You were never Courtney Love's drummer but you have a lot in common with Patty Schemel, who was
Also: potentially outdated manuals, Ukraine anxiety, curling, telling a ship to fuck off
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A catered intervention
I really love this week’s episode of the podcast with Patty Schemel. It shows how something can be completely relatable and absolutely beyond any imagining at the same time.
A lot of us have to deal with a mental disorder at some point or another. Might be major depressive disorder, might be anxiety that becomes problematic and interferes with your life (which is all that the term “disorder” actually means), or maybe it’s some OCD that’s become a real issue. So the fact that Patty has one - hers happens to be substance use disorder - is very understandable.
But Patty has lived in some circumstances that aren’t so relatable. Very few people have been in one of the biggest bands in the world. Few among us have had Courtney Love for a boss or lived with Courtney and Kurt Cobain. And chances are, you personally have not gone from winning MTV awards to living on the streets of Los Angeles in a short period of time. You might not have had those precise experiences with those nouns but the arc of mental illness messing up a life despite all the rational reasons why it shouldn’t, yeah, I think a lot of folks have been there.
Some parts of this week’s episode that stood out for me:
Courtney Love hosted an intervention and it was catered. And she mentioned some catering staff being there so I assume it wasn’t just a plate of cookies but like a table with sterno and chafing dishes.
Her sister showing up with a bottle of Bacardi and a Clash album. Loved that detail so much I put it in the title of the show.
I think Patty covers the internal logic of substance use disorder. She was drinking when she auditioned for Hole. Biggest job interview of your life and you’re pounding a beer during it. It’s ridiculous but it made sense to her at the time.
She mentions Hit Parader and Creem magazines. I lived by those things when I was a kid. And Circus magazine but that one got a little too metal. Alas.
Maybe all of psychology and mental illness can’t be classified through one huge book
That’s the notion behind Wired’s look at emerging challenges to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, that has dominated mental health thinking for decades.
ONE INITIATIVE AIMS to change that with a system that is both hierarchical (moving up from individual symptoms to a broad spectrum of disorder) and dimensional (characterizing psychopathology as different from “normal” behavior in degree, not kind). It’s called HiTOP, which stands for the Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology.
A psychiatrist consulting the DSM would likely diagnose someone with checking behaviors (repeatedly asking themselves, is the stove off? Or, are my thoughts immoral?) with obsessive compulsive disorder, assuming they met its harsh criteria for frequency and severity. In the process, a psychiatrist might find that they also qualify for anxiety, depression, or any number of other comorbidities.
In HiTOP, by contrast, checking behaviors would be treated as just one symptom reflecting a position on a larger internalizing spectrum—a general tendency to experience strong negative emotions that can encompass qualities of OCD, anxiety, and depression simultaneously. Depending on a patient’s specific experience, HiTOP might also offer additional insights: In this model, obsessive symptoms and related rituals might indicate an internalized response to fear, while depressive symptoms suggest an element of distress. Sexual problems, eating pathologies, and post-traumatic stress disorder are also placed within this spectrum.
Self care for those watching the Ukraine crisis
A friend of mine reported watching coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for about 12 straight hours. Wanted to get all the information he could on what was happening on the ground. And he did so from thousands of miles away from Kiev.
On the one hand, it’s important stuff going on and it’s good to be informed. But significant new developments are unlikely to reach my friend (I am not slyly talking about myself) in such an ongoing and steady way as to make the 12-hour vigilance especially enlightening.
What can result is a huge amount of anxiety resulting from imagining what might become of the crisis. If you have a mind that drifts toward catastrophizing, this kind of extrapolation can lead to very bleak places indeed.
During the covid crisis, the deaths have been unimaginable. And I mean that you can’t really frame your mind in such a way that you can comprehend a million deaths, like we’ve had in the United States. You can’t imagine a million of anything so it exists as an abstraction. That dissonance between reality and abstraction can really create some friction in your mind and cause or contribute to the massive ocean of mental health issues we’re dealing with as a society now.
I would argue that for many of us far from Ukraine, the potential for mental health problems can be the same. Something huge happened, it will lead to huge repercussions in the future, but that hugeness can go in a thousand directions.
We should all take care of ourselves. The way I might do so in Minnesota is different than how the citizens of Kiev are going about it because their situation is vastly different than mine but we all need to tend to our needs under the reality we’re living in.
Take it away, Dr. Jill Biden, whose Twitter thread I meant to introduce with a quick sentence but I went on for several paragraphs.
If you really put your mind to it, can you be a world class curler after a day?
No!
Of course not!
But it’s an interesting project to learn about how one tries to acquire skills.
via Kottke. Jason not Leo.