How to Win on Jeopardy, Working Until You Are Broken, and (Yikes) AI Therapist Notetaking
Also, psychiatrists are worried about the Secretary of HHS taking away SSRIs
The Grind is grinding you down and that’s why it’s called The Grind.
It’s interesting that to be ground down and to be ground up both mean the same thing. English, man.
Okay, so this week’s episode is about a few things. It’s about Zayna Youssef, lead singer of the very great Philadelphia band Sweet Pill, and how her band had to cancel this enormous worldwide tour they had planned, calling off several dates already sold out, because her mental and physical health simply would not allow it. It cost them a fortune, financially, but it had cost her and her bandmates quite a bit in terms of their health to go forward. It’s also about you. And The Grind. You are likely someone who grinds as well, at work, at school, at whatever you spend time and energy on. And this might be a necessary and unavoidable fact of your life! But! It can be damaging nonetheless. We live in a society that worships working yourself up to and past the point of self-harm. We fetishize it. In a capital-driven world, this works out great for the people holding the wealth, not so great for the workers. As I say on this week’s show, I’m not a Marxist, I’m just seeing the game.
I had fully prepared for an interview with Zayna based on the press materials her rep sent. Sweet Pill had a new album, Still There’s a Glow, and Zayna was inspired by therapy in some of her lyrics. We figured okay, we like music interviews, dropping in some cuts along the way, that’s good radio. Maybe 15 minute segment?
But before we started, Zayna said that this interview actually came at a perfect time. We hit record and I asked her what she meant by that. That’s when she revealed - I think for the first time? - that it was a mental health crisis that necessitated the cancellation. So I threw out my notes and we pursued that topic.
To get the album out the door, Zayna described a real perfect storm of the destructiveness of The Grind. The band had a successful debut album and, not stopping to enjoy that, she felt a NEED to top it. She writes all the lyrics and they NEEDED to be enough to change lives. She also does graphic design so that means album covers, merch, laminated backstage passes, so many little elements. At the same time, she was comparing herself to other singers, both in her peer bands and also Hayley Williams, lead singer of Paramore. So she grinded. Hard on herself. I asked her about boundaries for herself and she said she had never thought about those. More hours. More effort. Whatever you give is never enough if you can possibly give more. Sound familiar? I asked her about boundaries for herself and she said she had never thought about those.
And a person can only take so much before they simply break. Zayna broke. Her mind and body broke.
And a person can only take so much before they simply break. Zayna broke.
So for the last couple of months, she’s been repairing the rupture. Spending time with family and not talking business. Working at a quiet part-time job unrelated to music. Going to therapy. And, yep, planning a new tour that will include many days off between shows, going out on “legs” of a tour instead of four months straight on the road, and also having a mental health specialist advising Sweet Pill as the tour progresses.
You might not be in an emo hardcore band but I think you can get a lot from listening to this.
Therapists are increasingly using AI to take notes. What could go right?
NPR has the scoop on this trend.
The session moved on that day, but halfway through, Quinn noticed something was different.
“She wasn’t taking notes like she usually did,” Quinn says. “The iPad was just propped up.”
That’s when Quinn realized the session was being recorded.
Quinn says she froze for a bit. But then she kept talking.
It wasn’t until she walked out of her therapist’s office that the weight of it landed.
“The more I thought about it, the more I just started getting more and more sick to my stomach,” she says. “This person who I’m supposed to be able to trust with some very private and very intense emotions had just completely disregarded something I said I was not comfortable with. I felt completely violated.”
The Secretary of Health and Human Services wants to take away your antidepressants.
Psychiatrists are worried about this, as are many of us.
“He just doesn’t like S.S.R.I.s,” said Dr. Sung Hyon, a psychiatrist from Pasadena, referring to Mr. Kennedy. Dr. Hyon said S.S.R.I.s had been “foundational” in his practice — “boring drugs that are well established, have good safety evidence and have zero chance to cause addiction.” He called them “God’s gift to psychiatry.”
And patients know it, he added. “So many millions” of Americans already take S.S.R.I.s, he said, and the vast majority are fully aware of their downside, like sexual side effects and withdrawal symptoms.
“And they say, ‘You know what? It’s worth it,’” Dr. Hyon said. “Because there are so many of them, it would be a pretty big political firestorm if he really tried to restrict access. And there is very, very little medical evidence to do so.”
How to win on Jeopardy
You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know the small bits most commonly asked about on the topics that are more likely to come up. WHAT UP MY LIBERAL ARTS COMPADRES.
The mild Mexican salsa whose name translates to “beak of the rooster” is pico de gallo. Jeopardy likes this.
Another popular fact is that Lucy Hayes, wife of Rutherford B., was the first first lady to host the Easter-egg roll on the White House lawn. You don’t know anything else about Lucy Hayes, and you don’t need to. Like Nebraska’s Platte River—44 mentions on the show—Jeopardy is a mile wide and an inch deep.
If Jeopardy asks about Norwegian playwrights, the answer is almost always Henrik Ibsen.
The Iowa painter is Grant Wood.
The European duchy is Luxembourg.
The Zoroastrian singer is Freddie Mercury.
To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.
Rebecca Sugar on Sleeping with Celebrities
Created Steven Universe! Can build a dirt house!
In the Venn diagram of “heart” and “animation”, the overlap is Rebecca Sugar. Her series, Steven Universe, was more than just the adventures of an unusual boy’s search for identity in a spectacularly imaginative spiritual/paranormal world, it was mind-expanding and profoundly human and humane literature for legions of adoring fans. Rebecca’s non-animation interests are decidedly and literally much more down to earth. She is fascinated by how to build things, especially wee small houses out earthen building materials, the advantages and disadvantages of both the ingredients and of living your life outside the construct of building codes. She talks about the controversy of whether to use the terms “dirt” or “earth”, the presence of the white-throated wood rat, and what cob is when no corn is involved. Also, she plays a historical round of In The Cart Or On The Shelf.
