The Royal Buckingham Princess of The High Seas or Fucking Whatever
Also octopuses throw things at each other, just so you know that
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Kristin Hersh on Monday
Can you imagine starting a band when you’re 13 years old? Like at all?
Okay then can you imagine keeping that band together and then you’re 56 and that band is still playing?
Well, I can’t. I can’t imagine wanting anything from age 13 still with me. Because gross. But Kristin Hersh isn’t like most people and she’s done that. As well as playing in other bands and having a very vibrant solo career.
She’s on the podcast on Monday and we talk about:
Synesthesia
Trauma
Dissociation
Babies
Inaccurate diagnoses
College friendships with retired Hollywood starlets
We never get around to talking about this song she did, which has haunted me for years and not just because it has “ghost” in the title:
What’s wrong with me?
I don’t know.
I mean, I DO know, that’s why I started this whole mental health, you know, QUEST or whatever. But what I don’t know is why I’m so cynical about the efforts of Kate Middleton, the Royal Buckingham Princess of The High Seas or fucking whatever, to encourage perinatal mental health in England.
Maybe it’s the fact that I read a story about it in People magazine or that this was the headline on Google:
Later Wednesday morning, Princess Kate joined psychiatry professionals, midwives and social workers involved in perinatal care at a roundtable to talk about meeting the needs of vulnerable mothers in the community, and how to improve in the future.
…
In a sweet moment, Kate knelt down to speak with 3-year-old Akeem, who asked the royal her name.
"My name is Catherine," she told the boy, who simply replied, "Okay," as seen in a video shared on Twitter by Rhiannon Mills.
When Akeem showed interest in Kate's poppy pin, which is worn in remembrance of those who lost their lives in war, she offered for him to have it and took it off her coat.
"Do you know what this is for?" Kate asked. "It's for remembering all the soldiers who died in the war. There you go — that's for you."
Here are possible reasons why this bothers me:
Mental health and mental illness are serious issues that are often really messy and complicated but this article makes it look like Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Canada can just swing through and make a difference.
The whole Royal Family thing is useless.
I mean, look, any attention paid to mental health is good, even if it’s a photo op between moppets and The Empress of Antarctica or what fucking ever. But I think these issues are more important than this.
New startups want you to be your own therapist
Which means you don’t actually have a therapist. You have an app. And good luck to you on that one, Jonathan Sunshine.
I don’t think I’ve quoted Tech Crunch in this newsletter before.
If you have more moderate mental health problems there are players such as Noom (raised $657.3 million) with NoomMood, Nasdaq-listed Talkspace, Lasting and Youper (raised $3.5 million), which offers self-guided CBT therapy.
Also in the CBT field there are chatbots like Woebot (raised $123.3 million) and fournals like Alan Mind that leverage CBT.
In this “moderate mental health” problems space is also Bloom, a New York-based digital mental health “self-therapy” startup that claims it can help with mild to moderate mental health problems.
The startup says its users become “their own therapist” by using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) via video self-therapy sessions, to address stress, anxiety and sleep issues. All the sessions are devised by Dr. Seth Gillihan, author on CBT and Bloom’s head of Therapy and CBT.
Look, learning about cognitive behavioral therapy is great. Aces. Five stars, would soothe again. But let’s not call something therapy that is merely some reminders and exercises. That’s fucked up.
In the last 48 hours, I’ve flown from MSP to Denver to Fresno, stayed overnight, gave a speech, flew from Fresno to Phoenix and then back home. I’m really quite wrung out. I think that’s why I’m swearing so much. Maybe why I’m making up royal family titles like the Princess Countess von Baroness of Parts of Yorkshire. Shit.
Rules for Making Money
Jason Kottke of the valuable kottke.org blog has been on a sabbatical and has begun easing himself back into online life again. He’s doing that by re-running some of his classic blog posts, including this one, a list of the 20 rules for making money.
I’m just going to include my favorites:
6. Depend upon your own personal exertions
8. Don’t get above your business
10. Let hope predominate but be not too visionary
11. Do not scatter your powers
12. Be systematic
14. Beware of “outside operations”
19. Don’t blab
20. Preserve your integrity
These would seem to be good ideas regardless of wanting to make money.
You can read Barnum’s whole book, it’s pretty short, he had circuses to run, here.
Here’s this:
Octopuses throw things at each other
Not sure what this article is doing in Psychology Today but I’m glad I saw it. They throw debris at other octopuses. And yes, I choose that term over octopi. Personal preference.
In this behavior, an octopus would gather material such as silt or shells in its arms, hold it in its arms and web, and then use a jet of water from its siphon (a tube-shaped structure that can eject water) to propel the material through the water.
Why do they do this? This is the best part: NO ONE KNOWS.
“Targeting, if indeed that’s what this is, perhaps suggests the octopus’s intentions and ability to anticipate both the trajectory and the effect of the thrown material,” says Scheel. “However, intentions are interior subjective states, and so challenging to establish objectively.”
Throwing items at other individuals in the same population is a rare behavior in nonhuman animals, previously seen only in some social mammals. Further investigations may reveal exactly what these octopuses are up to and why they seem to throw debris at each other.
Also, check out this weirdie:
Therapist here, with observations about the be-your-own-therapist movement. I mean, if you can manage your mental health issues on your own, then great, wonderful, and more power to you. Tips and tools can be useful. However, those apps and services really do seem like a way to extract a few more bucks out of people who need help. AND -- this is really what I came here to say -- an enormous part of what makes actual therapy effective is the relationship you develop with the human being who is your therapist. Humans are wired for relationship, and there is no AI substitute for that. Having someone truly get to know you, and professionally assist you in arriving at insights about yourself? No app is ever going to do that, no matter how much CBT they stuff inside it.