Sucking in Texas, Obliviousness in London
But good insight on PTSD and valuable research on mental health
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PTSD from an inside view
My guest this week on the podcast is Jason Kander. If you’re familiar with Democratic politics, you might already know Jason because he had a meteoric rise in the party, starting in the Missouri legislature, up through the Secretary of State’s office, then onto a nearly successful U.S. Senate run, and a brush with a Presidential campaign. He was on his way to victory in a race for Mayor of Kansas City when his past finally caught up with him.
Jason had served as an intelligence officer for the army in Afghanistan, which often involved being in unfamiliar places, more or less unprotected, often alone, and with nobody having any idea where he was. And Afghanistan was a war zone, meaning he could be killed or called upon to kill someone else without any notice. Messed him up.
When he returned home, Jason couldn’t shake off the behaviors and states of mind that he needed to survive over there. He couldn’t sit with his back to the door of a restaurant, for instance. His hyper-vigilance, an awareness of all possible deadly threats in wartime Afghanistan, extended into a life where those threats didn’t exist anymore.
On this episode, Jason talks about dropping out of the Kansas City mayoral race to get help at the V.A. and what that help involved.
Either Prince William doesn’t understand what mental health is…
Or the BBC doesn’t. Or maybe some footballers don’t. Or perhaps the BBC is bad at explaining the connection between mental health and a conversation held between the Prince of Wales and some footballers.
It’s all in an article headlined “Prince William, Harry Kane and Declan Rice on football and mental health”.
Either way, I’m exhausted.
I just want… I just want to go lie down for a while.
Block quote.
Spurs striker Kane remembered his father giving him £5 after he scored his first goal when he was five years old, and spoke about the Harry Kane Foundation, which has partnered with Shout.
"My aim is to, especially to the younger generation, talk to them and try and provide ways of talking about mental health and wellbeing," said the England captain.
"The more we talk about it and open up, it will definitely help solve and hopefully encourage people not to be afraid to ask for help, especially when you are feeling a little bit lower."
Fuck, the whole thing is Ted Lasso with bad writers.
Texas Governor’s new mental health project sucks
After the Uvalde shootings, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott maintained that the problem wasn’t the easy availability of assault rifles in a gun-fetishizing culture, but rather the problem was mental health. So rather than deal with the actual problem, which is GUNS, he stirred up a lot of money to get more aggressive about promoting and supporting mental health. There’s even a big new center for it in Uvalde.
Now, supporting mental health, doing more about it, that’s good. Thing is, Abbott’s solutions suck hard.
But local leaders and mental health care professionals told ABC News that the work of Uvalde Resiliency has been hampered by a lack of cooperation with existing institutions with established relationships in the community. And an ABC News review found that only a small fraction of the money touted by the governor's office has actually gone to fund state mental health care programs.
Experts say the patchwork mental health care system leaves millions of rural Texans without access to medical care and that "stopgap" funding won't fix the systemic issues plaguing the Lonestar State.
"It's run by our state government, which they couldn't give a s--- less," Brett Cross, guardian to 10-year-old victim Uziyah Garcia, told ABC News. "Everybody in this town has profited off our kids' deaths. The resiliency center's a joke and it's been that way since day one."
Local practitioners say they have received negative feedback from community members regarding the quality of care, the therapeutic environment, and the long wait times at the center, all exacerbated by cultural taboos stigmatizing mental health care and poor insurance coverage in the largely Latino community.
Covid has built a sort of lab
Covid is bad. We know this.
But out of terrible situations, some research can be had.
First, how bad it is. I don’t do a lot of stats in the podcast or the newsletter but sometimes I gotta. From Vanderbilt University:
A review by Boston University School of Public Health researchers, published in The Lancet, found that rates of depression in the United States tripled from 9 percent to 29 percent during the early months of the pandemic and then continued to rise to 33 percent—affecting one in three Americans—by 2021. Another study by the University of Alabama at Birmingham found symptoms of depression and anxiety rose from 11 percent to 40 percent between April 2020 and April 2021, with higher rates among people who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latinx and Asian.
So, you know, sucks. But!
“In psychology, for ethical reasons, we are limited in the type of stressors we can model in the laboratory,” says Bunmi Olatunji, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology and director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology. “But the pandemic has really become a naturalistic laboratory of sorts for researchers to better understand the effects on individuals who have risk factors already.”
The doubts that the pandemic and other social disruptions have created make a breeding ground for anxiety, Olatunji says. “The pandemic creates an environment of uncertainty: ‘How long is this going to last? What’s the next strain? What’s this monkeypox thing all about?’ And it’s not alone in that regard. The political climate does that, gun violence does that. And once you have uncertainty, oftentimes the way individuals deal with that is to worry.” In cases of anxiety, that worry becomes debilitating, causing people to either overreact to stimuli or to freeze and become paralyzed.
Sometimes you need a tight controlled environment to really observe things.
Hey John, I live on the Kansas side of the Kansas City Metro area. I’m glad you talked to Jason Kander--and he talked and wrote about his experience with PTSD. I just want to tell you that your podcast helps me feel less alien in the world regarding my own mental illness (Depression, Anxiety, & ADHD). Just keep doing what you’re doing, man. Even the moments of meditation help! I want you to know that I do pull off the road if I’m going to close my eyes. 😄