This is a sequel to my Simon Says - Malaise post. I actually tried to write a different sequel first, about the next steps in fully engaging in the virtual civil war with the Republicans, for which I sketched some preliminary ideas in that Simon Says post. But I found myself with a full case of writer's block. I questioned whether I had sufficient expertise to write such a post in a convincing way. The last time I taught, fall 2019, I supposedly did have some expertise in college teaching, I found my ability to influence student learning quite limited. Consequently, it seemed pure hubris on my part to expect stronger results in another domain where the expertise is lacking. Certainly, I have many speculations about the topic, each of which make sense to me. But to persuade others you need more than speculation. So, for now I'm putting that post aside.
Instead, I'm going to focus on the other option in the earlier post, complete disengagement from politics and the news. Do you really need to go off your rocker to completely disengage? While I don't want to give my punchline just yet, I can provide a partial answer here. For certain types of people this is how it's done. I'm one of those. For others who aren't one of these types, tuning out in this way may be much harder. If so, there is less to commend it as a course of action. The kibitzing about the politics has become a form of social interaction. In this age of Covid, maybe it is a necessary way to interact with friends. To the extent that somebody needs to feel socially connected as a way of being whole, tuning out then comes at too high a price to the psyche.
What I intend to do here is to bring in a set of disparate sources and then try to make sense of them when taken together. Let me begin with this opinion piece, Taking the Magic Out of Magic Mushrooms. The piece is about using what we used to call hallucinogenic drugs, or their synthetic substitutes, to combat depression. It's an interesting read.
While reading this piece, I asked myself whether I would like to take some magic mushrooms now, if I were provided the opportunity to do so. At this time, I'm undecided on the answer to that question. Certainly, there is curiosity about what would happen. But with the various aches and pains I have now as well as my concerns about U.S. politics and Covid, my personal equilibrium is more fragile than I would like and I'm wary of upsetting it. The piece did cause me to reflect about depression, as I've had prior experience with it during adolescence, once in high school, then again in college.
Indeed, over the years I've written several posts about depression, some which might still be worth reading. This one, written soon after Robin Williams committed suicide, got some appreciative comments from Facebook friends, Depression in Performing Artists as a Reflection on Ourselves. In my experience there clearly was a linkage between depression and "environmental factors", with depression resulting from feeling trapped with no way out. The question then is how to prevent this from happening, if at all possible or to find a way out, however unlikely. This next one was written after having a bad experience in teaching during fall 2016, where I also had a bad experience the previous fall. (I was only teaching one course a year in retirement.) It was beginning to look like the new normal and that was getting me down, as I put a lot of energy and attention into the teaching. While ultimately I didn't fall into depression, and I taught again in fall 2017 and fall 2019, I needed to get my head oriented to something entirely different - Putting My Brain In Mothballs. This last one I wrote in spring 2020, so after the pandemic had started and after reading many pieces about it causing anxiety and depression in students. I had actually seen that in my students during fall 2019. The situation was bad ahead of time. Clearly the pandemic made it much worse. I thought that people with more experience who had depression in the past and learned coping skills to ward it off should make those overt to current students. So I wrote, Fending Off Depression - My Take.
Now I want to move on and consider when the environmental factors are mainly one's own health, but for the moment not consider prior mental health illness. I will do that below. Our healthcare system seems to provide at least some monitoring of a patient's potential depression, while being treated for chronic illness and/or after the patient has reached a certain age. The image below is taken from the healthcare portal my provider uses, under the tab labelled Preventative Care.
I find it reassuring to see the flu vaccine there. Some preventative care is pretty ordinary stuff. I'm not sure what the Annual Fall Assessment is supposed to be. I do have an annual checkup with my primary care physician, usually around my birthday in January, though as of late he has been hard to schedule and it has been later than that. I was surprised when I saw the Annual Depression Screening, the first time I saw it. When I clicked it to find out about the previously done dates, I learned that those were visits to my oncologist. I received radiation treatment for prostate cancer in 2018. Since then we have been in monitoring mode, to make sure the cancer is not returning. At first, the visits were every three months. I have since "graduated" to a visit every six months. I have such a visit next week.
During treatment, which was daily on weekdays, for a total of 44 treatments, I would see the doctor on Wednesday after the treatment was over. Between those a nurse would do a quick examination of vitals and related matters. As part of the examination I would be asked - are you depressed? I came up with this pat response. Of course I'm depressed. Everybody in America is depressed, but it's politics that's the cause not the cancer. Sometimes the techs who would administer the radiation treatment would ask me the question as we walked from the waiting room to the room that had the Tomography machine. Over time they learned that I was a Yankees fan. After the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs, I said I was really depressed. Everybody got a good laugh.
Prostate cancer itself, especially when it has been detected early, should not be a cause of depression. It is eminently treatable, with a high likelihood of remission. And the symptoms are comparatively mild - fatigue during the day that is remedied with a nap and having to go to the bathroom more frequently to pee. The latter persists after treatment and as getting up at night to go to the bathroom becomes routine, a sound sleep is harder to come by so the fatigue persists as well for that reason. But an MRI done prior to treatment suggested there might be other cancer spots outside of the prostate. That the cancer might have spread to nearby bone did a number on my head. For the first time in my life, I seriously contemplated my own mortality and there is no doubt I became very anxious about my health. Coupled with that was the insurance company refusing to pay for more sophisticated testing that would diagnose what was really going on. I became frustrated by that as the doctor seemed frustrated as well.
Ultimately, it was the right decision for the insurance company to turn down these advanced tests. It encouraged my doctor to consult with a different radiologist than the one who had initially read the MRI. Apparently, a spot with arthritis can show up in an MRI and look much like a spot with cancer, especially to the untutored eye. One has to take a more holistic view of the patient's health to get an accurate reading. In my case what the MRI and a subsequent bone scan showed is that I am riddled with arthritis in a variety of locations in my body, but the cancer itself was contained within the prostate. The awareness of the true situation prevented depression from ensuing, even if from time to time when the arthritis is bad I start to feel sorry for myself and then can be self-indulgent. When the more severe pain passes, I go back to being me as I ordinarily am.
Let me turn to prior mental health issues as a potential cause of depression, and with that offer up a warning both about labels with mental illness and with causality. (Does mental illness cause depression or does depression cause mental illness?) Perhaps the most famous such case is that of Vincent Van Gogh. I found the Irving Stone book, Lust for Life, a good read. Though it is historical fiction, it is based on the letters Vincent wrote to his brother Theo. The movie based on the book is also not bad. When I was a kid I liked Kirk Douglas as an actor. As an adult I grew into thinking of the Douglas approach as over-acting. In the role of Vincent Van Gogh, however, the Douglas style works as it helps to convey the intensity in Van Gogh's personality, even prior to any of his manic episodes. Van Gogh was said to have epilepsy, though in doing a Google search I saw that view contested, with his behavior better explained by chronic malnutrition and excessive drinking. Who knows? Van Gogh ultimately committed suicide. Before that, he surely was experiencing some kind of mental pain.
Another famous case is that of John Nash. Sylvia Nasar's book, A Beautiful Mind, is worthwhile reading and I believe gives a good picture of what Nash was really like. In contrast, the movie version while entertaining seemed entirely other than the book, in part because it got caught up in finding a way to externalize Nash's hallucinations. Nash had schizophrenia. The book talks about linkages between schizophrenia and creativity, particularly among mathematicians. When I was a graduate student at Northwestern in economics, I remember a presentation by the game theorist Lloyd Shapley, not for the content of the talk but because his physical presence struck me as that of somebody who was truly crazy. Maybe he didn't get much sleep the night before or perhaps there was some other benign explanation for what I saw. I know nothing of Shapley's personal life, so can't really comment about the cause here. Nonetheless, this sense of linkage between extreme creativity and mental illness survives in present day thinking and should be noted. Getting back to Nash, after his schizophrenia diagnosis, Nash was put on medication that held the disease in check. But the meds also suppressed his creativity, which gave him a reason for not taking the pills. Was this tension between creativity and living with a sense of normalcy a source of depression? Perhaps it was. Nash died in a car accident, where he was a passenger. There is no information about his mental state in that cause of death.
There is some history of mental illness in my family on my mother's side. In the early 1930s, my grandfather jumped out of the window of their apartment in Berlin, an attempted suicide. He survived this. (He and my grandmother later died in a concentration camp.) To explain why he did this, my mother said he had a premonition that Hitler was coming. Whether this premonition itself was due entirely to external causes or, instead, if my grandfather was "crazy" in some way is impossible to know now.
My mother herself had a very strong personality. I described her as something of a bulldozer in this post. Growing up, I attributed much of how she went about things to having been an adolescent in Nazi Germany. It didn't occur to me at the time that there might be genetic explanations for her behavior. Sometime later, when our younger son was in daycare, he got tested and then diagnosed with a mild form of autism, Asperger's Syndrome if you will. When I read up a little on that, particularly the controlling behaviors that results from an inability to adjust to changing environments, I thought it described my mom quite well. That felt like a revelation. Further, though I don't believe I'm controlling in this same way, I did exhibit some of the symptoms as a teen. When I received counseling for my depression in tenth grade, much time was spent on getting me to make good eye contact with the counselor. Beforehand, I would shy away from that, particularly when with authority figures I didn't otherwise know. It was noticeable. My brother reported remembering me doing that in a recent family Zoom call. The counseling was effective that way. Whether it also helped me inwardly with the causes for the behavior I'm still unsure of that, 50+ years later. Nonetheless, I'm fairly certain that I still have Autism Spectrum Disorder, though perhaps a high functioning variety.
While it might not be as highly regarded among research psychologists, Myers-Briggs typing remains popular among management consultants and those who have received such consultation. I was tested back in 2003 prior to attending the Frye Leadership Institute and learned that my type is INTP. Is there some correlation between being this type and having Asperger's? I would guess there is, though perhaps it would be better to have all the NT types aggregated before considering this correlation. The following is from a post called Going Against Type:
Sir Ken Robinson in this delightful and provocative Ted Talk called Do schools kill creativity? says that professors are unlike their students in that the professors live in their minds while their students live in the real world. (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Professors tend to teach the subject matter and not individualize their content depending on the student's personality type. In so doing, are they actually targeting their own personality type (which is very likely to be NT)? If so, what of the poor students who are unlucky enough to take the course though they are SFs?
A bit earlier I wrote a post call The Professor Mind, which aimed at giving more flesh to Ken Robinson's description of the professor. Some of the post is taken up with the nature of intellectual inquiry and then getting stuck in the process. Getting stuck is a normal thing. So, one who lives the life of the mind needs to develop methods for getting unstuck. There is a wonderful book, though I found it hard to penetrate initially, called On Not Being Able to Paint. The author, Marion Milner, makes the argument (perhaps only implicitly) that we rely too much on our rational selves in our thinking. We need our subconscious selves to be active to release our creativity. The rational self often blocks that out. This is why sleeping on a problem where you are stuck can possibly reveal new and better approaches to problem solving after you awaken. The dreaming attacks the problem in ways that can't be done while awake. Milner doesn't talk about drugs inducing this dream state, but if the reader goes back to consider the Magic Mushrooms piece, perhaps the good consequences about curing depression result from this release of the subconscious self. Alternatively, perhaps it is possible that those who live the life of the mind become depressed when working on a problem they find important only to get stuck and then finding no way to get unstuck. The simple answer - work on some other problem - has then become unacceptable because the problem itself is too compelling.
I want to make the argument personal again. I'll do this by juxtaposing the consequences of aging on the professor mind. At the time I attended the Frye Institute I was 48, a good deal older than many of the others, who were in their early to mid 30's. It was noticeable to me how much mentally quicker they were. Though I was their age in a pre-Internet world, so didn't have all the varied information sources coming at me in way where I needed to make sense of it all, I did recall to an even earlier time in life - high school - where I surely was mentally quick. This sort of slowing down over time is likely inevitable. Nonetheless, I found it worrisome when at Frye, then somewhat humbling after that. Some years later, I can't remember how many now, the senior moments started to happen. It is frustrating to feel that you know something, but can't recall the name or the face, or whatever else you are trying to remember. What comes next in this dimension?
My mother had Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia. That last five years of her life, she couldn't recognize me when I went to visit her in Boca Raton. I later learned from my brother, who is an MD, that she actually showed signs of dementia more than 10 years earlier, but perhaps her doctors couldn't separate out the consequences of that versus her reaction to the strong medication she was on. Since my prostate cancer, I've feared that I would get an early onset of dementia. Recently, I did some Google searching to learn there is a positive correlation between autism and dementia. Likewise, I'd suspect such a correlation between the professor mind and dementia.
Back in the 1980s when I was doing economic theory full time, there was a tee shirt that graduate students studying economic theory would wear - Do You Live In Your Model? The insight in that question is that you needed to mentally occupy your model for a sustained period of time, perhaps several months, before fully understanding the implications of the model and then being able to write up the results from that. Of course, even with living in your model there still was the practical reality of day-to-day life. For that you needed to live in the real world. So it was necessary to be able to mentally transition between the two. Time of day was largely the determinant of which world you'd occupy, though there are certain real-world tasks, washing the dishes is my canonical example, that may be done autonomously in which case that is time that can be devoted to living in your model.
When in the mid 1990s I gradually switched careers, ultimately to become an administrator for online learning on campus, there was some change in the living-in-the-model notion but maybe not as much as one might guess. To the extent that much of the job was talking one-on-one with other people on campus who were engaged with online learning in some capacity, it was a delightful alternative to pondering deeply (or otherwise) while sitting in my office. Much less satisfying were the various committee meetings or staff meetings that I had to attend and ditto for the myriad meetings with vendors. Given this, it is perhaps surprising that I flourished in group interaction online, which was opt in by the participants, who had a substantial prior interest in online learning. (Further, it was purely asynchronous and completely text-based, so unlike much group interaction now.) It seemed I was a natural for this sort of communication. Indeed, I probably got invited to work in SCALE by how others perceived my participation in the discussion group held in FirstClass. At the time, with very young kids at home, this activity also served as a proxy for a social life with adult interaction.
While this paper was written before all of us were using the Internet, I've found that Kenneth Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" very useful in categorizing the relationship between thinking and communication. It is helpful to consider it all as conversation. Reflective thinking is then internalized conversation while writing is externalized conversation. And there is an interplay between the pieces so that all the pieces become part of one larger conversation. In this way, instead of living in my model, what I did when producing research in economic theory, as a writer I am trying to produce a coherent narrative for a blog post such as this one, with most of the work done in what Donald Murray called prewriting.
Yet as I've gotten older this has become more difficult for me. Either my skills have deteriorated with age, or I choose topics that are too ambitious for me to make an interesting contribution, or some combination of the two. As of late, I find I get more satisfaction from reading fiction. There is a narrative that plays out. While the true creator is the writer, the reader can be thought of as a co-creator. There is no coherent narrative unless the reader makes sense of it all. Most recently I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I found on my son's bookshelf. (He must have taken a course in Russian literature to fulfill a gen ed requirement.) This was a paperback version that I could read while sitting away from the computer. I've been making a conscious effort to spend more of my day offline, if I can. The time spent doing that is enjoyable.
* * * * *
With all of this as background, I'm now ready to discuss the issue to which going off your rocker might provide the solution, at least for people with Asperger's or like descriptors that I considered above. The issue is how our national politics is impacting my mental health. Several times a day I find myself in what I'd call a daydream rage. Instead of the charm of a Walter Mitty, I find my mental projection wanting to take a baseball bat and swatting the head of certain Supreme Court Justices and Members of Congress. I have other manifestations of this sort, there is no need to elaborate about them here, that together occur several times a day. If I could willfully block them out, say by reading good fiction, there wouldn't be a problem. I could control the matter in that way.
But I found that even when in the midst of reading The Master and Margarita these rages would occur. Part of this is that my arthritis requires me to change my sitting position now and then and in the interlude there is time for other thoughts outside of the reading. The other part is that after years of sitting in front of a computer screen for many hours a day, my ability to focus on one source of information and not search for other bits - check Facebook or email, etc. - is not nearly as strong as it used to be. Maybe I can train myself to concentrate better. But perhaps not. And if not, these recurrent rages could become a long-term issue for me.
I want to note that normal daydreams are essential and part of the productive process in generating a piece of writing or in any other creative activity. So, a daydream rage conceivably could be productive as well, as prelude to the Darwinian fight response. But if repeatedly there is no actual fighting, only expressions of rage, and no apparent way to stop those expressions, then there would seem to be cause to fall into a deep depression. It is fear of that possibility that makes me want to look for other alternatives.
The news I get comes from multiple sources. I have an online subscription to the New York Times and the New Yorker. Sometimes I hear what's on MSNBC as my wife is watching it in the other room. And then I will scan what friends in Facebook have posted about what's happening, sometimes following the links they've included. There is also national news, on occasion, in The Chronicle for Higher Education and Insider Higher Ed. I want to observe that these sources frequently express the anger of others about the news, which sometimes stokes my own anger and at other times confirms that my anger is not an isolated case. But it doesn't help to calm me down. Ask yourself, what would do that? If you have similar multiple sources of news, could you go cold turkey on all of them? What then would take their place in filling out your day?
If I could create a narrative that I find completely absorbing, but keep it entirely in my head and/or make it up as I go along, with no requirement to make it coherent for others to understand, this might do the trick in warding off each daydream rage and keep me totally divorced from sources of news that might rekindle this internal desire to express intense anger.
Is it possible to find such a narrative or is thinking it can be done merely self-delusion? And, if it were possible, would the process be irreversible? (A fantasy one might entertain is to be in some reverie which acts like suspended animation where the person can return to normal if and when our politics has returned from the abyss and functions more normally.) Posing these questions is not difficult. Answering them, however, is beyond me. Instead, I will offer some conjectures.
I would try two paths to be attempted alternatively. Make a lot of progress with one and I can suspend trying the other path for as long as that progress lasts. If only modest progress is being made, then switching to the alternative path would be to see if better progress can be made that way. With either path I want to note that my mental model is to imitate how dementia develops in a patient. Assuming that it happens gradually, with less and less outward orientation over time, as a result of the compelling nature of the inward orientation and the decline in ability in dealing with outward things that happens over time, which presumably accelerates with less practice of this sort.
The first path I will term the productive path - working on creating a lifework that should be useful to others, Lanny Arvan's opus, so to speak. The second path will be the drug-induced path - whether it's becoming a pothead or taking magic mushrooms on a repeated basis or some other such drug would, of course, matter a lot in implementation, but for this discussion it matters not much at all. The underlying question that might drive pursuit along the second path is whether at this late age there are still important parts of my personality that have been underdeveloped and lack expression. Can the drugs bring those out so they flourish fully? And in the case of both paths, it's critical that the end not be visible from the start, so that it is unknown how long it will take to traverse the entire path. With that it is possible to imagine being fully occupied for an extended time while traversing the path.
I actually have a candidate for the productive path, based on some online learning ideas I wrote about years ago in a piece called Dialogic Learning Objects. I have made some of these using Excel for teaching microeconomics. A first step would be to develop a full curriculum this way, place them in some open repository for others to use, and keep on experimenting with form, function, and subject matter to engage me as the author. This would require energy that I don't now seem to possess, but perhaps with some discipline I could learn to put in a full workday making these, while otherwise isolating myself from the rest of the world. Prior to writing this piece I had the thought that others (mainly current college students with a nose for the subject matter) would be making these things and all my job would be is to get their attention for such a project. Based on some recent experience I now think that alternative will be more difficult to achieve. So why not do it all myself, instead?
Would going down the first path count as going off your rocker? The isolating part might. And if the objects produced ultimately get no other use, then continuing to produce them might seem at least a little bit nuts. This gets to where the enjoyment in the creation lies. Is it with knowing there will be ultimate use or does it simply mean pleasing oneself as the author? That question itself might engage me for quite some time.
More people would probably agree that going down the second path does count as going off your rocker. I will note, however, that pot was pretty ubiquitous when I was in college and LSD was rarer but not all that scarce. My experience with these, mainly in college, also some in graduate school, is that I never lost my sense of self or my ability to think rationally and I never had a hallucination - seeing something that wasn't there at all. In other words, it was still me, whether on drugs or not, though some of the senses were amplified. But then it might be that the dosage or frequency of use determined this. Would the second path require more intensive usage? I don't know. I know that it's been a long time for me not having done any of these drugs. (More recently I have had Vicodin, for example when I had a kidney stone that wouldn't pass. My recollection is that it mainly impacted my dreams but didn't do so much for when I was awake. Also, it made me constipated.)
The second path might entail a variety of health risks. Those need to be compared to the risks of the onset of depression as a result of these rather frequent bouts of anger. When I say rational choice in my title, I mean that such a cost-benefit analysis has been done and, at least in some cases, the second path will be preferable to doing nothing, which then might enable the depression. The first path may seem safer, though shutting down communication with friends when you are otherwise not evidently needing to do so might entail its own risks.
At present the entire analysis is hypothetical. I have not decided whether to do this. My personal inertia is fairly great. Doing nothing is still the likely outcome for me. But I think it useful to work through this alternative. And now, having written this piece, maybe I'll feel ready to write the other piece, about fully waging this virtual civil war. In the next week or two I'll see if I'm up to writing that post as well.
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