Mrs. Carter, Ms. Strayed, and Mr. Run a Marathon Every Damn Day
Also, a Paul Davis video! For all of you who want a Paul Davis video!
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You should learn about Rosalynn Carter
The Carters could have just retired after Jimmy’s presidency ended. They could have gone back to Georgia and simply kicked back. They didn’t. And a lot of people are familiar with his building houses with Habitat For Humanity but I think a lot fewer people are familiar with her work on mental health.
It’s a good idea to spend a few minutes at the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program site and especially the page about Mrs. Carter herself.
A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk to mental health journalists at the Carter Center. There would be no speaking fee paid and the ticket there would not be first class. I went because it was an honor. As I got up and got ready to give my talk about my own experiences with mental illness and the trauma of my brother’s suicide, Mrs. Carter walked into the room and quietly took a seat. Which: NO PRESSURE, MOE. I needn’t have worried. One of the best things to happen when you give a speech is if you can spot at least one person in the audience who seems to be understanding and appreciating what you’re saying. A subtle nod, a clarity of the eyes, maybe even a lean forward during important parts. The speech was a success for me because she was that rock for me all the way through. It didn’t matter to her that I wasn’t an important politician or a major donor or a doctor or anything beyond a guy who talks about mental health a lot. She was there because she simply cared a lot about mental health and had done incredible work on the issue for decades. And she was good at listening.
Afterwards, I was introduced to Mrs. Carter and thanked her for a multitude of things.
Cheryl Strayed on the podcast
We’re taking a little time off this week for the holiday so we’re re-airing a recent episode we loved with Cheryl Strayed…
There are a lot of places one can go in an interview with the author Cheryl Strayed. You can talk about her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail back in 1995, a trip that became the basis for her book Wild and the movie version of that book with Reese Witherspoon playing Cheryl.
You can talk about the new Hulu tv series Tiny Beautiful Things, based on Cheryl’s advice column, Dear Sugar. In this one, she’s played by Sarah Pidgeon and Kathryn Hahn.
And indeed I touched on both of those in the interview. But ultimately it was more about listening to inner voices.
From the show notes:
We all have voices inside ourselves that give us advice on what to do in a given situation. Not talking about literal voices that you genuinely hear, just thoughts that you have when a decision needs to be made or something needs to be navigated. And those voices sometimes contradict each other so you need to know which one has your best interests at heart. Author Cheryl Strayed refers to her negative and unhelpful voice as her ITS, which stands for Inner Terrible Someone, while the one that’s really got her back, that makes her feel genuinely good is the Wise Inner Sage.
The mental health damage of climate change
I’ve brought versions of this story to you a few times now but they keep coming up, even though I feel like very few people are talking about it. The horrific effects of climate change and the existence of the idea of climate change is screwing us up.
“Until climate change gets under control, things are only going to get worse unfortunately,” said Dr. Robert Feder, a retired New Hampshire-based psychiatrist and the American Psychiatric Association’s representative to the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. “As the temperature keeps increasing, these effects are going to be magnified. There’s going to be more storms, more fires, and people are going to be more worried about what could happen because a lot more things are happening.”
Rising temperatures have also been associated with suicide attempts and increased rates of mental health-related emergency department visits, several studies have found. And long-term exposure to air pollution — which the climate crisis can worsen by adding more particles from droughts or wildfires — has been linked with elevated anxiety and an increase in suicides.
Here’s a dude who ran 365 marathons in 365 days
Which: what? No. What? No. I couldn’t even — what? WHAT? What? No.
On Sleeping with Celebrities: Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold
Maybe the old method of counting sheep works for you as a sleep aid. But maybe you need your animals to be a little more varied. That’s where comedy writers Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold come in with an exhaustive rundown of the various non-humans who have inhabited the White House. And we’re not just talking about dogs. Not by a longshot. We mean alligators and goats and possums. Ben and Rebecca are the authors of Naked in the Rideshare, a new book of humorous essays and they just recently became engaged to marry one another.