Tuesday, May 31, 2016

"Why Letting Women Take Tea Breaks Was Once Considered Dangerous "

"sipping tea was once thought of as a reckless, suspicious act, linked to revolutionary feminism.

Huh? Well, the feminist complaints came from 19th century, upper class Irish critics who argued that peasant women shouldn't be wasting their time — and limited resources — on tea. If women had time to sit down and enjoy a tea break, this must mean they were ignoring their domestic duties and instead, perhaps, opening the door to political engagement or even rebellion...

In a paper published in the journal Literature and History, O'Connell explores the angst about tea by combing through popular pamphlets — or short works of fiction — published in the 1800s. The pamphlets were published by reformers who were trying to weave tales of morality and clean-living into story form...

The reformers' campaign against tea took on another moral outrage: slavery. Since tea was typically sweetened with sugar at the time, reformers in Ireland tried to convince people that tea drinking was akin to drinking the blood of slaves, who were forced to work the plantations where sugar was produced.(Many prominent British intellectuals of the 19th century, including the Romantic British poet Percy Shelley, also boycotted sugar in their tea for this reason.)"
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/11/431394045/why-letting-women-take-tea-breaks-was-once-considered-dangerous?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150811

I find this interestingly complicated. To be clear, this is about British women - the women who were slaves were not involves in this thought. And opposition to the economic system based on slave labor got caught up in a moment of repression of British women. It's frustrating to see these times when movements are pitted against each other, as though the activists ought to be enemies.

"Trump will soon be getting briefings from U.S. spy agencies. It might not go well."


"It beggars the imagination," said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, who was among those who briefed President Obama after the 2008 election. "Given that [Trump's] public persona seems to reflect a lack of understanding or care about global issues, how do you arrange these presentations to learn what are the true depths of his understanding?"

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said last week that U.S. spy agencies have already begun planning briefings for Trump and his presumed Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, although neither is expected to receive an initial briefing before party conventions conclude in July.

Pre-election briefings tend to be overviews of spy agency assessments of major topics such as the civil war in Syria."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/05/donald-trump-will-soon-be-getting-briefings-from-u-s-spy-agencies-it-might-not-go-well/?postshare=8541462496624743&tid=ss_tw

... Why is this happening?

"Brain's 'atlas' of words revealed"


"Volunteers - including lead author Alex Huth - listened to more than two hours of stories from a US radio programme while remaining still inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner...
The results were converted into a thesaurus-like map where the words were arranged on the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

They show that the semantic system is distributed broadly in more than 100 distinct areas across both halves - hemispheres - of the cortex and in intricate patterns that were consistent across individuals in the study.

The maps show that many areas of the human brain represent language describing people and social relations rather than abstract concepts.

But the same word could be repeated several times on different parts of the brain map. For example, the word "top" was represented in a part of the brain that responds to words about clothing and appearance, and also in a region that deals with numbers and measurements."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36150503

This is really interesting. And now that there is a baseline, sort of, it would be really interesting to look at different people who process words differently, or use words differently. Do writers have more areas; do poets have less distinct barriers between these areas; do people with language processing problems have a different structure; does these areas develop over time, and how?

Is the map the same for processing as for producing (i.e. speaking/writing)?

They also published an "interactive brain viewer" where you can choose a word-concept-cluster and it shows you where your brain would process it: http://gallantlab.org/huth2016/

Monday, May 30, 2016

"A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows"


""The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered...

John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.

"They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting.""

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

"those other men, those other white people "

"In a world where we’ve raised the social costs of failing to adequately signal our political righteousness to unprecedented heights, we find ourselves in a kind of political arms race, particularly among the white educated progressives who are unquestionably a part of the power structure that they decry. After all, you can either be the target of someone else’s critique or you can, preemptively, be the one doing the critiquing...

Were politics a matter of sorting the good people from the bad, political problems would not be nearly so intractable. But since male privilege is expressed through material, economic, and political inequalities regardless of the personal righteousness of individuals, engaging in a way that merely identifies the superior virtue of specific men can actually make meaningful change more difficult...

At its ugliest, this risks being an appropriation of anti-racist political theory for the social and political pleasure of a white person. Is ending up being that righteous aggressor ultimately the point?... if that engagement did not ultimately leave you, like the woman in the comic, telling other people to fucking educate themselves, would you still bother?"
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/09/27/those-other-men-those-other-white-people/

Mmm, signalling with politicals like this, I totally do this. And I often feel like I'm not actually doing much, besides trying to sort of be-in-spaces. And sort of try to hold up education that I like. But what am I doing about the systems and the structures? I think I'm waiting for something to come to me, or hoping that I happen to passively help educate someone who has the power and clarity about direction that I don't.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

"The Air I Breathe: Growing up tolerated and underestimated in Portland"

"When I first left Portland after high school in the fall of 1996, I never thought I would come back. Growing up, I always had the sneaking suspicion that no one outside of the five or so blocks that made up my Northeast Portland neighborhood wanted me to be there. Portland did not appear to love me, its own son, but merely tolerated and continually underestimated me. So when I graduated from high school, I left and didn’t look back, until I was pulled back several years ago...

[In Philadelphia,] The story of African Americans is written, though perhaps apologetically, in permanent ink and projected on the walls of buildings and placards; it is carved in the statues and monuments of black people who make that city what it is.

All of these things brought about a new kind of social and emotional security that may be a given to most white Americans. A sense of belonging, a sense that one’s own interests are being looked out for and that the feelings and beliefs of one’s fellow citizens mirror those of one’s own, a sense that one belongs to a community. For a black person in Portland, this shared sense of history and belonging is notably absent...

For the first six months of third grade, I felt like an exhibit. It took that long for the other kids to realize that I was just as curious, interested, and articulate about the world as they were... When they found out I was familiar with the way they lived and breathed in the world, I began to make friends....

Perhaps the most difficult thing about living in Portland was the lack of an authentic visual and social acknowledgment, recognition, and appreciation of African American people. Without a historical anchor, I fear the potential of what Portland could be in the twenty-first century will be lost to the unrelenting pressure to maintain and preserve a very particular understanding of its history... Though there is no precedent for such large-scale social, political, and ethical reform, if there is any city that can investigate the anthill beneath its boot, it is Portland. It is for a purely selfish reason that I hold out hope that this city and the people who control it will chart a new course for the future. "
http://oregonhumanities.org/magazine/quandary-fall-winter-2014/the-air-i-breathe/925/

I am lucky not to feel the same about my almost-zero-black-people West Coast hometown (probably for class reasons), but there is certainly a sense that I am a transplant and now, having lived in 3 regions of the country that have a long history of black people, I am realizing that there are certain basic securities that I missed out on.

(but, yes, feeling like an exhibit... this happens to me constantly with new people, until they figure me out for  themselves)

Related: a short article about being black in Portland  that features a beautiful video made by this author

Saturday, May 28, 2016

"Your Hitler analogy is wrong, and other complaints from a history professor"


"Recently, writers and pundits have been on a quest to find historical analogs for people, parties, and movements in our own times. Trump is like Hitler, Mussolini, andNapoleon; the imploding GOP getting rid of one ill-suited candidate after another is like Robespierre in the French Revolution, who stuck the executioner in the guillotine because there was no one left to behead. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was like Robert E. Lee...

Hitler comparison has become so common over the years that it has its own probability factor known as Godwin's Law...

Too often, people grab a quick, sexy, polemical, historical analogy to make a point or further their cause. The problem is these easy analogies are extremely shallow and based on a superficial knowledge of the past.

History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide...

Simplistic historical analogies do a sort of epistemic violence to the past and to ourselves... Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continuesthrough generations, even up through the present...

As Mark Twain supposedly said: "History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role."

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11450526/trump-is-hitler?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4/19/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Super valid; we need to stop with these comparisons.

Related: woman who made nazi salute

FB: "To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward."

"The Myth of Multitasking: Longing to Be Absorbed Wholly"

"At the end of a day spent flitting around the Internet without committing to one task for an extended period of time, I often feel jittery, as if I’ve been throwing back espressos on an empty stomach. In fact, according to Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, multitasking actually creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop “effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”

It also increases production of the stress hormone cortisol, as well as the flight-or-fight hormone, adrenaline. In other words, all bad things. Things that make you feel out of control. Things that make you anxious. Things that make you sick...

Before reading up on this literature, I have to admit, I thought multitasking was exhausting, but mostly benevolent — like that very high-energy friend that you can’t be around all the time, but in smaller doses, can be fun. Sure I feel jittery after too much multitasking, but sometimes, after what I think of as “just the right amount,” I feel triumphant. I feel like I’ve fooled the universe into letting me squeeze it all in. I’m a conductor in a Wonder Woman cape, wildly flapping my arms in front of the orchestra that is my life and I’ve somehow got everyone playing in synch. "
http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-myth-of-multitasking-longing-to-be-absorbed-wholly/7259

Yes, such great descriptions of the lures and downsides of multitasking! 
I want to have more conversations about attention and attention habits - and also, our responsibility to the people whose attention we expect to hold. 

Friday, May 27, 2016

"The Last Amazon"

"Superman débuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, Wonder Woman in 1941. She was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. A press release explained, “ ‘Wonder Woman’ was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” Marston put it this way: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world...

Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hardboiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly...

In 1944, Wonder Woman became the only superhero, aside from Superman and Batman, to make the jump from the pages of a comic book to daily newspaper syndication as a comic strip. Marston had so much work to do, writing Wonder Woman stories, that he hired an assistant, nineteen-year-old Joye Hummel. She’d been a student in a psychology class he taught at the Katharine Gibbs School. (Hummel, now ninety, still has the exam that Marston gave in class. It reads as though it were written by Sheryl Sandberg. Question No. 6: “Advise Miss F. how to overcome her fear of talking with the company Vice President who is in charge of her Division and whom she has plenty of opportunities to contact if she chooses; also tell Miss F. why these contacts are to her advantage.”) To help Hummel write Wonder Woman, the family gave her copies of Marston’s “Emotions of Normal People” and Sanger’s “Woman and the New Race.”...

Wonder Woman ran for President in a comic book written by Marston in 1943; she ran for President on the cover of Ms. in 1972. She’ll run again; she’s never won. The Equal Rights Amendment never became law; in 1982, the deadline for its ratification expired. A century after Sanger started The Woman Rebel, even the fight for birth control isn’t over."


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon

The origins of wonder-woman! I mean the exceptionalism is in the name I suppose, but that was before exceptionalism was even a problem I guess...

And all these details -

"Lewis Terman, who helped develop the I.Q. test, also helped create a test to measure “masculinity” and “femininity”: its purpose was to identify deviance."

"The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions"

"If we do not get enough deep sleep, our bodies take longer to heal and grow. The absence of the large spurt of HGH during the first deep sleep continues in many depressed patients even when they are no longer depressed (in remission)... Scanning depressed patients while they sleep has shown that the emotion areas of the brain, the limbic and paralimbic systems, are activated at a higher level in REM than when these patients are awake. High activity in these areas is also common in REM sleep in nondepressed sleepers, but the depressed have even higher activity in these areas than do healthy control subjects... in REM these individuals also show higher activity in the executive cortex areas, those associated with rational thought and decision making. Nondepressed controls do not exhibit this activity in their REM brain imaging studies. This finding has been tentatively interpreted… as perhaps a response to the excessive activity in the areas responsible for emotions...

dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory...

memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. "
http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/


I really want to read this book now to hear the full version of this theory.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

"You’re Right, I Didn’t Eat That"

"There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though “active” and “full of energy” make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from “a woman who takes care of herself.”
It seems a benign enough request, but one quickly learns that this man is not especially concerned that she has regularly scheduled self-care sessions like time with friends or spa days with a good book. He isn’t asking that her household finances be in order and that she be self-actualized. He is asking her to be thin.  When he says “herself,” he means “her body.”...

An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the  “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it...

thin women said that the more they disappeared, the more visible they became"

Just pausing at the very early moment in the essay that I quoted, it gets at something that I'm really trying to articulate for myself - the way that certain people are expected to be constantly available to be gazed upon without every spending time preparing for that gaze, or even being aware of it. For example, it's the person described in every song about a girl who doesn't know she's beautiful. It's this coquettish lack of self awareness that lets the gazer define the person, fill in all the blanks that are normally filled in by a person's actually identity beyond that moment that is visible by the gazer. It's like, this person isn't really supposed to have a mirror of their own, they are sort of supposed to only understand themselves through the understanding of the gazer. They are reliant on the gazer to provide this information.

And that's using some gendered stuff, like men looking at (and through looking, owning and defining) women. But there is also stuff that I experience with race, with people looking at me and defining my race and how it does or doesn't exist and how I am supposed to identify to fit in with their lives. Like, am I the kind of black person who listens to rap? Who can do X or Y dance move? Can I help the gazer be cool? Can I be a source of comic relief for them, their very own BBF? Am I cool with that kinda joke the gazer made all the time in high school but has since started to worry might be racist and therefore sort of wants to get a black person to laugh at? Can I be saved by the gazer, provided the love and acceptance and that I might not find in this cold world, with all the small slights I probably experience from the non-colorblind people but shouldn't ever really bring up because that would make the gazer uncomfortable, so that the gazer can know that they themselves are not racist?

And I dunno, as anyone who has been gazed at knows, you are expected to be available for all of this while not noticing the ways that people think about you. There has to be some scholarship on this somewhere, that puts it better that I am. It's sort of like the double consciousness thing, but it's the expectation that there is no double consciousness - that there can't be.

This essay also has really important things to say about mental health, and I think about how the gazed-at aren't understood to have the human complexity of mental health, and therefore people don't think to ask about it.

FB: A deeply thoughtful reflection on body size by a woman who became very thin and decided to stay that way, and encountered all the social expectations for thin women

"Covert concern about my body is easy to maintain in the dating phase of relationships. Men will touch a particularly small or toned part of me and remark, “Wow, you must work out.” Upon confirmation that I do, the most frequent reply is, “So what do you do, yoga?” It is generally safe to assume that such men have never practiced yoga. Yoga, in the minds of many straight men, is a placeholder for light but effective exercise done primarily by women. It is a sanitary practice, a form of exercise uncontaminated by sweat or gender-neutral footwear. Something that pretty girls do three times a week in flattering pants. But while the benefits of yoga are tremendous, it cannot turn overweight or average bodies into tiny ones. Real yoga—as opposed to cardio routines that borrow heavily from it—cannot create the calorie deficits required to be thin thin. Real thinness requires something much more brutal."

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

"My Indian Parents Are Huge Fans of Cultural Appropriation, Even While My Generation Finds it Appalling"

"Looking back at that now, I realized us first-generation kids spend our most formative years trying to fit into a culture that demands assimilation while simultaneously barring us from it... We have all grown to accept and love our brownness, yet the relentless battle for assimilation has left so many bruises that instinctively provoke knee-jerk responses to ensure distance from our Otherness. We spent our whole lives trying to love our parents’ culture and accepting ourselves as the curry-eating, oil-scrubbing, naturally-tanned selves we are, but we never really did...

that’s why we are upset when someone wakes up one day and decides to exploit our turbulent identities as a disposable fashion -- and by doing so be rewarded as a paragon of globalization and cultural acceptance...

Our parents, on the other hand, never came to this country for assimilation; they came here for survival. They knew from the onset they weren’t going to be accepted. They grew up embedded in a deep sense of cultural identity -- one that everyone around them shared. They always knew where they are from and they owned it, even when they arrived in America... Years later, our parents' generation is bursting with pride at the thought of all the customs they accepted being embraced by the mainstream -- whether it’s being exoticized or not. Our parents see the western infatuation with select parts of their otherwise deeply rich culture less as self-promotion and more as an acknowledgement; it is a cross-cultural equalization they could have never dreamed of."
http://www.xojane.com/issues/my-indian-parents-are-fans-of-cultural-appropriation


This is really, really interesting to think about.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

"Letter to Our Daughters: Do Not Be Good "

"Here’s the other thing: I want you to be decent human beings who think about others’ feelings. But I don’t want you to think too much about them, to the point where you’re consumed with other people’s happiness and not your own. The world is going to try to sell you the Good Woman as Martyr myth (just watch the commercials around Mother’s Day, or don’t)–how you’re supposed to be selfless and giving and lay down and let your children and men feed off your body and energy–but proceed carefully into that world of sacrifice...

You can surround yourself with the people you enjoy and who enjoy you. The people who make you feel good and worthy. The people who make you feel fascinating, worth listening to. The people who accept your eccentricities.
Let your freedom bewilder you. That is a better problem to have than ideological shackles, unhappy relationships, a case of the “shoulds” and “oughts.” Guilt, a friend once told me, is often unreleased anger. No, girls. Do not suffer people quietly or life bitterly in the name of goodness. Do not be gently unhappy for years at a time."
http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/letter-to-my-daughters-do-not-be-good/

Mm, gentle unhappiness.


Related: two beautiful essays on "Girl Pain"; "Three Months Without Breathing

Monday, May 23, 2016

"Not All"

"Unfortunately, non-racist, non-queerantagonistic, non-misogynistic, non-abelist/disableist, etc. systems and institutions do not prevail in this country. They are exceptional–as are the people who, at the very least, grapple with, question, confront, challenge, undo, excise, abolish, and heal their privileged roles in the various hierarchies. And the proof that they are exceptional rests in the fact that oppressive categories, institutions, peoples, and systems not only exist, but thrive. And beyond thrive, they set the tone for existence.

If the majority of people weren’t participants in and perpetrators of oppressive paradigms, there’s simply no way these paradigms would continue to be so successful.

So my point of view is that it’s isn’t necessary to shout “NOT ALL!” whenever we have these discussions."
http://sonofbaldwin.tumblr.com/post/53673183808/not-all

Short and pointful.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

"Life's Stories"

"But it's not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn't much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you're on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.
“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They  are  personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the  APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology...
When people tell others about themselves, they kind of have to do it in a narrative way—that’s just how humans communicate...  Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life—career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the micro-stories of specific events...
Once certain stories get embedded into the culture, they become master narratives—blueprints for people to follow when structuring their own stories, for better or worse. One such blueprint is your standard “go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”
That can be a helpful script in that it gives children a sense of the arc of a life, and shows them examples of tentpole events that could happen. But the downsides of standard narratives have been well-documented—they stigmatize anyone who doesn't follow them to a T, and provide unrealistic expectations of happiness for those who do."

(This article is a little too long for the actual content, and I advise skimming and reading the interesting paragraphs)
I've been thinking about narrative and stories a lot (a lot a lot a lot) and now important it is to have a narrative, and how society might be sort of organized around giving people narratives for the random stuff that happens in a human life, and how you can see who a society is structured for by looking to see who has good narratives
And I think that when we communicate, we are often offering narratives to each other, signifying about our recognizability. And when someone is trying to communicate a narrative that the other person doesn't know, or when someone is trying to communicate something that doesn't have a narrative, that's when we have to stop and really articulate ourselves as individuals. And that's really hard.
I notice this especially during small talk  - I'm often finding myself in moments of absent narratives, or with narratives that only make sense if I explain a big context.  It's such a relief when I find myself in the company of people who hold my similar narratives.

(Mental health; narrative; psychology)

Saturday, May 21, 2016

"Why Depression Needs A New Definition "

"The  DSM-III,  published in 1980, was the APA’s first attempt to clarify the definitions of specific disorders by listing their symptoms; the new edition included guidelines for differentiating depression from other disorders like schizophrenia, dementia, and uncomplicated bereavement, and outlined eight symptoms of depression, included “poor appetite or significant weight loss” and “complaints or evidence of diminished ability to think or concentrate.” If an adult met four of the eight symptoms, the manual counseled, he or she would meet the criteria for clinical depression. In the  DSM-V, published in 2013, depressive disorders were finally allocated their own chapter. The diagnostic criteria were mostly unchanged, with the exception of one additional symptom: “Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful).”...

Some scientists believe that the DSM-V definition is still too vague...  in 2010, researchers in Germany testing the validity of the  DSM-IV  definition found that the criteria captured a huge population of patients with “widely varying associations with the pattern of co-morbidity, personality traits, features of the depressive episode and demographic characteristics.” The results, they argued, “challenge our understanding of major depression as a homogeneous categorical entity.”...

Bruce Cuthbert, the director of adult translational research and treatment development at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), thinks that part of the problem is that researchers have largely focused their attention on finding a one-size-fits-all treatment that doesn’t exist. “When you do a clinical trial, you’re getting a bunch of people who are ‘depressed,’ but they’re actually very different,” he said. “It’s like comparing apples, pears, and tangerines. You’re not going to see a significant effect. You’re not going to be able to say, ‘This treatment works for fruits.’” Trying to create a singular treatment for depression, Cuthbert said, is like trying to create one for cancer: too unspecific to actually be helpful...

The current definition of depression, Cuthbert explains, has largely stemmed from scientists observing patients and then developing lists of symptoms based on what they saw. “The belief was that if you described the disorder well enough, you would be able to define it,” he said. But it’s becoming increasingly clear, he said, that by relying on describing the disorder, scientists are only skimming the surface in terms of understanding it."
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/why-depression-needs-a-new-definition/399902/?utm_source=SFTwitter

Definitely! I am super excited for personalized medicine, it's going to be big in a lot of ways, but one thing it will especially do is provide diagnostic tools for people to understand what is contributing to their psychiatric health or disorder, and what might help. The field is turning toward identifying "biomarkers" instead of ofte-subjectively-described symptoms (like, this is a problem across medicine, for example with autism and adhd and heart attacks being under-observed in women). Biomarkers are things like hormone/protein levels that can be measured in a blood test.

The research I'm doing right now (or, at least, while I write this) is examining the way that two people can be exposed to the same trauma but only one will develop an anxiety disorder or PTSD - and these two people might have different levels of certain gene transcripts in their blood. So, it might be possible to screen someone who is at the hospital just after a traumatic incident to determine if their body is reacting to turn that stress into a chronic condition. It might also be possible to use these biomarkers to suggest what kind of treatment will work best - CBT, certain medications, etc...

The field is really trying to understand neurodiversity now, and facing the fact that there is almost never "a gene for X". It's now being understood as a system, and perhaps there are a finite set of states of that system that can be measured, and then targeted with therapeutics.

"We Broke All The Gender Rules For Prom And Here Are The Gorgeous Photos To Prove It"

"Embracing who you are and knowing your truth is an act of bravery – especially for kids who don’t fit in with the often narrow gender norms of high school. We firmly believe prom is for everyone, which is why MTV News asked 12 young adults with diverse gender identities to help us create a series of looks that celebrates the fashion and true joy that’s possible when no one is excluded.

Our hope is to spread a message about compassion and inclusion that can be heard from the streets of Lebanon, Ohio, to the gymnasiums of Charlotte, North Carolina: No one deserves to be told what to wear to the party."
http://www.mtv.com/news/interactive/breaking-prom-gender-rules/

Friday, May 20, 2016

"Study Reveals Most People Don't Feel Like an Adult Until the Age of 29"

"Fly Research conducted the study to discover what variables people associated with adulthood,  reports the Independent. The No. 1 reason for feeling like an adult is home ownership, while the biggest reason for still feeling like an adolescent is financial reliance on parents.

"More adults than ever before are leaving it later in life to move out from the parental home, get married or have children," Frank Furedi, a sociologist from the University of Kent, said in a Beagle Street press release sent to Mic. "This is having a knock-on effect to how old and 'grown up' people actually perceive themselves to be, which suggests that the old adage of age being but a number is factually true."...

"Growing up is less about years and more about reaching milestones," Gledhill said. "With each of these life events there is a need to take responsibility and a need to become an adult as you have people depending on you to do so.""

http://m.mic.com/articles/124772/study-reveals-most-people-don-t-feel-like-an-adult-until-the-age-of-29

And maybe a certain amount of permanence? Like, living in a city and thinking that this is where you LIVE.

And these milestones are also very class-based and heteronormative, and describe situations that not everyone is going to have access to if it isn't easy for them to find fields or communities that are inclusive of them. And I feel like adult also means "real human" in a way, where you have achieved that status.


(credit to DK)

"My life without gender: 'Strangers are desperate to know what genitalia I have'"

"Five years before actor Laverne Cox became a household name, five years before  Miley Cyrus said, “I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl” and five years beforeCaitlyn Jenner would share her transition with the world, I came across the term “transgender” for the first time...

I have always felt like a walking brain, living in my head while everyone around me seemed to have some innate understanding of their bodies: how they moved, what they desired. As a young child, the only desire I had for my body was to grow a penis, but as soon as I hit puberty and came to an understanding that this would never happen, I gave up on the fantasy. I replaced those dreams with dreams of bigger breasts, thinking that if I somehow developed attributes that were deemed “womanly”, I would start to feel that way, too...

Realising that I could no longer live as a trans man was both terrifying and freeing. What next? What would people think? I had never seen anyone transition from a binary trans identity to a non-binary trans identity, so I had no point of reference. I was completely on my own, unaware of how my body or my brain would change post-testosterone.

On my first day off the hormones, I shaved just one of my legs. To me, this symbolised my confusion and made a statement about the current state of my gender identity: in flux...

I write an advice column for LGBTQA+ youth because I want young queer trans people to see me doing what I love and think, “Wow, someone like me exists and is surviving and thriving.” It is important to hold a mirror up to trans youth to show that being who you are and following your dreams are not mutually exclusive."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/07/my-life-without-gender-strangers-are-desperate-to-know-what-genitalia-i-have