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This week on the podcast, we’re re-running an especially popular episode from last fall. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time…
Happiness as a practical pursuit
Is it an indication of personal cynicism, personal depressive tendencies, or SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS that I kind of reflexively roll my eyes when the subject of happiness comes up? Let’s blame society. It’s already such a fuck-up, society I mean, that why not dump more in its lap*.
I guess I’ve always seen happiness as a result and not an actionable thing and that made me more dubious. It’s like if a novelist set out to write A Very Sad Novel, it wouldn’t be as sad as someone writing a novel about relatable characters going through difficult times.
Dr. Laurie Santos is my guest this week on the Depresh Mode podcast.
I’m really glad that Laurie (she said I could call her Laurie and not just Dr. Santos) talked about the really alarming state of mental health among young people, which is what led to the creation of the class in the first place. “Right now, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days,” Laurie says. “Over 60% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious.”
And this worrisome trend (it makes me anxious!) did not start with covid, it goes back to before that.
People who took her class, either at Yale or in the free-to-anyone online version, report feeling better. Not like all their problems are solved and they dance around all day and beam rainbows from their glazed eyes, but better. Still get sad, still get angry, still have a full range of emotions, but they’re solidly and incrementally better.
The most important part of Dr. Santos’s work and about happiness and this interview is not the Worry About Yourself video but it’s one that has stayed with me a while. I’ve watched it many times.
* Society, as far as I know, does not have an actual lap.
Real atom-based psychiatrist has some concerns about AI therapists
Because of course. Because we all should for crying out loud.
Forbes has a commentary by Dr. Dana Wang about the there’s-no-stopping-it advance of artificial intelligence being used for therapy. Which, you know, is NOT therapy. It’s just algorithmic data throwing. But what do I know. I’m not a damn robot.
Our brain is able to project our needs, desires, hopes and fantasies onto cartoons and inanimate objects to make the relationship feel quite real even if it’s one-sided. But the difference with a therapist is the ability to challenge the patient to see their blind spots, call them out on the temporarily false securities of their psychological defenses, and bond over the human weakness we all face.
Wang acknowledges that using AI for therapy does significantly improve the accessibility of… something… for people who can’t afford or find or schedule therapy appointments. She also worries about the relationships people will form with their “therapists” that cannot, definitionally, be reciprocal and human in nature.
Wang is ultimately pleased that efforts are being made to provide something.
You might read this article and come away intrigued by the pluses and minuses of it all. I came away worried that so many people are thinking of this thing as therapy in the first place.
Can we treat depression better by subdividing its taxonomy?
An article in Salon talks about the movement to recognize the depression that follows traumatic brain injury as being different from other types of depression. Researchers are talking about giving it a different name and everything.
In the study, researchers propose the new subtype named "TBI affective syndrome." The research adds more evidence to the belief that some psychologists, neurologists and psychiatrists have long held, but have found it difficult to scientifically prove: that there are many subtypes of depression. This new study could contribute to changing the way the mental health condition is treated in the future.
…
"The reason why the different way is important is because it tells us there's a different entity happening, a different disease process," Siddiqi explained. "With people with traditional major depression, these circuits are under-connected, there's less connectivity in the circuits, and after a brain injury, there seems to be increased connectivity of these circuits."
It’s harder than it used to be to stop comparing yourself to others
So says this article on Psychology Today’s website, which points out that in the days before the internet, we instinctively gathered with people who were more similar to us. We’d hang out with folks from similar backgrounds, similar educational careers, similar incomes. We’d all just find each other. Now it’s not like that.
Unfortunately, with the emergence of the internet, our points of comparison have expanded exponentially because we can now compare ourselves to literally anyone in the world. Thus, we are now exposed to groups that are drastically different from us in terms of wealth, status, power, celebrity, and physical appearance. What had in previous generations been a small gap in our comparisons has become a yawning chasm of differences, in which those differences feel so large and unattainable.
The article then offers 15 tips to quit comparing yourself to other people. None of these tips are BURN ALL YOUR SCREENS. So let’s call that number 16.
Sonny, the cuckoo bird, will now react to Cocoa Puffs in a restrained and adult manner
“While Sonny’s hysterical reaction to a bowl of cereal has long been an iconic part of the Cocoa Puffs brand, he’s an adult now, and he needs to react to cereal in a normal, adult way instead of like a drug-addled lunatic,” explained General Mills in a press release. “No one can go nuts over a bowl of cereal forever. Now that Sonny is an adult, he understands that cereal is merely a food he can buy at the store with money from his marketing job whenever he wants. He could take it or leave it, like all adults do.”
Clickhole paints this as a development in Sonny’s maturity but I think it sounds like he finally got his problematic manic episodes under control through medication.