizing language at a recent CNN town hall. Asked to define "woke," which the right has repeatedly demonized, Haley stammered this response:"How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room? And then they wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year."
Long covid linked to mental health problems
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - is presenting new research indicating that the impact of long covid is not entirely physical. I mean, not that mental health is normally unlinked from physical health, they’re all part of HEALTH, we all know this, the brain and body when separated don’t tend to do well, of course of course but you know what I mean.
The list of mental problems is a long one: fatigue, brain fog/cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, OCD, sleep disorders, psychosis, and the onset of substance abuse disorders. Yikes.
“The symptoms of long COVID are greatly varied, can go for an extended period of time and sometimes keep people from their day-to-day activities — all things that can contribute to mental health challenges,” the L.A. County Department of Public Health said in a statement.
Long-haul sufferers who are women, Black, Latino and Native American are at higher risk for also developing a mental health condition. Those who were hospitalized for their acute COVID-19 illness had a more severe initial illness or a longer duration of symptoms.
Long covid is bad but so is metal health. It will, in fact, drive you mad:
I went to see Asteroid City
It’s a movie with a lot of sorrow in it but a lot of hope. I think it’s a movie about finding hope in the midst of grief and loss, how a devastating loss fills one with an instinctual need to unearth hope as a result.
There are a couple of moments that really stick with me, and they’re similar to each other. Toward the beginning of the film, Augie (Jason Schwartzman) must tell his children, including preschool age triplet daughters, that their mother has died. It’s delivered deadpan in the Wes Anderson style but one of the daughters immediately wants to know when their mother will come back. She’s not weepy, she’s not emotional, she just wants to know. Later, the daughters insist on burying their mother’s ashes at the motel where all the various travelers are staying. The same daughter insists that from this spot in the ground, their mother will rise again.
And that’s kind of what everyone does.
Augie looks to recover from the loss of his wife by latching on to Midge, the Scarlett Johansson character, as she looks to rebound from bad relationships. Tom Hanks’ character tries to find hope in grandchildren who are not particularly ready to latch on to him. And everyone, including the U.S. military looks to the quintet of young inventors to provide hope for a better future in the rocket age.
In maybe the most notable example of hope following loss, a - uh - visitor from a long ways away stops by to steal Asteroid City’s most prized object and the town, indeed the whole world, embraces this loss as the most exciting thing imaginable for the hope that it represents.
Anyway, good movie. About mental health. Kind of. About the mind recalibrating after devastation to find new reason to go on living.
Here’s a video about the use, by Wes Anderson and others, of miniatures:
Here is an entire album of musical mashups
And the end of the first one made me laugh quite a bit. It’s Queen and Spongebob.