Episode 9 - Mental Health Care is On Screens For Good Now, Let’s Get Ready
It's very convenient. Robots are definitely eavesdropping.
Screens and minds, hearts and bones, Shields and Yarnell
My therapist, whom I call Julie in my book even though it is not her real name, has changed my life for the better over the last few years. I honestly didn’t think I was worth much when I started going to her. Sure I had career success and a family that loved me but I also had a conviction that I was rotten. She worked with me to help get me pried out of that place. Julie is a special person in my life.
For the last 14 months, I have encountered her only as a floating two dimensional head on my computer or sometimes my phone. And it’s her but it’s not. We’re together but we’re not. I understand the person on the screen to be Julie but a large part of my brain tells me at all times that this is a show and not a person. I believe this cognitive dissonance gets in the way. I get the necessity but still.
It led me to wonder about what we have to get used to in the two-dimensional mental health space and what we merely need to put up with for a while. Short answer: we’re mostly not going back.
So in this episode, I talk with Dr. Anthony Sossong about what it means to psychiatry and it’s a lot of pretty good news. Underserved communities are going to be able to connect better with the few psychiatrists who are available and that can be huge in areas like Texas or Alaska. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the rate of people actually showing up for appointments is almost 100% for telehealth where it was 60-80% for in person visits.
I also talk with Chet Wisniewski of the online security firm Sophos, who knows more about privacy and security than anyone I know. I used to host Marketplace’s tech show several years ago and he was my go-to expert there. He talks about how you’re mostly safe talking with your therapist online because those conversations don’t have the big identity theft items like passwords and social security numbers. Some of the apps are a little more dicey, however. Talkspace, the most popular therapy connection app, stipulates that you are allowing their robots to listen to your conversations, anonymize you out of them, and use the harvest of key words to assist in marketing the app. On the one hand, well, you’re anonymized but on the other hand, holy WHAT? Robots listening to your therapy? For marketing?
We also have some listener voices and a quick look at the Preshies group on Facebook.
We Did It
The Max Fun Drive had already launched when I was asked to reveal what my goal was for total number of members. All the members would be new members since it’s a new show. But because it was a new show, I had no idea. 200? 100? Finally, I was told that 500 might be possible so that’s what I set.
Now it turns out that when you factor in the Drive, a few late stragglers, and a couple other sources coming through during the drive, we hit a grand.
Non-Mask Anxiety
Writing on CNN, psychologist John Duffy talks about what he’s hearing in his practice.
Despite the positive news from the CDC, I'm hearing plenty of anxiety from my clients around the new mask and social distancing non-mandates. For nearly a year, people have been describing to me anxious nightmares in which they are in a crowded public space, often the only person unmasked and at-risk.
Some have expressed near-panic watching pre-pandemic movies or TV shows depicting concerts or restaurant scenes in which everyone is, of course, unmasked and packed together.
This makes sense. After all, we were taught early in the pandemic that crowds of unmasked people were a threat to us, and that we could present a similar threat to others in close quarters.
Many people have developed a sense of comfort and safety while wearing a mask and maintaining distance, perhaps both indoors and outdoors. Some are expressing uncertainty about how to acclimate to an atmosphere free of masks after spending so much time focused on wearing one.
As I type this, I just got back from the salad place near my house. Got it to go. There were unmasked people at tables and then a couple unmasked people in line. For the first time, it didn’t really bother me in a visceral sense. I did not feel in danger and I didn’t sense danger for others. I’m unfairly stereotyping but a salad place in the nice part of St Paul seemed like a place where everyone was vaccinated. But this would still have bothered me before and it didn’t today. I do not know why this was the case.
But some kids that I know have been less sanguine. It still deeply troubles them that people are just going for it while there are still deaths every day. They’re not wrong. Ambiguity is a hell of a thing.
Psychic Numbness Explained
A very good comix explainer by NPR’s Connie Hanzhang Jin about why you might not have felt anything when you heard 500,000 people had died from covid.
Here’s something you can do instead of working
You can watch short films about mental illness. Here are several.
And here’s one of those several: