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Trowma.
My interview with Jamie Lee Curtis comes out Monday on the podcast. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll mention it again because: Jamie Lee Curtis. In the interview, she mentioned a meme going around about her that she thought was really funny. I didn’t know what she meant but I tracked it down later. It’s about all the times she’s talked about the trauma of horror films and how characters in those films need to manage the PTSD stemming from that trauma.
Or, as she pronounces it for some reason, trowma.
Mysterious pronunciation aside, I think she’s right. Laurie Strode, Jamie’s character in all those movies, has to cope with a long-standing series of attempted murders at the hands of Michael Myers. NOT MIKE MYERS.
I’m going to try to get Jamie back on the show this fall to talk about her appearance in another Halloween movie coming out in October and about trowma. I’m also curious about whether horror movies or actually good or bad for people with trau(ow)ma.
Someone on a website called Bloodknife.com thinks they can be good:
I’m not alone in turning to horror as a way of coping. A study from 2018 found that a key part of the appeal of horror movies is the ability to feel in control of your fears. Making it through a film about a serial killer can, in some sense, give you the experience of conquering those same fears, even as you know you were never really in danger. A scary movie can become a sort of psychological play acting, boosting confidence and easing anxiety.
Okay, if you say so, BLOODKNIFE DOT COM.
The rugged self-reliance of the American West is some bullshit and people are dying
The Washington Post has an opinion piece about how cowboy stoicism is not working out:
Rural suicide rates increased 48 percent between 2000 and 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men in rural areas are 40 percent more likely than their urban counterparts to end their lives. Women, universally less prone to suicide, are more likely to do so if they live with the specific challenges of ruralness, including those cited above, and higher poverty rates.
Turns out that the very elements we celebrate as rural Westerners — self-reliance, mental and physical fortitude, and being alone a lot — put our well-being at risk. According to the CDC, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming have the seven highest suicide rates in the country.
The author of the piece, Maddy Butcher, points to the abject isolation that goes with living in some of these states, which, combined with the tough guy mentality, is incredibly toxic and lonely.
I have no whimsical video to include here.
Everyday racial discrimination hurts mental health
That’s according to a new study from JAMA, written about in the Seattle Times:
A large national study published Wednesday helps quantify the serious and widespread emotional toll of such everyday experiences of discrimination during the pandemic. The U.S.-based study, which is the largest and most diverse on this topic during the pandemic era, found that the more often someone faces discrimination, the higher likelihood they’ll also experience depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts.
One of the most striking findings, the researchers say, is that people who faced discrimination nearly every day were just as likely to experience depressive symptoms early in the pandemic as was someone previously diagnosed with a mood disorder. The research was published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatry.
One of the doctors who worked on the study reported that mental health has deteriorated for everyone during the pandemic but with the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the rise in attacks on Asian and Asian-American people, the numbers have gotten a lot worse for people of color.
Again, no funny video to put here.
Here, watch this
I interviewed Elizabeth Ito yesterday, that episode will be out pretty soon too. We talked about stress and anxiety and depression. She makes really amazing videos, including this one, where she cast her family as monsters and then had her brother talk about high school.
Those Joni Mitchell videos are even cooler than you thought
Joni Mitchell, who has always tuned her guitar in really unusual ways, had a long journey back to the stage after an aneurysm in 2015:
In this case, however, Mitchell didn’t just forget her tunings after her illness. She forgot how to play the guitar altogether. She had to teach herself again by watching videos of her playing online. “I’m learning,” she says in the CBS interview at the top. “I’m looking at videos that are on the net, to see where to put my fingers. It’s amazing… when you have an aneurysm, you don’t know how to get into a chair. You don’t know how to get out of bed. You have to learn all these things again. You’re going back to infancy, almost.”
She’s come a long way since 2015, when she could neither speak nor walk, “much less play the guitar,” notes NPR. “To be able to recover to the point of being able to perform as a musician is really incredible,” says Dr. Anthony Wang, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Regan UCLA Hospital. “Playing an instrument and vocal cord coordination, those sort of things are really, super complex fine movements that would take a long time to relearn.” Mitchell’s commitment to mastering her instrument again was unflagging.
Now here’s a cool video: