Discover more from Depresh Mode
Long-term mental health damage of covid and also disco Messi
And White House doles out some grant bucks and please do some crafts
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Covid may be STILL messing up your mental health
I remember thinking during covid that when/if this thing gets back to normal, or something approximating normal, that the mental health damage of the pandemic would be with us for a long time. It would be like the Great Depression or a World War, I thought, not something where we just take off our masks and go back to life the way it was.
I WAS RIGHT. And so were many, many people who saw that coming. This week on the Depresh Mode podcast, we talk about some of the science and research that’s starting to surface in the long wake of covid.
First, we welcome Dr. Royce Lee, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, who says that, yes, there is ample scientific evidence that if you had a serious mental illness before covid that it likely got worse during the pandemic. If you were bad off, you became worse off and the problems from that may be continuing to this day.
We also get into the idea of inflammation, a common result of covid infection, and how we have found more and more connection between that and mental illness over the years.
The moment that blew my mind in this interview, though was when I asked Dr. Lee whether people who had covid were more likely to develop additional mental disorders later on. He said maybe the time as come to stop thinking about mental illness as something just some people get while others don’t. We’re all patients or potential patients. You wouldn’t characterize anyone as a person who just never gets a cold or flu or infection; we’re all susceptible to physical disease. Likewise, maybe as human beings, we will all get sick to some degree at some point.
Mind blown on that one.
Then I welcome Dr. Neva Corrigan from the University of Washington to talk about her team’s recent findings on brain aging and the covid epidemic. It seems that among adolescents boys, brains aged over a year faster than normal over the course of the pandemic and the brains of girls aged over four years faster. Dr. Corrigan sees a connection between the stress and anxiety of the pandemic and the social needs of young people, especially girls.
Covid was more than just a respiratory disease, it was a mental health bomb also, one that still keeps going off.
Biden administration announces $68 million in grants for suicide prevention
It’s Suicide Prevention Month and the administration is writing some checks. $68 million in all, including some funding directed at particular groups:
$15.3 million for Cooperative Agreements for the Garrett Lee Smith State/Tribal Youth Suicide Prevention and Early Intervention Program to support states and Tribes with implementing youth and young adult suicide prevention (up to age 24) and early intervention strategies in schools, educational institutions, juvenile justice systems, substance use and mental health programs, foster care systems, pediatric health programs, and other child- and youth-serving organizations;
$2.2 million for Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Campus Suicide Prevention to assist colleges and universities in enhancing mental health services for all college students, including those at risk for suicide, depression, serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders that can lead to academic challenges. The GLS Campus program assists colleges and universities to identify students who are at risk for suicide and suicide attempts, increase protective factors that promote mental health, reduce risk factors for suicide, and ultimately reduce suicide attempts and deaths;
Here’s the actual headline from this CNN story and I wonder if it makes you laugh as much as me: Making arts and crafts improves your mental health as much as having a job, scientists find
“Engaging with arts and crafts is accessible and affordable. Options such as knitting and drawing require very few tools and can be engaging and creatively fulfilling activities,” said Dr. Helen Keyes, cognitive psychologist and head of the school of psychology and sport science at Anglia Ruskin University, via email.
Now, a new study by Keyes and fellow researchers have found that engaging in creative activities can significantly boost well-being by providing meaningful spaces for expression and achievement.
God dammit, AI, quit making me fall in love with you
AI, as I read somewhere on the internet, is a device by which the wealthy can extract value from creative people without compensating them for that value, then use that value to become yet wealthier. It’s a horrible practice for society, for art, and for the economy. The computing power is awful for the environment. It sucks.
But if you click this link, you can see an eighties disco where all the dancers are Lionel Messi.
The crew of Hello From the Magic Tavern on Sleeping with Celebrities
I taped a Sleeping episode with these guys as my guest and we also taped an episode of their show with me as a guest that will air in November.
Matt Young, Adal Rifai, and Arnie Niekamp are well-known to fans of their podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern as Usidore the Wizard, Chunt the Badger, and, well, Arnie Niekamp. They step out of character to join John Moe for a broad ranging, fairly vague, and very entertaining journey through movies that they all saw a long time ago but don’t remember all that well. Was Jessica Tandy in all movies from the early eighties? Did she die in all of them? And what was the plot of Batteries Not Included anyway? You’ll gently ponder these questions as you doze off.
Covid isn’t a respiratory disease, it is an airborne vascular disease. We’re very much still in the throes of the pandemic despite the government & society’s efforts to pretend we’re “post-Covid.”
Please keep masking in public spaces, doing so protects those of us who are already disabled & high risk.
The pandemic definitely made my agoraphobia worse.