You have trauma, you're losing friends, and Uzbek Voldemort will confuse you
Ooh also: you can make a comeback from being a Twitter Bad Guy
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Even if the virus disappeared today, covid will be with us a while.
Mental health damage from Covid could last a generation, professionals say
Thanks, professionals.
CNBC has a kind of broad report on all the ways that covid will reverberate in mental health issues for some time to come.
“But although they were kind of delighted when it first happened, then [they were] being really worried about facing people again. And that’s been a kind of across the board, people with social anxiety, people with personality disorder, who are avoidant of other people, because ... it wasn’t so much the isolation that was difficult. It was the getting back out there,” said Jones, who works with both public and private patients in Leeds and Bradford in northern England.
Bereavement, isolation, uncertainty and loss — a loss of freedoms, relationships and moments that can’t be relived and retrieved — are just some of the issues that have affected many people during the pandemic. Psychologists say that while the pandemic may be in its “endgame” phase now, the mental health impact of Covid could be felt for years.
Alex Desatnik, a consultant clinical psychologist in the U.K. working with adults and children, told CNBC that he believes it will take “at least a generation” to resolve the damage to many young people caused by missed milestones and experiences crucial for development.
Friendships lost and missed
A beautiful article by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic on how collapsible friendships become in middle age right when we nee them the most.
According to Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, I’ve aged out of the friendship-collecting business, which tends to peak in the tumbleweed stage of life, when you’re still young enough to spend Saturday evenings with random strangers and Sunday mornings nursing hangovers at brunch. Instead, I should be in the friendship-enjoying business, luxuriating in the relationships that survived as I put down roots.
And I am luxuriating in them. But those friendships are awfully hard-won. With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much for many friendships to withstand. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away.
Made me think about all the events in life that cause mass friendship casualties: going away to college, leaving college and going to grad school, leaving grad school, moving to Seattle, moving away from Seattle to Saint Paul. Each big move away involved mutual assurances that friendships would persevere but few of them did. But a few of them did.
I wonder if the primal importance of friendships as a young person is a thing you misplace, a thing you throw away, or a thing you run out of sufficient energy to support.
Originally, the producers of Friends wanted R.E.M. to do the theme song but they declined. Then they got The Rembrandts.
Clap clap clap clap clap.
Human Resources interview but it’s okay I did nothing wrong.
Normally when you know you have an interview with Human Resources, it doesn’t feel good. But this one for Depresh Mode was fine. Because it was just a show! Called “Human Resources”! And the interview was with Nick Kroll, who co-created the show, and Brandon Kyle Goodman, who is a consultant on it. They both act in it as well.
Human Resources is a spinoff of their show Big Mouth, which is an animated comedy about adolescence. The new show is about all the psychological and emotional creatures who live within each of us: lovebugs, depression kitties, ambition gremlins, anxiety mosquitoes, and so forth.
We talked about how to be accurate and truthful about mental health while also having things like depression as a cat voiced by Jean Smart.
So that interview will be coming out next month.
Irksome tweet, redemptive follow-up
A few days ago, Jeremy Schneider became the thing you never want to be: the lead character on Twitter for a day. He said something really stupid:
And he got ratio-bombed. Tons of replies, ripping him up and down. Typical of which:
Yesterday, Schneider returned to the wasteland of his replies to apologize and reflect. It was pretty great.
Maybe the social media jungle isn’t quite so scary. Maybe you can fuck up sometimes and then make it right.