Tag: Mental Health

Venting Not Shown to Quell Anger

Venting when angry seems sensible. Conventional wisdom suggests that expressing anger can help us quell it, like releasing steam from a pressure cooker.

But this common metaphor is misleading, according to a 2024 meta-analytic review. Researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 154 studies on anger and found little evidence that venting helps. In some cases, it could increase anger.

“I think it’s really important to bust the myth that if you’re angry you should blow off steam – get it off your chest,” said senior author and communication scientist Brad Bushman when the results were published.

“Venting anger might sound like a good idea, but there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory.”

https://www.sciencealert.com/venting-doesnt-reduce-anger-but-something-else-does-review-finds

The Accumulated Self – Therapy and Meditation, Two Approaches Towards

You had a line I thought was interesting where you said:

Traditional therapy unpacks in order to make sense. Meditation asks us to stop making sense so that we can find where happiness truly abides. Therapy examines the accumulated self, the only one that is shaped by all the defenses we’ve used to get through life.

Meditation asks us to divest ourselves of those very defenses.

Tell me a bit about that tension. You’re setting them up as almost, not quite opposite ways of knowing, but one mode is very cerebral and takes the stories very seriously, and the other mode is, in some ways, trying to get you to loosen your grip and be very skeptical of the stories your mind tells.

Yes. I was trying to channel David Byrne there with “stop making sense.”

Taking the story — one’s own personal story — seriously is superimportant. And there’s a real tendency among people who don’t have a psychotherapeutic interest but are coming strictly from the meditative point of view to diminish the importance of everything we’ve learned from a hundred years of psychotherapy: Early childhood experience, emotional pain, even traumatic events — those are all just phenomena to be observed. Don’t make too big a deal.

I think that’s a mistake. I think we need to take ourselves seriously and understand ourselves as best we can, and then begin to loosen the attachments that we all have to the various events that have formed us.

From the spiritual side, freedom from identity is the goal. And we can see what happens in the world when people are unable to free themselves from their identity. It’s a big cause of conflict and pain. But those identities are superimportant to be able to make sense of, too. So that’s one of the ways that I see these two worlds really helping each other.

Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?
The Ezra Klein Show
Interview with Mark Epstein
Epstein is a Buddhist and a psychotherapist. His first book, published in 1995, was called “Thoughts Without a Thinker.” His 2022 book is “The Zen of Therapy.”

Now a lot of people go to therapy. The fact that today it might have all these dimensions of mindfulness and awareness in it would seem normal and natural. But some people built that bridge, and Epstein was one of them.

Experience and Emotion

Get cut off in rush-hour traffic and you may feel angry for the whole trip, or even snap at a noisy child in the back seat.

Get an unexpected smile from that same kid and you may feel like rush hour — and even those other drivers — aren’t so bad.

“The thing about emotion is it generalizes. It puts the brain into a broader state,” says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University.

Deisseroth and a team of researchers have come up with an explanation for how that happens.

The process involves a signal that, after a positive or negative experience, lingers in the brain, the team reports in the journal Science.

Experiences themselves act a bit like piano notes in the brain. Some are staccato, producing only a brief burst of activity that may result in a reflexive response, like honking at another driver, or smiling back at a child.

But more profound experiences can be more like a musical note that is held with the sustain pedal and still audible when the next note is played, or the one after that.

“You just need it to be sustained long enough to merge with and interact with other notes,” Deisseroth says. “And from our perspective, this is exactly what emotion needs.”

To get from experience to emotion, the brain hits ‘sustain’

Monomania and the Tyrannical State

Plato claims that justice in a republic was the same virtue as justice in a human being, and that the parts of a human soul match those in a state and stand in the same just or unjust relationships to one another. A monomaniac runs his life as a tyrannical state runs itself.

Plots (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
Robert Belknap

In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, “one”, and mania, meaning “madness” or “frenzy”) was a form of partial insanity conceived as single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomania

Bad Habit of Overthinking

But looking at it from another angle, if we’re able to control our mind, maybe we’ll be able to stop the continuous thinking that goes on in our head, dictating how we behave. The problem here is that the mind has a habit of looking for stronger stimulation and can get out of control if we let it. Because negative thoughts have a much stronger impact on our brain than a mild, gentle sense of happiness, it’s hard to prevent that from happening.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living
Ryunosuke Koike

Stick Your Hand into the Fire – Reality Check

Michael told Bo that there was no way he was going to watch a film set in a burn unit because every morning he opened his eyes and found his room on fire. That was when he explained about his schizophrenia. Every morning, he told Bo, he lay in bed paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real. His father didn’t just tell him; he proved it. Ordering Michael to put out a hand and touch the fire, he asked him what he felt.

“Does it burn?” his father asked. “Does it burn? No? Good!”

Then he ordered Michael to do the same with his other hand. Again, the call-and-response: “Is it hot? Does it burn? Does it burn?” When Michael admitted it did not, his father told him, “That’s because it isn’t real.” He got him to sit up and put one foot on the floor. Never mind the flame. Even if he had to lift his leg with both hands and force it down, he had to put his foot on the floor, then tell Chuck if the floor was hot. “Is it hot? That’s right. Now the other foot!”

Michael slipped into his father’s voice to tell the story, putting on the bullying Brooklyn accent like a bomber jacket, adding dramatic urgency and with it that suggestion of mastery that comes with a performance, even if he was performing a terrible reality that tyrannized him.

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
Jonathan Rosen

Laughter Yoga

And then there’s laughter yoga, a movement that now involves 16,000 laughter clubs in 72 countries, offering people the world over a chance to chuckle their way to physical and mental health. To experience laughter yoga for ourselves, Pete and I had stopped by one of the weekly meetings of the Denver Laughter Club. In a downtown Unitarian church, we joined a dozen or so club members being led by two so-called laughter leaders (“Jovial Jeff” and “Crazy Karen”) through a surreal chain of exercises. We began with “greeting laughter,” moving around the room and shaking each other’s hands with a hearty, forced chuckle. Then we carried on extended conversations in nothing but gibberish, and imitated lawn sprinklers while others pretended to run through our spray. Other drills followed—“bumper-car laughter,” “happy pills,” “laughter bombs”—each designed to encourage so much fake laughter that everyone broke down for real. At one point, I passed an imaginary laughter bong to a gray-haired grandmother, from which she took a deep drag and burst out cackling.

“I do feel more energized than I did an hour ago,” admitted Pete when it was over. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d gone through a trial run for living in a loony bin. Still, the regulars, a welcoming and normal-seeming bunch, seemed to be getting a lot out of it. “You don’t need stand-up comedy or movies or plays,” one of them told us. “You can just laugh.”

That’s the point, said Madan Kataria, the doctor who developed laughter yoga in 1995 and is now recognized internationally as the “Guru of Giggling.” When I reached him via Skype in his home base of Mumbai, India, he told me, “Laughter was always conditional and dependent on jokes, comedy, life happenings. For the first time, in laughter yoga, laughter has been disconnected from our daily lives, because there are often not enough reasons to laugh. My discovery was that laughing without reason was enough to give people benefits.”

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny
Peter McGraw, Joel Warner

Walking and Freedom from the Bondage of Self

What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.

A Philosophy of Walking
Frederic Gros

Probation Officer on the Perspective of Youth

Sheila missed the action of the drug trade. She was having lifestyle withdrawal. She still went to parties and was still dating an up-and-comer in one of the neighborhood gangs, but she worried that her peers didn’t look at her the same way anymore. Her boyfriend said that her holding down a day job reflected poorly on him. It made him look like he wasn’t a good earner, like he couldn’t provide for his girl.

You want to tell young people that the things they care about now won’t matter in a couple of years. They’ll make new friends, meet new people, see new places, gain and lose a half dozen jobs before they’re settled, but this insight, like so many others I’d hoped to bring to the job, was tied to my own experience, to class if not race, and hopelessly inapplicable. Most people on probation and parole in the Seventh Ward didn’t go away to college. They rarely left the city limits for any reason. When you don’t go far from home, the local ecology is the only one you care about.

The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison
Jason Hardy

People have got to learn to be dopey without the dope. – Cassavetes Quote

“People have got to learn to be dopey without the dope.”
— John Cassavetes

Full Excerpt:
“I hate the Hollywood idea of saying, ‘We’re going to make this film, and it’s going to be about a junkie, it’s going to be about a guy who takes pot.’ Because they know that there’s a great mass of people out there who are drug-oriented.

It’s a drug-oriented society that we live in. It would be pretty dishonest of me to make a drug-oriented picture when I don’t dig drugs. Because then I would be a commercial son of a b!tch.

But I can understand why people take dope. I don’t think it can be cured by saying it’s wrong, by saying to your children, ‘Don’t do this.’ For people to stop, you have to give them a different way, a better way. People have got to learn to be dopey without the dope.”

Editor’s Note:
Cassavetes’ reply to criticisms that his title characters were ‘bourgeois’ and that contemporary ‘realities’ like drug-taking were left out.
(Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Edited by Ray Carney)

via twitter

Ship Mutiny – Mind, Mental Illness Metaphor

“Now imagine that the human body is a gigantic ocean liner, and that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these crew cells is up on the bridge. He’s the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew belowdecks is doing; all he knows is that the ship keeps running smoothly and the job’s getting done. Now the captain is you—it’s your waking consciousness. And what happens in dual personality—maybe—is that one of those crew cells down belowdecks comes up on the bridge and takes over command of the ship. In other words, mutiny. Does that help you understand it?”

Chris was staring in unblinking incredulity. “Father, that’s so far out of sight that I think it’s almost easier to believe in the flipping Devil!”

The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty

Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience – The New York Times

“Now we find something that potentially can explain it in the brain,” she said. “The brain doesn’t look like it’s in a state of memory; it looks like it is a state of present experience.”

Indeed, the authors conclude in the paper, “traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.”

The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C.

Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience

Self Deception in Politics – Two Quotes

An opposition researcher once told me that politicians who hold office at the federal level are invariably a bit delusional. In campaign mode, they’re forced to tell a story about themselves that is idealized and laundered of flaws; eventually they tell that story so many times they begin to believe it. Some slip down the slope into bigger lies.

The Very Good Reason People Like George Santos Lie About Nonsense
Elizabeth Spiers

The viewers deserved better than this election denialism—but in their MAGA hearts, it was what they really wanted. And wherever there was demand to be lied to, there was plenty of supply. “One thing I can’t comprehend,” said Al Schmidt, the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, “is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”

Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy
Brian Stelter

Depression and Medication – NYTIMES on

Experts initially thought that depression must be caused by low levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, in part because the first antidepressant drug — accidentally discovered in the 1950s — increased circulating amounts of the chemicals. Further research suggested that serotonin played an especially important role in mood. This so-called “chemical imbalance” theory gained a foothold in the cultural psyche and was promoted by ads for the medications.

However, starting in the 1990s, researchers began to understand that depression was much more complicated and that serotonin played only a nominal role. For one thing, S.S.R.I.s increase serotonin levels immediately, but it takes several weeks before people start to feel better. Studies also started to emerge showing that another brain system played a role: People with depression consistently have less volume in an area called the hippocampus that’s important for regulating mood.

The current prevailing theory, Dr. Hellerstein said, is that chronic stress can cause the loss of connections — called synapses — between cells in the hippocampus and other parts of the brain, potentially leading to depression. Antidepressants are now thought to work at least in part by helping the brain form new connections between cells. Researchers aren’t exactly sure how increasing serotonin with an S.S.R.I. causes these synapses to regrow. One possibility is that the medications also increase levels of other brain chemicals, called growth factors, that help those connections form and spread.

A paper published earlier this year made headlines for presenting several decades’ worth of evidence that people with depression don’t have less serotonin than people who are not depressed. To most psychiatrists, the paper didn’t reveal anything new, and it didn’t mean antidepressants aren’t effective (a widely held misinterpretation of the paper). Instead it revealed a fundamental disconnect between how the public viewed depression and how the experts thought about it.

Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think
The most commonly prescribed medications for depression are somewhat effective — but not because they correct a “chemical imbalance.”