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At long last, Love
My guest on the podcast this week is Kevin Love of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.
Feels so good to type that.
I’ve been trying to get Kevin on my show since before my show was this show. Back when it was another show. But that’s hard to do. Kevin Love is a busy guy. The NBA never really lets up in schedule and none of my shows are made by companies with easy access to big league sports.
But I’ve been fascinated by his story - or stories - for a long time.
Story number one:
Kevin grew up outside Portland, Oregon as a star athlete. He was big, tall, coordinated, and his dad, Stan Love, had played in the NBA. Like a lot of kids who are good at sports and bigger than their peers, Kevin was treated as an adult while he was a kid and had piles of expectations placed on him. But he also was depressed and anxious. In an atmosphere of achievement and toxic masculinity, that’s seen as soft and so he stuffed it down.
Story number two:
Until it couldn’t be stuffed down any longer. Playing for a Cavaliers team that wasn’t meeting expectations and losing to the Atlanta Hawks, Kevin experienced a full-blown panic attack on the court. He just broke. He got to the Cleveland Clinic and they said his body was healthy but his mind wasn’t. He got help. And then he started talking to the world about it so other people wouldn’t have to go through what he did.
In our interview, he tells both stories as well as answering the question of how can someone who makes such a ridiculous amount of money ever be depressed? The answer, of course, being depression doesn’t care how much or how little money you make, it just wants to destroy you. As Kevin points out, there is a long list of wealthy successful people who aren’t with us anymore because of suicide. It’s not like you can inject cash into your bloodstream and get cured, he says.
We also talk about what it’s like having an uncle who is widely hated by music fans and a cousin of your father who is one of the most famous cases of mental illness in American cultural history.
Nth type of depression
The other day, someone was asking me how many types of depression there are. So I Googled it.
Oh okay. There are eight types. And seven. Also five and three. Got it. Is that all?
Six. Sure. Okay. I guess that’s i—
Surely that covers it. There aren’t any m-
Hmm. Does that round out the top ten? Not quite.
Well, obviously there’s more than one or two so that covers us up to ten. No consensus but at least it doesn’t go higher than te—
Goddammit.
Get scared!
Trigger warning on this link because maybe you have one of these phobias. If so, tread lightly. There are clowns.
The Guardian has a rundown on some popular phobias and why they’re so persistent.
Some of them seem perfectly reasonable and like good practice. Like phone calls.
Doctors at a Parisian hospital made the first diagnosis of téléphonophobie in 1913. Their patient was seized by anguished terror when she heard a phone ring, and upon answering a call she froze and became almost incapable of speech. In these early days, the telephone could seem a sinister, intrusive device.
Others I did not expect. Like kayaks.
At the turn of the 20th century, many Inuit men in Greenland abandoned the kayaks in which they hunted seals, having become paralysed with fear out at sea. In some coastal districts, more than one in 10 of the adult males had “kayak phobia”, a serious problem in a colony that, since the decline of whaling, had become dependent on seal hunting.
Serena funds Selena
Serena Williams’ venture capital company has invested in a mental health operation founded by Selena Gomez and her family.
Good for them. All hands on deck, et cetera. I’m unclear on what the company, Wondermind, actually does. I’m wondering. In my mind. But it’s great news for anyone who has ever had feelings.
(Daniella) Pierson, co-CEO of Wondermind, is targeting a wide audience. “We are going after everyone with feelings–not just [people with] mental health disorders,” she says. Pierson describes the site in an email to Forbes as “a sexier, more entertaining competitor to Psychology Today, WebMD, etc. for the millions of people searching about mental health daily.”
Oh good. It’s sexy. That’s always been my gripe with Psychology Today. NOT SEXY ENOUGH.
I hope this company helps people but that biz about being sexy is just stupid.
Michael Jackson did not invent the Moonwalk
Bonus content: