Suicide prevention: Detecting the risk

Some very interesting and worthwhile reflections by Don Gillmor on his brother’s suicide. I was struck, in particular, by his opening paragraph:

I often wonder what my brother David was thinking at the moment he stepped into the river. Perhaps he was at a point, that December day in 2005, where the psychic pain was like the sound of a waterfall, a roar that eclipsed all rational thought. And it’s the idea of that despair that remains so troubling.

It is easy enough to try to empathize with psychic pain by way of analogy to physical pain, which makes its presence known loudly and with such pomp that it is difficult to ignore, and with such force that the world is drowned out and replaced by the pain of physical suffering, but in my experience it doesn’t work that way. “Rational thought” is not drowned out by a loud noise, by an overpowering tumult of “irrationality” because mental illness supplements or superimposes one “rationality” onto another. The world stays where it is, it just looks different. In the first place, we must risk the possibility that suicidal thoughts are rational thoughts par excellence. It is a frightening suggestion, to be sure, because it places suicide prevention/intervention elsewhere than as an attempt to “reason” with the suicidal individual, which also implies (although I doubt that Mr. Gillmor meant to imply this, but he does so nevertheless) that the problem lies solely with the individual, who cannot ‘adapt’ to the conditions of her (or his) existence.

When Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams at the end of 1899 after a long period of reflection and self-analysis, one of the aims was to situation dream-life into the normal chain of psychic life, a proposition hitherto barely considered. His point was that dreams are rational processes that follow a different logic and that by studying them through his method — which he calls interpretation, but which bares no resemblance to a popular way of understanding interpretation, such as determining by means of an artifice such as a dictionary the meaning of a symbol — one catches a glimpse of normal psychic functioning. Exaggerated as it is in the state of dream, it thereby makes this functioning more visible.

On the other hand, in Freud and Breuer’s early work with Hysterics, they discovered that hysterical symptoms were an expression of conflict. It was no coincidence at this time that hysteria was predominantly associated with women (although there were certainly exceptions, as there continues to be now): women were particularly susceptible to hysteria precisely because of the conditions under which they were born into it, a condition we would call “patriarchy” these days, but which, in the mid to late 19th century was merely the “way things are”. Hysteria was a revolt against these conditions — and I would argue, if I were forced to put it in such rigid terms, a perfectly rational or reasonable revolt — expressed, nay, written on the body, the very surface that patriarchy obsesses so much about. The “irrational” response was here on the side of the state, the accepted medical practices of the time, which prudently locked hysterics up or submitted them to electric shock “therapy” or lobotomized them. Really, this is “irrational” only depending on one’s perspective, but since I don’t lend any validity to a thought-process that advocates destroying the very thing that threatens the status quo in order to maintain the status quo, in order to protect it any any cost, I think “irrational” is perfectly acceptable here.

In my experience, one feels fundamentally and completely alone; but it is a wimpering feeling, not an irrational flood or a torrent. It is a silence, a deep and affecting silence, an insidious silence that you cannot escape, that resonates, among other places, in the voices of those talking to you when they don’t seem to understand what you’re saying — like some kind of supplement to reality that suddenly makes you feel that reality isn’t what it purports to be, like the difference between dream and wakefulness. It is the death of desire. It is not necessarily an inner feeling of worthlessness, but the feeling that the world reflects back to you an image of your being worthless in what you think wouldn’t be so bad if only you could express yourself better. It’s the feeling that other people think you’re worthless because you are not doing a good enough job explaining yourself. It’s not “you”, that supposed “inner” you, no, you’re fine, but your fucking brain isn’t working. It’s probably defective, you probably have brain damage which nobody noticed, so you won’t ever be able to really live up to your potential. You’ll just be trapped in this fucking body, with this fucking broken brain, like you’re suffering from locked-in syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really, that Bell’s new pet project (1 part good intentions; 9 parts marketing?) to raise awareness for mental illness is called “let’s talk”. I don’t have much faith in the intentions of those who prefer to talk when they should be listening. But alas, listening requires attention, charity, a willingness, a responsibility, an openness. It prevents us from a kind of authentic encounter with otherness, much like the simple gesture of sending a text message to fund god-knows-what research into mental health, required for understanding anything at all.

Saving for a rainy day: Keith Chen on language that forecasts weather — and behavior

Keith Chen, Economist:

How are China, Estonia and Germany different from India, Greece and the UK? To an economist, one answer is obvious: savings rates. Germans save 10 percentage points more than the British do (as a fraction of GDP), while Estonians and Chinese save a whopping 20 percentage points more than Greeks and Indians. Economists think a lot about what drives people to save, but many of these international differences remain unexplained. In a recent paper of mine, I find that these countries differ not only in how much their residents save for the future, but also how their native speakers talk about the future.

In late 2011, an idea struck me while reading several papers in psychology that link a person’s language with differences in how they think about space, color, and movement. As a behavioral economist, I am interested in understanding how people make decisions. Could a person’s language subtly affect his or her everyday decisions? In particular, could the way a person’s language marks the future affect their propensity to save for the future?

We should be thinking a lot more about the relationship between language and what I will broadly call experience (under which I subsume behaviour, decisions, meaning, etc).

TTC by the kilometre? Distance-based fares could help pay for expanded transit

The Star details an exceedingly, frustratingly myopic report released by The Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario.

Highlights:

Asking transit users to pay more to expand service is an idea that has received scant attention in recent discussions of how Toronto raises $40 billion to expand public transportation.

This is simply untrue. Transit fares increase almost every year. While this might not be rationalized as money put toward “expansion”, but rather more like ‘maintaining the status quo’, the fact remains that transit users in Toronto are singly asked to foot the bill. The problem with this, however, is that transit is not simply a service for passengers; drivers, cyclists, and the transport of good and services stand to benefit from an effective public transit infrastructure. Transit infrastructure is an extension of the city, not a supplement to it.

“Clearly there’s a lot of political capital at stake here,” said Manahan. “If fiscal responsibility means the province can’t afford to pay for (transit expansion) and we’re going to have to move to a more user-pay kind of a system, that’s the nexus. I think that has to be looked at.”

Clearly! Cleary! They say, about a connection that is anything but clear! A real example of performative speech in action! Except that not paying or transit expansion is hardly an example of “fiscal responsibility”: on the contrary it is completely and utterly fiscally negligent. Full stop. The majority of people keeping the economy moving are those that are paid barely enough to feed themselves, let alone drive to work. And without workers getting to work, there is no work. This might not seem to be such a problem for the Bay street Ponzis or Sunshine-list academics, but they are the minority, I’m sorry to say, and their scheming and pontificating depends on clean offices and toilets, food services, secretaries, grad students, and god knows what else.

They suggest that flat-fare transit encourages urban sprawl by allowing commuters to live farther from their jobs without paying more to commute.

Yes, because commute times have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. One hour or 10 minutes to get to work. It’s exactly the same.

Manahan acknowledged that the construction management groups and unions represented by RCCAO have a vested interest in seeing more transit built. However, he stressed, the report, Financing Roads and Public Transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, is objective and independent.

Yes! It is “objective and independent”! Because I say so!

The sheer lack of imagination and the shameless worship at the alter of Economics is beyond my capacity for empathy. Thanks for listening.

U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service

Speaking of shoddy business practices: Susan P. Crawford gives an interesting rundown on how the state of internet in the U.S. has less to do with so-called “innovation” and more to do with trying to protect its oligarchy from new entrants in the market.

From the article:

Internet access, like electricity, is crucial to the economic and social health of the country. Electricity, however, is provided by largely reliable, taxpayer-supported entities, and no one seems to think the country would be better off if a purely private, wholly deregulated operator were in charge. Such a company might decide to provide service only in New York, Washington and other big cities, at very high rates for those who could afford it, and refuse to serve small towns and less- successful areas.

This is exactly what happened in the 1880s, when privately owned electric companies served big cities and the homes of the rich, and everyone else intermittently if at all. By the mid-1920s, 15 holding companies controlled 85 percent of the nation’s electricity distribution, and the Federal Trade Commission found that the power trusts routinely gouged consumers. In response, thousands of communities formed their own electrical utilities. Now more than 2,000 U.S. communities, including Los Angeles, San Antonio and Seattle provide their own power. And electricity is a regulated public utility.

I’d like to see some similar information for Canada, but I have no doubt that the contents of this article can serve as a model for how Rogers, Bell and Telus operate and stifle communications infrastructure insofar as we are similarly experiencing and have, over the last 20 years or so (beginning in the 90s), experienced deregulation of the previously publicly owned infrastructure.

A Many-Headed Hydra

An article from Ars Technica exploring how a patent troll tried to extort money from small businesses for the use of basic office technologies. Somehow this is completely legal, at least insofar as most of these companies lack the resources to fight these specious claims and those that do bother to fight are rewarded for their legal victory by watching three new shell corporations erected:

Vicinanza soon got in touch with the attorney representing Project Paperless: Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm.

“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

It didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:

“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”

Vicinanza made the unusual choice to fight back against Hill and “Project Paperless”—and actually ended up with a pretty resounding victory. But the Project Paperless patents haven’t gone away. Instead, they’ve been passed on to a network of at least eight different shell companies with six-letter names like AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan. Those entities are now sending out hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to one of those entities, AdzPro.)

Chalk up another victory for the free market. One is tempted to claim that this is a rather more lucrative version of the old, “I am a deposed king from Ethiopia, I need your bank account information to hide my fortune and in exchange I will give you half” scam.

Adult antidepressants suspected in suicides of Canadian kids

Jesse McLean & David Brusser, reporting for The Toronto Star:

In about 35 per cent of the cases reviewed by the Star, kids 12 and younger were reported to have suffered serious side effects, including a 5-year-old girl who suffered seizures while on the antidepressant paroxetine (a generic version of Paxil), and a 6-year-old girl who experienced aggression, panic and personality disorder while on antidepressant Effexor XR.

“I am gobsmacked when I hear that. Why on Earth is a doctor putting a 5- or 6-year-old on a psychotropic drug? They’d better have a good reason,” said Dr. David Juurlink, head of the clinical pharmacology department at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital and a drug safety researcher.

Let me state this categorically: there is no “good reason”. It speaks to an increasing ignorance about mental health and child development, and a naive faith and understanding of the relationship between pharmaceuticals and cure. It is a tragic short-circuit between diagnosing and dealing with ordinary organic illness which does not translate into the treatment of psychic illness.

Amanda Todd’s death was more about mental health than bullying

Diane Weber Bederman, writing for the Toronto Star:

Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old girl from British Columbia, killed herself. She was being bullied. The response from the government is the need for more education regarding bullying. I agree. Take aim at the bullies. Charge them with criminal offences whenever possible. Shame them in public. Involve their parents. Hold them accountable. But my concern remains with the child who has been bullied.

I don’t understand why Amanda’s mental illness has been given such short shrift. She didn’t kill herself because she was being bullied. The vast majority of children who are bullied don’t kill themselves. She killed herself because she was in the middle of a mental health crisis that should have been treated.

Perhaps if the mental illness side of this story has been “given such short shrift” it is because bullying represents a more concrete problem, linked to palpable victims and aggressors. It allows activity to be directed toward something, even if that something does not ultimately result in a real solution to the root problem, which requires not just a flurry of directed activity, but requires that we sit and think hard about what it means to be human and the relationship between the human’s mental life and the world outside.

Riddled with Irregularity

Philip Ball, writing for Prospect Magazine:

There are several schools of thought about how colours get named. “Nativists,” who include Berlin and Kay and also Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, argue that the way in which we attach words to concepts is innately determined by how we perceive the world. As Pinker has put it, “the way we see colours determines how we learn words for them, not vice versa.” In this view, often associated with Noam Chomsky, our perceptual apparatus has evolved to ensure that we make “sensible”—that is, useful—choices of what to label with distinct words: we are hardwired for practical forms of language. “Empiricists,” in contrast, argue that we don’t need this innate programming, just the capacity to learn the conventional (but arbitrary) labels for things we can perceive.

In both cases, the categories of things to name are deemed “obvious”: language just labels them. But the conclusions of Loreto and colleagues fit with a third possibility: the “culturist” view, which says that shared communication is needed to help organise category formation, so that categories and language co-evolve in an interaction between biological predisposition and culture. In other words, the starting point for colour terms is not some inevitably distinct block of the spectrum, but neither do we just divide up the spectrum any old how, because the human eye has different sensitivity to different parts of it. Given this, we have to arrive at some consensus, not just on which label to use, but on what is being labelled.

[…]

[T]here’s nothing in the physiology of vision that would let you guess a priori that red is going to emerge first. And indeed, in the computer simulations there’s initially no well-defined word for red—it is only after some time that a word stably referring to the red part of the spectrum appears, followed later by violet, and so on. Culture—the discourse between agents in the population—is the filter which extracts the labels that are most useful from the biological given of colour vision. So both biology and culture are required to get it right.

Fascinating insights into word formation from the physiology of perception.

Child eating disorders on the rise

CNN:

As a child, Smith (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) formed habits that would eventually lead her to develop both bulimia and anorexia nervosa, both of which she is still dealing with today.

Smith remembers her parents using food in a reward-punishment system. When she was good, she got treats; if she was bad, snacks were forbidden. “I think there was a mixture of … intentionally restricting my food and then going to try to find the food my parents were hiding,” Smith said. “Even in childhood, it became sort of obsessive.”

OK. So I know that CNN is hardly a rigorous source, and, to an extent, I acknowledge the need to accessibly introduce the topic to a wide readership, but the simplicity is appalling:

“There is so much emphasis on obesity,” Zeckhausen said, “that there’s a danger that we are going to produce a lot of anxieties in kids around weight.”

Zeckhausen says that starting overweight kids on diets can trigger an obsession with food that could lead to an eating disorder. She recommends putting overweight children in a sport or becoming more active as a family and providing healthier food options.

There seems to be increasingly less emphasis on the psyche in psychology. I wonder why…

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep

Raymond Tallis, writing for Philosophy Now:

Dreams, of course, have figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness – prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams 458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs. More to the point, they place a philosophically interesting question mark against our confidence in the nature of the world we appear to share with others. Your dreams as you are dreaming them may be as compellingly real as the fact that you are reading this article (and possibly dozing off over it). “There are no certain indications” as Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, “by which I can clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.” The glib response to this – that we should not be looking for mere ‘indications’, because we do not rely on these kinds of things to find out whether we are awake or sleep – doesn’t work; and so we are embarked on an endless, and endlessly fascinating, journey in pursuit of the kind of certainty that only our philosophical selves want, or pretend to want, or need, or seem to need.

Oscar Pistorius makes history but Blade Runner debate goes on

Rosie DiManno, writing for the Toronto Star:

That Pistorius made it to these Games — lawyering up after initially banned by the IAAF in 2007 — is a victory for inclusivity. Except … except … the very essence of the Olympics is about exclusivity, the human form at its most magnificent. What Pistorius presents is an extremely well-tuned and ferociously trained three-quarter body on top of custom-constructed artificial legs. The longer term scenario is rife with ethical problems. Can science make sports, as we know them, unrecognizable some day?

Is Pistorius doing the running or are those scientifically engineered legs doing it?

There are clear disadvantages in his steel blades. He can’t get propulsion jumping out of the blocks and must pull into the race to start. He doesn’t have the side-to-side motion that assists runners in the turn. He obviously doesn’t have ankles to generate power. In his case, that power must come from the hips.

Does he have an aerobic advantage once he stretches out in the race, with his longer stride? Johnson — who knows Pistorius personally and genuinely likes the guy — believes so. Tenets of fair play matter and nothing about the science of Pistorius is irrefutable.

So, who wins Olympic Cycling events? The cyclist or the bicycle?

A Conversation with Robert Bellah

Hans Joas interviews Robert Bellah, Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley about his recent book, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age:

One of the leitmotifs in your book is the formula, “nothing is ever lost.” It keeps reappearing in the text. Could you explain what you mean by that?

It again goes all the way back because the subatomic particles in our body were produced by the Big Bang, so parts of our body are 13.7 billion years old. Every cell in our body is genealogically descended from single cell organisms, which we call familiarly “bacteria.” So even biologically we haven’t lost anything. We’ve developed enormously new complex structures, but on the basis of things that remain fundamental for us all around. This is true culturally too. It’s possible, I argue, that maybe religion emerged before a fully grammatical modern language because bodily communications are so sophisticated among human beings. But whether that’s true or not, the body is central in religion—embodied practice. I belong to a tradition in which the Eucharist is the central act of worship. And that’s a physical practice. You’re partaking of some physical matter, bread and wine, which you believe is the body and blood of Christ. You participate in that, and it says to you, “yes, I am a member of the body of Christ.” The bodily involvement in religion is certainly never going to go away.

Also, religion can never be turned into a set of abstract propositions. Narrative is absolutely central. Religion is full of stories—every religion. You read the Analects of Confucius, and you get one amazing anecdote after another of what Confucius did or what his disciples did and so on. And, of course, the life of the Buddha is extraordinarily rich, and for Christians the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the center of everything. It cracks the skulls of rational thought, but narratively it’s beautifully and profoundly real. You can’t get away from narrative in religion.

The theoretical is also important; we need that because it reminds us of the universal level. I would reject the notion that all religions are basically the same—different paths to the same end. They’re not all the same. And yet, at some level, particularly at the most general theological and ethical level, they do share some profound commitments. At the same time, it’s their very difference that is so important to us because what the Buddhists know and what the Hindus know are things that Christians often don’t fully know. They’re not entirely missing in our tradition, but we are helped to understand more about our own faith if we open ourselves to others. So it’s that sense, neither homogenizing nor denying a profound resonance among the great traditions.

Obviously one has to separate metaphor and analogy from biological fact, but it sounds like a worthwhile read.

Sigmund Freud’s Post-Millenium Playlist

Richard Wood:

He’s the godfather of modern psychology, but what songs would he listen to were he alive today? These are the tunes that Sigmund would have blasting out of his boombox…

Dryden said that the job of a writer is to instruct and delight. Obviously, these are ideals fit for a semi-facetious article on Sigmund Freud’s post-millenium playlist. To that end what follows should be a balance of education re: Freud, the self-contained paradigm of psychology, and jest re: Freud, the short hand for phallic humour and embarrassing slips of the tongue, all via the medium of song.

A solid and eclectic playlist. Click the link for the list.

Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age

Peter Ling, writing for History Today:

If dating pre-dated motoring, public anxiety over sex preceded both. However, there were particular reasons why the turn of the century saw an increase in this concern. In the 1890s, just as courtship was made respectable by being confined to the front parlour, so the sexual subject itself was supposedly made safe by being excluded from public life. The taboo even extended to medical societies who were reluctant to discuss sexual practices and their associated health hazards. However, this ‘conspiracy of silence’, as its critics termed it, was challenged because of a growing professional recognition of the spread of venereal diseases and of the serious health implications. Ostensibly respectable men, it was known, were contracting syphilis from prostitutes and then transmitting the disease to their wives and unborn children. Horror at this ‘syphilis of the innocent’ was intensified by alarmist forecasts of the spread of such infections via the numerous shared facilities of the late nineteenth-century city, such as the omni-present drinking cup and of course, communal toilets. Such fears of contagion were politically useful to all groups seeking to curtail casual social contact. Racial segregation, for example, was advocated on the grounds of the high incidence of contagious diseases among Negroes. When female workers in the Treasury Department in Washington urged racial segregation in federal offices, they reported specifically their fears of infection from shared toilet facilities. Similarly, nativists, calling for immigration restriction, urged tougher health standards and inspection procedures at immigration entry points. Thus at the start of this century the VD threat seemed graver and more pervasive than anyone had previously imagined. Moreover, in a world of contagion, improved transport undermined attempts to quarantine the dangerous classes.

Sex, Diseases and Automobiles. Seems to put into perspective the horrifying grill of the Edsel. It’s like L’Orgine du monde and Pandora’s Box (oddly, no pun intended there) all rolled into one.