Lady for Sale, Bad Advice on Tik Tok Given Out Free
Plus good news for Wyoming ranchers and for drum brokers
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Boxers, jockeys, and apparently leading ladies
Those are professions where it makes a difference how much you weigh. On this week’s podcast episode, I talk with Lola Kirke, star of Mozart in the Jungle, Mistress America, Gone Girl, and a lot of other things that happened in the past. And things have slowed down a lot for Lola in the present because during the pandemic she gained a little weight.
Lola says she was mostly in Nashville with her boyfriend over the past couple of years. This boyfriend is a tall fella and only has one mirror, way up around the level of his head. So Lola didn’t pay much attention to her own body. She ate good food and hung out with someone she loves and was happy. But she’s been told by her team of agents and managers that she’s not a character actress, she’s a leading lady, and she now weighs more than she should to get parts.
For a boxer, the weight has some bearing on how you match up against your opponent. For a jockey, it makes a difference to the horse’s speed. For an actress, it’s just bigotry. Lola’s the same actress no matter her weight or shape.
We talk about that and her new album, Lady For Sale, which is in part about the commodification of women in entertainment and the commercial marketplace. And we talk about depression, which she says she has definitely experienced, and eating disorders, which she says she has not.
Self-appointed mental health experts
My dear friend John Hodgman’s first book is called The Areas of My Expertise. It’s a dense volume of hilarious made-up facts. John says he was inspired to write it after a freelance experience where he learned how some professional chefs make scrambled eggs, which led to John himself being on TV talk shows as a scrambled egg “expert”. The idea is that “expert” is a loose term.
And nowhere is this more prevalent than social media influencers and mental health. The Washington Post reports on Tik Tok users who have simply decided that they’re qualified to dispense mental health advice despite having no training in counseling, psychology, or psychiatry.
Of one… celebrity?… Issey Moloney:
Some of her clips are general, such as a short ode to the relationship between mentally ill people and pasta, while others address real diagnoses, such as “signs you might have BPD,” or borderline personality disorder. Sometimes, people ask her to address particular conditions. She tries to to research for at least a week, checking websites and message boards and interviewing by direct message people who have the particular diagnosis. She adds disclaimers: “Everyone deals with [panic attacks] differently and not all of them feel the same.”
Dude. Issey. Stop it. You are playing with fire and gasoline-soaked rags. She has 5.9 million followers. She is 17 years old.
Deciding who counts as an expert isn’t always straightforward. Klara Kernig, a creator with 159,000 followers on Instagram, describes herself in her biography as a “people-pleasing expert.” She earned that title through experience, she said.
After dropping out of her dream PhD program against her family’s wishes, she said, Kernig started learning about codependency, trauma and “people-pleasing” from books and the internet. Now she’s a lot healthier, she said, and makes her own mental health content, including “5 things we think are nice that are people-pleasing behaviors.”
“I don’t want to discredit therapists, but I also want to say there are other ways of educating people and of having that information,” she said. “Maybe I’ll even put something out there that’s wrong, and then I hope that my community and also the therapists there point that out to me in a loving way.”
I try to always be clear on what I am and what I’m not.
I am an interviewer and writer. I am not a trained therapist or psychiatrist or anything of the sort. I am happy to report on what I have experienced or observed and happy to provide guests with an opportunity to talk about what they experienced or observed. If I feature what experts say about specific disorders or situations, I will mention that this is coming from those experts.
I mean, good lord, are we just in a post-responsibility era? I hope not.
Damn that song makes me cry sometimes.
Help for overlooked populations
The Atlantic has an article about a new hotline set up for farmers and ranchers in Wyoming, a place that desperately needs it. And sure, we all have access to the 988 number now but when one seeks help, it works a lot better if the person providing it understands some of the context of what that person is going through.
Mental health is a particularly important issue in Wyoming. The state had the nation’s highest rate of suicides per capita in 2020; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its suicide rate is more than double the national average. Wyoming’s suicide-prevention line only recently received funding for 24/7 coverage, although staffing is still limited.
Farmers and ranchers in need can always call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. But they might talk to providers who don’t understand the unique challenges they face: keeping the ranch in the family, operating on slim financial margins, battling waves of grasshoppers, watching crops wither during drought. “There are so many factors in agriculture that are out of their control,” says Tara Haskins, who runs AgriSafe’s mental-health programming and helpline. “They can’t control the market. They can’t control the weather. They feel the need to keep working regardless, because when they spend time away, they can equate that to money lost.”
Representation matters! I’ve been told by Black people how important it is to find a therapist who directly understands what it’s like to be a person of color in America today. If you say to your therapist that you were watched closely when you went into a convenience store, you don’t want that therapist to say, “Why do you feel like they were watching you?” You want them to just nod because they know that that stuff happens.
NAMI goes to the barbershop
I’m so glad someone thought of this. NAMI is doing a program where they train barbers on mental health responses. Not to give them MSW degrees, just so they know what to do to help people. Whole lot of guys out there who would not open up to a therapist but might be comfortable confiding to their barber.