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Rachel Aviv on the podcast
She’s the author of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.
The episode isn’t a straight-forward profile of a famous person. It’s mostly about this book that Rachel wrote, in which she profiles four people plus herself and, briefly, someone from her childhood. The idea is that the full complexity of a person cannot be boiled down to a mental health diagnosis they have received.
On Depresh Mode, I talk to her about people like Ray, an historic case from several decades ago, who fell into a profound depression and was admitted to a hospital for a talk therapy cure. It didn’t work and he was finally removed, given medication, improved, and then sued the crap out of that original hospital. His case is sometimes held up as being proof for the medical solution over the talking one. As Rachel explains, it wasn’t quite so simple as that. Because few things are simple in the world of mental health.
I think it’s tempting to make the choice to simplify mental health. It’s easy to point to a solution that solves everything and people have been doing that since snake oil days and clear into self-help books today. Mental health is a lot more complicated, and scarier, when you admit that there’s nothing tidy about it most of the time.
You won’t believe this but mental health got worse for kids during the pandemic
That’s according to new research. It’s another drop in the bucket of stuff we already know about this topic but at some point it’s helpful to know that this bucket has become very very veeeeerrrrrry full.
Perhaps the best news out of this is that there is research being done on the mental health effects of the pandoozle* on children.
Mental health diagnosis categories included: alcohol and substance use disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), eating disorders, behavior disorders, anxiety disorders, stress or trauma disorders, and mood disorders.
Of the 7 mental health categories, 3 saw differences between the prepandemic period and the pandemic period. Alcohol and substance use visits notably decreased during the pandemic period, with the annual visit rate decreasing from 5.8 visits per 1000 patients to 5.5.
Eating disorder visits increased during the pandemic period, from 9.3 visits per 1000 patients annually to 18.3. Mood disorder visits also increased, from 65.3 visits per 1000 patients annually to 94.
*trying out new pandemic slang, don’t like it
Be more Buddhist, feel more better
Speaking of research but this time speaking of Buddhists, be more like Buddhists! You’ll reduce stress and have a some degree of protection from depression. That’s according to some more research.
A new study of 644 people living in Thailand found that those who hold themselves to high ethical standards by observing Buddhism's Five Precepts experience much less perceived stress, slightly lower levels of neuroticism, and fewer depressive symptoms.
"Cultivating the observance of the Five Precepts may change the association between neuroticism, perceived stress, and depressive symptoms," the authors conclude. "Our findings suggest that people exhibiting high levels of neuroticism, and high levels of stress, may tend to develop depressive symptoms that may be buffered when obtaining a high level of observing the Five Precepts."The researchers hypothesize that non-Buddhists can probably benefit from lower levels of perceived stress, less neuroticism, and fewer depressive symptoms by observing any moral code that boosts feelings of self-control.
I don’t know. I do love killing people. (Not really.) (You can’t prove anything.)
Pathological lying as mental illness?
There’s a movement to classify lying as not just a jerk move by lying jerks but a full-blown, put-it-in-the-DSM mental illness.
Massimine told journalists he was born in Italy (truth, New Jersey). He told friends his birthday is in September (May). He told his wife, Maggie, that he was having an affair with Kim Kardashian (definitely untrue) and he invented awards to add to his CV. A friend described his behaviour as catching “a minnow and then it became a swordfish”.
Maggie reviewed all her husband’s Facebook posts and email accounts and unearthed voice impersonations, dummy email accounts, elaborately forged correspondences, mocked-up photos (Massimine allegedly at a base camp at Everest with a sherpa when he was actually in Cambodia). “Who is this person?” she is reported as thinking. “Who did I marry?” Her husband has now been diagnosed as having a personality disorder. Dr Jordan W Merrill, a psychiatrist who treated Massimine last year , says his former patient is a “benign” liar as “a protection for his internal fragility. It’s not seeking to take something from you, it’s about just trying to cope.”
People on drugs don’t deserve death
Helpful thread to that effect: