Sacrificing highs to avoid lows: a good bargain?
Sacrificing air quality to experience trauma: not as good a bargain?
If this enterprise can’t raise enough money from listeners/readers, I swear to God, I’ll turn this show around. Don’t think I won’t, mister. If you’ve already donated, thank you. If not, go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
The antidepressant bargain
And I don’t mean bargain like in “come on down for mega savings”, I mean bargain as in a deal being struck.
On this week’s show, I welcome Michael Landsberg, iconic Canadian sports television host and mental health advocate. He’s very active in the fight for mental health awareness and the fight against stigma.
And something Michael says at the beginning of the interview on Depresh Mode has really stayed with me. Right at the top of the conversation, I ask him, by way of opening the dialogue really, how he’s doing that day. And Michael says that on any given day he’s between a four and a seven on a scale of one to ten. He never gets up to an eight, much less a ten, but he also never dips down into one or two range. And that’s because he’s medicated for his major depressive disorder. So he gives up the highs, he sacrifices a more ecstatic form of joy, in order to avoid the crashing lows.
I wonder if the parameters of this bargain - a bargain he’s very satisfied with - make sense to the average person not affected by depression and I don’t think they do. I have no science to back up my opinion, it’s just a hunch, but I imagine the average normie couldn’t imagine giving up days that are tens. I think - again, hunch - that they can’t imagine days that are ones or zeros for the saddie.
Canadian wildfire smoke is doing more than turning New York yellowish
It’s affecting our mental health, according to ABC News.
A December 2022 review published in the journal “BMC Public Health” analyzed 19 studies and found exposure to mostly chronic and persistent wildfire smoke can impact mental health, although the study reviewers noted that more research is needed.
In addition to study subjects reporting anxiety and depression, being confined indoors due to wildfire smoke led to feelings of isolation, stress and frustration, the studies showed. "A diversity of emotional impacts and responses associated with persistent smoke events including worry, stress, guilt, depression, lack of motivation, hopelessness, and helplessness," another study in the analysis found.
Essentially, it comes down to trauma response. With trauma, to put it very very simply, something happens that is too monumental for your brain to really understand and process, so it just sits in your brain undigested. And we associate trauma a lot of times with personal experiences - violence, a car crash, a sudden loss of a loved one - but I think some more attention needs to be paid to traumatic situations like NORTH AMERICA BEING ON FIRE AND TURNING NEW YORK YELLOW. These are events too huge to understand so they mess us up. Given what’s happening to the planet, I think we’ll be dealing with a lot more wildfires, more trauma, more mental health damage.
Eating disorder hotline replaces human operators with AI, all fuck breaks loose
AI. Besides everyone who has spent time with it, who could have guessed it would create as many or more problems than it solves? Yeah, so NEDA, the National Eating Disorder Association, decided to give over the reins of its hotline to Tessa, an AI program in the fooooooolish hopes that it would be as good and helpful as a flesh human.
Tessa rattled off a list of ideas, including some resources for "healthy eating habits." Alarm bells immediately went off in Maxwell's head. She asked Tessa for more details. Before long, the chatbot was giving her tips on losing weight - ones that sounded an awful lot like what she'd been told when she was put on Weight Watchers at age 10.
"The recommendations that Tessa gave me was that I could lose 1 to 2 pounds per week, that I should eat no more than 2,000 calories in a day, that I should have a calorie deficit of 500-1,000 calories per day," Maxwell says. "All of which might sound benign to the general listener. However, to an individual with an eating disorder, the focus of weight loss really fuels the eating disorder."
The aforementioned Maxwell is an actual expert in eating disorders. She made her complaints known. And…
On May 30, less than 24 hours after Maxwell provided NEDA with screenshots of her troubling conversation with Tessa, the non-profit announced it had "taken down" the chatbot "until further notice."
The article is a pretty good rundown on the storm that all this has caused, with everyone involved blaming someone else involved. And it’s complicated. But jeebus, don’t roll out a robot that instantly starts shaming people.
On the reading list: New Yorker article about Daniel Bard
Via Kottke, a write-up of a feature in the New Yorker (The Official Home of Articles You Really Intend To Get To) on baseball pitcher Daniel Bard, who has struggled with control issues despite having a body that should work just fine.
Once Bard acknowledged the problem, he tried every available fix. He met with sports psychologists; he saw a hypnotist; he meditated. He whispered mantras, which he found counterproductive — athletes "don't think in words, we think in shapes, feelings, and visions," he told me. He had a rib removed, to help with the blood-flow problem caused by thoracic-outlet syndrome. He tried different arm slots. Adair posted inspirational messages around their house. At one point, she and Bard drove to a Holiday Inn to meet a woman who used eye-movement therapy to treat soldiers with P.T.S.D. Bard also tried a technique called tapping: you tap your fingers on certain places on your head, in a certain order, to reframe traumatic memories. It didn't work.
It was a long way back but he’s got a .96 ERA with the Rockies this year, after starting the season on the injured list with anxiety.
I’m on Bluesky now
Visible at johnmoe.bsky.social. It’s still invite-only and I don’t get many invites. So far, I like the space a lot. It’s like Twitter before the creeps started running the place instead of hiding in corners like creeps naturally do. When Bluesky goes public, everyone should leave Twitter and go there.
Thanks to production intern Clara Flesher for help with this week’s newsletter!
Thank you for the flight of the concordes. Man, keep putting up the Daddo-gram for about a year. Abt i will turn off these machines? No offense intended but maybe i will come into money, you do good work .
I agree. It is definitely a bargain we strike. I also agree that normies, as rule do not understand this bargain. Having grown up with several family members who struggled with addictions, I often wonder if addiction is the inverse of depression. Do they find that day to day is too "dull"? Do they feel they are sliding through life gently oscillating between 4 and 7 and they are self-medicating in search of the 10's (while paying for it with the 0's)?