Mental health expertise and societal subterfuge. Also Satan.
And Kevin Love and Megan Thee Stallion and no, they don't start a band.
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You are a mental health expert
Congratulations!
Don’t remember going to med school and getting your doctorate in psychiatry? Really? Because I was there with you! We hung out! We dissected a frog’s anxiety disorder or something that would happen in brain med schoo….
No, we didn’t do that. But we did live in the world. And if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve run up against mental illness in some form, either in yourself or someone close to you. My guest on the podcast this week is Dr. Ken Duckworth. Ken is the medical director of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Ken is a double-board certified psychiatrist and one of the most respected people in his field. So that’s where he gets one form of expertise.
He’s also someone who got into psychiatry because of personal reasons. Ken’s dad had bipolar disorder, marked by pretty extreme manic episodes. Ken wanted to figure out why his father was this way and what could be done about it. He wanted to help. And that spirit still lives on in the work he does.
But Ken says if you’ve had personal experience with mental illness, you are an expert of lived experience. That’s not patronizing, mind you, not the psychiatry equivalent of little plastic pilot wings or being made a “special deputy sheriff.”
But for real, though. Ken has a new book out through NAMI called You Are Not Alone. He talked to 130 people from all walks of life, including psychiatrists, sure, but mostly people who aren’t. They share what they’ve learned through the sheer act of living with this stuff. Full disclosure: I’m one of the 130. The book is a tremendous resource for people dealing with complicated minds.
It’s also a statement that we can do great things if we pool our resources. No army was ever defeated by individual soldiers acting on their own but if those soldiers (we soldiers) pool our resources, of course we can win.
Mental health is a problem but it may be an effect of another problem
Writing in the Old Huge Frightening Gray Lady, UCLA professor Danielle Carr writes about how the mental health crisis we are experiencing is being kind of flipped around on us. Sure, a lot of people are anxious and depressed but it’s a mistake to think of it as being an irrational response to the totally donked up world/climate/economy/system we’re living with/under.
Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.
Basically, the puppet masters and oligarchs are going to try to pull the same bullshit they try with things like “skip your coffee to save money” or “carbon credits” to escape their own culpability in creating the whole donked up gestalt.
And here is the core of the problem: Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to address the underlying cause of population-level increases in mental and emotional distress. It does, however, work really well if you’re trying to come up with a solution that everybody in power can agree on, so that the people in power can show they’re doing something about the problem. Unfortunately, the solution that everyone can agree on is not going to work.
This has nothing to do with the item:
Megan Thee Stallion launches mental health site
Not a headline I was expecting to type this morning, gotta be honest. It’s called Bad Bitches Have Bad Days Too, which is something that is understandable about bad bitches.
From People:
The site featured a list of free therapy organizations, a national crisis text line, a suicide & crisis lifeline, substance abuse, and mental health administration national helpline among other resources. It also offered resource directories for projects benefitting the black community including therapy for black women and men, LGBTQ Psychotherapist of Color Directory, and black mental wellness, to name a few.
It also has this:
Kevin Love is kind of a regular guy
Sure, he’s a star player in the NBA. Is very tall. Makes an extraordinary amount of money for playing a game. But it turns out depression and anxiety don’t check your bank account numbers before deciding to mess you up; they just come after you. And they did for Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
I consider Kevin to be a friend or at least a friendly acquaintance and he’s on Depresh Mode next week. We talk about the pressure on him as a kid when he was bigger, taller, and more talented at basketball than anyone around him. Besides all that, his father was an NBA player. So Kevin was in a situation where if he succeeded wildly, it was only a matter of meeting expectations. If he came up short in any way, he’d be a failure. It almost led him to quit basketball and sent him down a very dark path.
From Cavaliers Nation:
Love’s mental health activism has been well received in the NBA community. It has also shed light on the internal struggles that some players deal with but perhaps choose not to express outwardly because they might be deemed soft by fans, pundits and even fellow players.
Here’s a good interview with him:
A voice that sounds like Satan making prank phone calls is showing up on American Airlines flights.
And it’s unclear why.