We're Burned Out! And Depressed! And Shrooms Could Help!
Plus anti-self-care self care and cool young people and nothingness
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.
We’re still burned out! We’re more burned out! Man, screw this!
Sometimes work feels like an arrangement where you run top-speed head-first into trees all day. And why do you do that? So you can earn enough money to run top-speed head-first into trees all day tomorrow.
Or, in a more practical sense, you drive to and from a workplace so you can earn enough money to pay for gas to drive to and from that place again.
So you can earn enough money to live in a place close to where you have to go to earn enough money to continue to live in a place near your job some more.
People are burned out. People are losing the energy, concentration, the give-a-shitness to get up and keep doing this. It’s connected to the pandemic, to economic disparity, and to a growing belief that the system doesn’t work for almost everybody. We see it in the rise of labor unions at Starbucks and Amazon and we especially see it in the desperate and vicious anti-union efforts by those companies.
On this week’s show, I talk to Jennifer Moss, an expert on burnout and author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It. She talks about the burnout she dealt with in even writing that book!
She also talks about the efforts some forward-thinking companies are using to help employees, retain employees, and prosper in a time when 41% of employees are planning to quit in the next three months.
Our Whitman, My Story
On last week’s show, I mentioned talking to a guy named John, who was able to type like 220 words per minute. Now I can tell you why I was talking to him.
It was for a series of podcast episodes I made for and with my alma mater, Whitman College. They were looking for new ways to reach prospective students outside of the regular barrage of emails and brochures and slick videos, because all the colleges do those. We came up with the idea of 10-minute podcast episodes, each featuring a different student talking about why they chose to go to a small liberal arts college in the wheat fields of southeastern Washington state.
So I went out to Walla Walla and interviewed the ten students, then edited the tape, added music, and worked with the engineer John Miller to put it all together.
We have students from Zambia, India, Guatemala, Texas, Tennessee, Maine, Utah, and Washington, each with very unique stories. Including John Leeds! Who talks about developing his extreme typing because of his ADHD.
Another episode that touches on mental health is the first one, with Mariel Amador. She grew up extremely poor in the Seattle area and struggled with OCD. Her economic condition meant that she couldn’t get her mental health treated very easily and she nearly dropped out of high school. She ultimately applied to colleges, got great financial aid at Whitman, and was able to advocate for herself such that she received proper treatment for her condition. It’s a wonderful story.
I’m really happy with how these turned out. If you want me to make very cool artisanal podcasts for your company or school or whatever, hit me up.
Quick thoughts for quick moments to tend to yourself
The novelist and short story writer Lauren Groff put together some tips on self-care for writers as part of National Self-Care Day (which I did not know existed) and the first thing she does is say she thinks the term “self-care” is silly. So that’s kind of awesome.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this short video and I really like the “No” bracelet she wears to stop herself from agreeing to things that she really doesn’t want to do. Also: audiobook moments and dog snuggling.
Open Mike Eagle? Thoughts?
More research indicate psilocybin significantly helps depression
And does so better than the conventional anti-depressant it was tested against. Imperial College London tested, well, shrooms against Lexapro and found that the shrooms provided more relief and faster relief, which could last three weeks.
“These findings are important because for the first time we find that psilocybin works differently from conventional antidepressants -- making the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression,” said David Nutt, head of the Imperial Centre of Psychedelic Research and a senior author of the paper.
The team examined brain scans of patients before and after they received psilocybin-assisted therapy or a conventional anti-depressant, the drug known chemically as escitalopram. They found the antidepressant had a milder, slower effect than the magic mushroom ingredient.