Shatner goes to space kinda, gets depressed
And the Surgeon General talks loneliness. What's happening?
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I talked to the dang Surgeon General of the flippin’ United States
When I left the major media organization I used to work for, I figured that was the end of my opportunity to interview people in really high level jobs. Not so!
On our show a few weeks ago with Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos, she mentioned how the Surgeon General was really interested in the concept of loneliness and how it can effect individual and public health. “Huh!” I thought.
So Gabe Mara, Depresh Mode producer, got in touch with Dr. Vivek Murthy’s office and we asked and they said okay. We taped this week.
I can’t reveal everything we talked about yet but what really blew my mind was how open, at ease, and seemingly vulnerable Dr. Murthy seemed to be. Confident and secure, of course, but he’s also someone who has talked openly, for a long time, about his own mental and emotional well-being.
Dr. Murthy is actually a two-time Surgeon General, having served in the role during the Obama administration as well. And a sensitive person doesn’t get to that level of success without some degree of calculation in how he’s presenting himself to the world. Therefore, Dr. Murthy has decided that being open and honest about his vulnerabilities is a good idea that can help him in his role of helping the country.
That’s refreshing.
Anyway, nice guy, episode coming out on 10/24.
Psychedelic drugs are coming. Want some?
Also this week, I had a pretty interesting conversation with John Semley, a freelance writer who has been paying close attention to the research (and slow roll out, really) of drugs normally associated with raves and dancing in a muddy field.
Semley wrote in Wired about research that tests new psilocybin-based compounds on mice, watching to see which ones make mice twitch their little mouse heads to indicate that they’re tripping. His article was focused on a researcher named Jason Wallach who has significant backing of investors hoping that all this mouse twitching will lead to vast riches.
A few years in, with continued support from the company, Wallach has cooked up scores of novel psychedelics, mailed them off to partner labs for testing on those mice, and then waited—and hoped—for the telltale twitch results. The chemist, 36 and pale, face framed by a rough red beard and rectangular glasses, can hem and haw a bit when it comes to specifics: “Compass doesn’t want me to give out numbers. I’ll say we’ve made a lot.” It’s in the neighborhood of 150 new drugs, all of which can potentially be patented and sold by Compass.
Wallach and others say that the testing they’re conducting is yielding very positive results. Being “cured” of, say, major depressive disorder is a term that no one is eager to use but, among some humans, we don’t know about the mice, there isn’t a more accurate term than that.
He told me that he expects psilocybin-based treatments to be available in clinic settings in the pretty near future, next few years.
John Semley has also written about going to a Jamaican resort to experience “ego death”, which he said was great.
Black kids and suicide
Interesting piece by Seattle Times columnist Marcus Harrison Green about the increase of death by suicide in the Black community.
If all you can see now is a world of callousness, indifference and disregard then why stick around?
Having asked myself that question as an adolescent, I’m horrified that so many Black youth seem to be asking the same one today. In what is a sub-crisis of a larger one, Black youth in our state are increasingly choosing to prematurely end their lives. A crisis as detrimental to our Black community as “Black-on-Black violence” yet with a fragment of the sustained public uproar.
Black youth suicide among 10- to 19-year-old boys has soared 60% since 2017, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Suicide has also plagued Black girls, with a 59% increase between 2013 and 2019. Black children younger than 13 are now twice as likely to kill themselves compared to white children of the same age. These numbers were increasing even before the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated mental health woes.
The mental health crisis - and this is something I find myself talking to people about nearly every day lately - predates the pandemic. Yes, things got worse, but things were already pretty bad and deteriorating.
Latinx stigma
Writing in Forbes, Ilse Calderon explains how it’s not generally seen as okay in Latinx circles to have mental health problems and certainly not to talk about them.
Any time anyone wasn’t feeling mentally well, the answer was something like “eat some pozole, you’ll feel better”. For more extreme displays of mental issues, one was called ‘loco’ and silently dismissed. These examples are becoming more and more problematic as the rate of mental illnesses becomes pervasive across all ethnic groups.
In the United States alone, more than 16% of the Latinx community struggles with a mental health condition. This is nearly 10 million people. This is roughly the population of a country like Greece or Sweden. Imagine if everyone in Greece had a mental health illness and no one seeked help or at the very least, therapy!? Those picturesque, well-visited islands, like Santorini, would cease to exist. And while mental health doesn’t discriminate against any one community, it does affect non-White populations at prolonged rates. Such that, depression in Blacks and Hispanics is likely to be more persistent than in White populations.
In my book, WHICH IS NOW IN PAPERBACK, I write about how it’s hard for a lot of people to talk about mental health but it’s a whole lot easier for me to do so. I live, you see, in a castle high atop Mount Privilege. As a white, straight, land-owning man, the mechanisms of society were shaped hundreds of years ago to advantage me. So if I expose some vulnerability by revealing that I deal with depression, I have SOCIETY to fall back on. If someone who is already treated as second (or lower) class by that same society speaks out about their own mental health, they’re taking the risk of harming whatever standing they already have. Ergo, it’s easy for me to say “Everyone should be public about mental illness” but that would come with an erroneous assumption that everyone is like me.
William Shatner went to space and got depressed
That headline sounds like a lyric of some band I would probably like.
The actor traveled up to what is technically space but not really “outer” space a while back and wrote about it in a new memoir.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Really, we should have seen this coming: