Poetry, Despair, Nihilism, Rumination, Norwegians, Dogs Using Forks
Not just a packing list for a hell of a picnic, an actual newsletter
I don’t charge for this newsletter and heaven knows you can listen to the Depresh Mode podcast, for free if you so choose. That’s because the whole thing is donation-driven. It’s public radio style, depending on people recognizing that to make this stuff costs money. If enough people donate, we can exist. If they don’t, the whole thing will shut down. Would you like it to keep happening? Go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
Poetry, hope, and so on
Here are two things I believe in regard to poetry:
NASA has never sent a really great poet up into space. And they should. Because most of us won’t get to go up there and so we could really use someone who could describe the experience in vivid, accurate terms. Instead, we get a lot of astronauts who just say that it’s neat and amazing or whatever.
There aren’t all that many really great poets to begin with.
As I explain in my interview with Maggie Smith in this week’s Depresh Mode podcast, I’ve always been in awe of truly great poets in the same way I’m in awe of violinists. Just as anyone can drag a bow across some strings and make sound, anyone can write a poem. Many - most? - of us have had to do so, at least in school. But just as there’s a difference between that dragged bow sound and beautiful music, there’s a difference between what most of us could write and beautiful poetry.
And I know that this difference is a matter of years of training and practice and discipline but for me there’s still an element of mysticism about it. Like, “how can that person, using commonly available tools, create THAT?”
Or like dunking a basketball: I can get a basketball and I can locate a hoop, but how do they do THAT?
Anyway, so, yeah, Maggie Smith is on the show this week and we talk about poetry.
Perhaps more urgently, we talk about the push and pull of the dynamic relationship between despair and hope, which has been much on my mind. Life - and I don’t necessarily say this as a person with chronic depression - sucks right now. The Supreme Court attempting to take away rights. The war in Ukraine. Environmental catastrophe. The rise of American fascism wherein some people seem willing to vote against their own right to vote. Here’s where I’d put a funny joke item at the end of the list but I just don’t have sufficient pluck left in me.
And yet we need to hunt for hope. In order to go on, we must actively pursue better tomorrows.
AND we talk about divorce, lemonade, optimism, and pessimism.
Speaking of hopelessness…
Hopelessness as nihilistic contagion
Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, a child psychiatrist for the last twenty years. He says it’s never been as bad out there as it has been in the last eighteen months. Schlozman sees a particularly bleak element in the mental health crisis being experienced by young people.
Here is how this psychological contagion spreads:
A child with mental health problems comes to a general hospital and the family quickly learns there are simply no — or very few — treatment options. The tools available for psychiatric care in general hospitals are extremely limited, and no beds are available for specialized psychological help. People wait days, sometimes weeks, for appropriate treatment to become available. They are too sick to go home, but are in the wrong kind of hospital for what they need most. When children and teens become stuck like this, they internalize the message that their suffering is not planned for or taken seriously. They compare this lack of action to the immediacy of treating other illnesses. When they contract strep throat, they receive quick and effective treatment. If they need surgery, they get it. But things are different for serious mental illness. Hopelessness takes hold and spreads through communities and across social media platforms.
Norwegians have been studying the effects of rumination on depression. Because of course they have. (I’m Norwegian).
New research out of Norway indicates that the more you dwell on negative thoughts, the worse they get. Which is a bit of a “don’t think about an elephant” proposition, really.
“Meta-thoughts—or metacognitions—are the thoughts we think about the thoughts we think,” says Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Psychology
The study suggests that meta-thoughts or metacognitions can be helped by, as logic would follow, metacognitive therapy. How meta. Metacognitive therapy is a rather new thing.
Getting better involves overcoming self-reinforcing patterns, thoughts and actions.
“We believe that metacognitive therapy can be an effective treatment in treating depressive symptoms for young people, too,” says Professor Kennair.
Pedersen says that metacognitive therapy focuses on changing what maintains depressive illnesses: the depressive brooding and the negative thoughts about our own thinking.
For some non-ruminative Norwegianness, let’s go to our favorite Norwegian appliance-playing band Hurra Torpedo:
Everyone should just be more like Hurra Torpedo.
Some rough elements in the newsletter today. Let’s watch some dogs.
These dogs are trying to eat but their food is controlled by human arms.
Here is the same concept done in live performance:
No rumination there. No nihilism there. Maybe a little nihilism there.
Okay, back to the terror of actual life and returning to Norway
I love the Great Art Explained series where art historian James Payne reveals a lot of the things you’re wrong about when it comes to art you think you know. The latest is about Edvard Munch’s The Scream:
I first got into this series via Payne’s amazing video about Van Gogh: