Drew Magary's recovery, Olympic minds, and Valentines that will confuse and cause upset
And also a little bit of time with Beck
A quick note right at the top here. I messed up. In the last newsletter, I wrote about some therapists with autism and, because I like to include some images with the items to bust things up, I included stock photography of puzzle pieces and a puzzle piece ribbon. I did so because that comes up a lot in a Google image search for autism. Turns out that the puzzle piece imagery is offensive to a lot of folks in the autism community, who feel it infantilizes the lives of people on the autism spectrum. I had not given this enough thought and I apologize. The puzzle piece stuff has been taken off the website for this newsletter and an explanation provided.
If you get something out of this newsletter or the Depresh Mode podcast, I would appreciate your financial support. Go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
Drew Magary was a jerk about the garbage disposal
We don’t tend to talk about traumatic brain injuries a lot on my shows. Always felt as much neurological than psychological to me and there are plenty of things to cover along the lines of environment-based behavioral disorders. But this week we talk about TBI and I’m glad we do.
Drew Magary is one of my favorite writers, especially on the subject of sports and the deep and problematic relationship so many of us have to sports. His writing is smart, sometimes tough on people who deserve it, and often incredibly funny. There’s always a moral center to it.
Drew’s book, The Night the Lights Went Out, opens with a still inexplicable brain injury that puts him in a coma for a couple weeks. It’s also about his quest to figure out what exactly the injury was and how it affects everything else in his life. Why, for instance, does a sudden blow to the head, make him overreact to his wife using the garbage disposal and declaim that he is a writer who makes his living with his hand. Importantly, his hands were nowhere near the disposal at this moment.
Drew’s recovery and search for answers take him through neurology and psychology alike and into some revealing therapy sessions.
I’m glad Drew’s recovery is going so well and I’m also glad he has not made his writing any more tame. Take, for instance, his recent article What The Fuck Happened Between The Vikings And Jim Harbaugh?
Here’s a helpful set of links for Drew:
The Olympics and mental health
This year’s Winter Olympics and last year’s delayed Summer Olympics are spooky and broken. Small crowds or no crowds, nobody’s parents in attendance, and a general tone that feels more like a government-mandated ritual than a celebration of human achievement.
ABC News has a report on what the U.S. Olympic team is doing to prioritize mental health and it sounds fine. It also sounds like the kind of broad generalities that are always released by large organizations that wish to appear enlightened on the subject of mental health, regardless of whether they back it up. Amazon, for instance, will tell you that they care deeply about employee mental health, and maybe some people in the press release department do, even though the company has a terrible record on it.
The interesting stuff in the ABC article is a few paragraphs down:
"Whenever I think about Biles' decision, she really helped people speak up," (psychiatrist Dr. Leela) Magavi said. "I've had people say, 'I never thought you could even do that. If you were experiencing something like twisties, that could even say that.' I do think that her decision did bridge the gap between mental and physical health."
And it seems like some professional athletes have followed suit.
Prior to the NHL announcing that no hockey players would be traveling to the Olympics due to Beijing's strict COVID measures, Las Vegas Golden Knights goalie Robin Lehner said he would not be playing for the Swedish national team, citing mental health struggles.
Lehner, who has been open about his bipolar disorder diagnosis, said that after consulting with his doctors, he had made the difficult decision to stay in the U.S. instead.
"Reality is that what [has] been said about how it's going to be is not ideal for my mental health," he tweeted Dec. 6. "Took long time to make [a] decision with my psychiatrist and family. My well-being [has to] come first and being locked down and not knowing what happens if you test positive is [too] much of a risk for me."
Sledding
I wonder if someone from the U.S. Olympic Committee patrols parks in the winter, looking for kids who are really great at sledding and then approaches their parents about a potential future in luge or bobsledding.
Probably not.
But it’s sledding. Come on, it’s sledding. It’s really really very good sledding.
I wonder if the Olympic luge people have hot chocolate after to warm up.
I wonder why no one has ever hired Beck to record a song called “Luger”.
I wonder why, if he has a couple of couches, I have to sleep on the love seat.
I’m a rider, I’m a winner. Things are gonna change, I can feel it.
This has nothing to do with mental health but it makes me laugh a lot, which makes me feel good
Or you know what? Maybe it does!
I’m a big fan of AI-generated content. An artificial intelligence bot will be given an assignment and do an *okay* job. Or a *pretty good* job. Or, sometimes, a *terrible* job.
One of my favorite places to look this kind of thing up is on the AI Weirdness site, which offers a new set of AI Valentines.
Here are some:
When I started this project, it was important to me that the AI specify not just the message, but also the images. Right now we don't quite have an AI capable of this. CLIP+DALL-E and similar CLIP-based algorithms can generate a picture of a sign that's at least a bit legible if the message is only a word or two long, and you spell out for it exactly what it should say. But asking for even something as simple as "a candy heart with a message" resulted in entirely illegible and extremely cursed items.
So, what I ended up doing was using a text-generating neural net to write both the message and a description of the accompanying picture. Then I did my best to create each card following its instructions.
I guess the mental health angle here, for me anyway, is the awkwardness of knowing that something needs to be expressed but not knowing how one is supposed to do that. So you end up saying “I am no one!” and drawing a rabbit head. It feels like a lot of conversations I’ve had with people who never deal with this stuff.
AI stuff can also make it feel like the robot apocalypse is still quite a ways off. Which is comforting.
You are a class act! Recognizing when we have struggled, or lacked insight and addressing it immediately makes you extraordinary. We are all learning, and you are giving people a voice. Thank you, my patients enjoy your podcasts, they bring up healthy and healing conversations for group topics.