Movie Stars Are Just Like Us and Sometimes Addicted to Vicodin
A talk with Jamie Lee Curtis. Plus: swimming... good?
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Jamie Lee Curtis! Talking to me! About mental health!
I’m kind of excited.
Somehow my first question to Jamie Lee Curtis was not “You’re Jamie Lee Curtis” or “I’m really talking to Jamie Lee Curtis”, because those aren’t really questions she can do anything with and those are not even, in fact, questions.
From the show notes to this week’s episode:
Getting Jamie Lee Curtis to open about her many years spent addicted to Vicodin is, frankly, not very difficult. She wants to talk about it. And that’s for a couple of reasons. One, she wants to make it clear that she’s no different from any other addict in any other walk of life. That’s why she calls herself a dope fiend. She just happens to have had success in an industry she derisively calls “show off business”. Two, because she committed to sobriety after reading someone else’s story of addiction so maybe her story can help someone too.
In a lot of ways, Jamie perfectly embodies what I want my show, indeed my career, to be all about: open and honest conversations about mental health, without shame or guilt or judgment or stigma of any kind. I believe that’s how we heal. I believe that the more layers of gunk that we put on top of the problem, the more problems we have and the more intractable those problems become.
By the way, have you seen Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? Or as my mother-in-law called it Everyone, Everything, Here We Go? Jamie’s in it, which I didn’t even know until the final credits. She has a love scene where she and her partner have long hot dog fingers.
I will keep praising this movie as long as I can praise movies. And I won’t even show the trailer because I don’t want you to know anything about it before you see it. I’ve already spilled the hot dog finger element.
Swimming - get this - is GOOD for you
I have a sister who is ten years older than me. And I ain’t young. And I’m jealous of her. A few years ago, we were in Norway and there was a mountain in the village where we were staying. One day, we all made a trip up and down the mountain and it took a few hours, after which I was pretty spent. The next morning, before I was even up, she had gone out and done the same trip on her own just for fun.
Recently, we were at a wedding and she made sure to book a hotel with a swimming pool so she could get laps in every day. She’s also pretty balanced mentally. And thus I have unlocked her secret.
New research indicates that swimming, especially open-water swimming, really helps mental health:
For those willing to brave the chill, the feelgood hormone dopamine is released by getting into cold water, ensuring an endorphin rush that can last hours after drying off.
Research into cold water's anti-inflammatory properties by the University of Portsmouth in the UK has reaped a growing body of anecdotal evidence that it can dampen the inflammatory responses that cause anxiety and depression.
Just being in a so-called "blue environment," close to the ocean or a body of water, is known to lower stress responses.
Writing for CNN last summer, frontline worker Dr. Mark Lieber reflected on the transformative impact of even brief dips in the pool in helping alleviate the weight of the previous year, literally and figuratively.
Take it away, Mentally Balanced Michael Stipe!
John Oliver looks at our messed up mental health system
There’s so much happening in this John Oliver segment about our broken system, including kids being stuck in emergency rooms waiting for treatment for 27 days.
Sometimes my brain hurts, but not from being punched
Like when I want to praise someone for being open and honest about mental health struggles, for being thoughtful about something real and human, but then that person is also someone whose job it is to pound other people into unconsciousness. And get punched a bunch of times himself.
Hello, professional boxer Danny Garcia, who recently opened up about his struggle, following a victory:
“It was the pressure of life, the pressure of boxing, being a good dad,” he said. “I’m just letting it out right now because it was stuck inside, it rained on me for a year and a half and the only way to get better is to fight and to win, and I’m a fighter, it’s what I do and love to do. If you battle anxiety and depression, you can get over it, that's what I did tonight.”
Tweeting that recurrent thought
I’ve been humming this to myself for years and decided to purge it from my brain and throw in a picture: