Maggie's Farm

Reposted and revised -

It's a cliche, isn't it? (I don't know how to put accents on words on this machine.) Lonely and isolated people feel lonelier during holidays.

Let's all think about, and try to include, the lonely this year.

We are told that holidays are supposed to be times of special social fun as well as family time, whether the 4th of July, Thanksgiving (we always try to include some close friends), or Christmas season which many like to use as an excuse for throwing a party for all their 200 closest friends or just a fish supper with a handful of good pals on Christmas Eve after church (with Eggnog of course).

People obviously vary a great deal in the extent of their social connections and (cliche again) one can easily be lonely in a crowd. Many prefer to be isolated but I think there is a basic human need to be "in community," to have human connections of all sorts outside of family. We are tribal creatures. I feel sad for those who lack tribes with whom to touch base and reconnect during the holiday season. That makes it depressing indeed because it's supposed to be about fun fun fun and party party party, right?

(As an ex-drinker who used to have some degree of social insecurities, I have learned how to have a good time at parties anyway. I like to touch base with the people I enjoy, and I like to walk up to strangers and say "Hi. I'm Joy. I don't think we've met." If they don't love me, it's their loss but maybe mine too. Rejection is just part of life, and many people seem to feel that they already know enough people unless you wow them in some way.)

There are many ingredients to constructing a satisfying life, but what a satisfying life means is different for everybody. However, I believe that to be in community, or really a part of multiple communities, is a key component. Some care about it more than others, for certain. With a little luck, the construction begins with an anchor solidly lodged in immediate or extended family, and extends, in separate but often-overlapping circles, out from there depending on what one does or decides to build.

And I do mean "build." Like career, community is never handed to you on a silver platter. I like to connect with interesting, intelligent, positive, and amusing people with interesting and adventurous lives. Who doesn't? On Saturday night, I met a gent, a retired banker, who covered the erection of the Berlin Wall for the New York Times when he was 21 years old. He had taken his grandkids to the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin this summer. I want to include him, and his wife, in one of my circles.

More below -

"As opposition to the war on drugs grows louder, a movement to challenge traditional ways of treating—and doing treatment with—people who have difficulties with drugs is also reaching critical mass."

A Struggle for the Soul of Addiction Treatment

After 30 years of Nixon's politically-motivated War on Drugs - the criminalization of almost all drug use and sale except for alcohol - has failed. Anybody who wants illegal drugs can buy them almost anywhere in the US within 30 minutes. All prohibition does is to raise their prices, to create abundant new criminals, violence, and gangs, and to make drugs more appealing to defiant youth.

Things were better before The War on Drugs. I think that drug addiction is a terrible, often soul - and life-destroying thing, but many drug addicts do quite well in life in places where criminalization is less harsh.

We can't criminalize everything we disapprove of. Help for addicts and abusers is plentiful anywhere for anybody who wants it, for free or close to free. I think every sort of help is fine and not worth fighting over, but I remain an advocate of AA.

This week is the 81st anniversary of the end of Prohibition in the US.

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse with this, but I do hate bad science especially when it is transported into policy and public misinformation.  9 Lies About Fat That Destroyed The World's Health

It never hurts to be skeptical. Recent scientific case in point - this morning's link about the honeybee scam.

"I'll go on a diet after the holidays." Right. Sure you will, just like last year.

Being fat in the US is highly correlated with social class. Like academic degrees and choice of clothing, being heavy is a social marker of sorts for men and women.

In a sexist way, men are given some leeway for a few extra pounds but only if they are wealthy, powerful, or brilliant.

Black women, recent immigrants, working class and lower middle-class, and the poor seem to display the most consistent overweight. (In the midwest US, fat in women seems to be near-universal outside of urban centers. What is that about?) Cause, effect, coincidence, or what? I have no idea what it is all about.

One must accept that, in many ways, it is a great success of the western world - to give everybody the opportunity to be fat if they want to be, even if on welfare. (See  Dramatic Increases in Obesity and Overweight Prevalence and Body
Mass Index among Ethnic-immigrant and Social Class Groups in the United
States, 1976–2008)

There was a time, over 100 years ago, when prosperous men displayed their prosperity in their bulging bellies. Fashion and expectations change. In eastern Europe and Russia, fat was good. It meant you had more potatoes than the next house. In the 1600s, fat was popular in western Europe too - see Rubens. Today, see a WalMart aisle. It used to be difficult to be pudgy and today it is difficult to be fit. Fortunately for us, we do live in a fitness-oriented world despite our (mostly) daily lack of manual labor. Fitness makes everything in life better and longer, reduces indolence, lethargy, and fatigue, and puts old age farther into the future. Nothing but sinful laziness stands in our way.

In the Western world today, with its abundance of cheap and tasty carbs, thin has been in for 100 years and being fat has been a public sign of giving up on an energetic life in many aspects: sex, romance, social attractiveness, sports, fun, agility,  and overall vitality.

In my view, you can be too thin, you can be too heavy, but you can't be too rich.

Rape is forced sexual interaction. Rape is a felony in the US and no 18 year-old does not know that. It's a male crime. Women can seduce, and they often do quite easily because men can become aroused with little effort, but female use of force for sex is a rarity. Why on-campus rape and sexual assault is such a hot topic today I cannot figure out. From my standpoint I do not see why it should matter where you were raped.

Maybe the growth of co-education brought rape out of the shadows and onto campuses. In any event, rape and any other crime are matters for the police no matter where they occur.

College administrations need play no role in that. Colleges can, however, try to do what they used to do in the good old days: require honorable and gentlemanly behavior from the men and honorable and ladylike behavior from the women. Punishment is expulsion. Why does that sound quaint today?

Where UVA Went Wrong: Students Need to See Rape as a Felony, Not Just a Campus Infraction

UVA Should Help Police Catch Alleged Rapists -- Now.

The Right and Campus Rape - Calling in the cops is not enough.

“It is impossible to overstate the growing weirdness of the college sex scene.”

As I have been saying here for years, forget about it. Dietary fat has nothing to do with cardiac disease. Lowering saturated fats does no good. This video h/t SDA

Keeping thin is a good idea, though, for many medical reasons. Yes, people have been conned. Low-fat is foolish, and science and politics is always a mess. Junk science, indeed. Carbs make you fat and harm your arteries, joints, energy, and everything else.

Heart of the Matter Part 1 Dietary Villains from Michael Eades on Vimeo.

Or even for ordinary peoples' interest, there is a book: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon:

 Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis - What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of
human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age. A quote:

 “I think it must be something internal,” my 45-year-old friend S. told me. He described his 20s as exciting and fun (“I was really dumb but thought I knew a lot”) and his 30s as a time of hard work and steady rewards (“I felt on track … Things looked like white picket fences and the American dream”), but said he was bushwhacked in his 40s by an unexpected divorce, unmarried fatherhood, and a heart attack. He said he now experiences difficulty feeling contentment, leading to some of the same self-doubt that I felt: a creeping suspicion that he is fated to be whiny. He also wondered whether his dissatisfaction has been a cause of some of his problems, not just an effect. “Professionally, things looked pretty good,” S. told me. “But maybe something was going on. Something sufficient for my wife to leave. If I did a deep psychological dive, I might say that nothing will ever make me content. Maybe there’s something deeply psychologically wrong with me. I see life as a challenge to overcome rather than an adventure to be enjoyed. I’ve thought of running away to Brazil—changing my name and becoming a hotel clerk. Maybe that will change in my 50s.”

On reading about this piece, I found myself wondering about the premise of the questions in the surveys. A question like "How satisfied are you with your life these days?" seems like a very American question to me. Most people on this planet think about whether they are satisfied by their meal, or whether their god is satisfied with them, and all sorts of other things other than narcissistic or hedonistic satisfaction.

The gigolo industry is gradually coming out of the closet: Male escorts - Is the growing market for male escorts a sign of female sexual liberation or just a re-run of the same old stereotypes?

This has nothing to do with "liberation."  Women have always had healthy sex drives, but just kept quiet about it. The illusion of genteel innocence can be sexy to men. On the other hand, the image of dirty, nasty and accessible femininity can be sexy to men too. Almost anything can be sexy to men.  Despite modern lesbian feminism, men should never underestimate female sexual longings and fantasies. Female fantasies are at least as reckless as those of men.

Women are, perhaps, more discriminating than guys but their needs for sex are abundant, especially in middle age. Perhaps Mother Nature wants us to get knocked up before it's too late.

We posted about Tarte Tatin last week, and there is no need to post more about Apple Pie because everybody makes it the way their Mom did. Here are more favorite apple desserts, all quick and easy to make (except for the Apple Tart), and all as American as Sarah Palin (except for the Apple Tart):

Apple Brown Betty (a classic American colonial dessert - a "betty" is a pudding)

Apple Cobbler (I think it's better with a few cranberries added)

Apple-Cranberry Crisp

Apple Crisp (a Dr. Bliss standard, with ice cream)

Apple Dumpling

Baked Apples

Apple Tart

Apple Pan Dowdy

I also like to make Apple Pancakes for breakfast. I just throw thin slices into the batter. A good pancake combo is some apple and a handful of cranberries. (Every fall I throw a dozen or so bags of cranberries in the freezer. They seem to last 10 months easily without any deterioration.)

Our Editor tells me his family refers to all of these apple desserts generically as "Upside-down Apple Town Dowdy Betty Bow Wow," and reminds our readers that, in Yankeeland, Apple Pie is traditionally for breakfast, not for dessert.

There remains a trail of destroyed lives from that quackery:

The belief that hidden memories can be “recovered” in therapy should have been exorcised years ago, when a rash of false memories dominated the airwaves, tore families apart, and put people on the stand for crimes they didn’t commit. But the mental health establishment does not always learn from its mistakes—and families are still paying the price.

New book from Dr. Allen Francis: Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life

I endorse this book. The mini reviews on Amazon are informative.

A conversation with F. Roger Devlin. One quote:

The liberal system will collapse of its own weight: debt, over-centralization, anti-natalism, all the perverse incentives it creates. As our old sources of national strength quietly dry up, the regime is distracted with exotic trivia like gay marriage and the search for new forms of discrimination to combat. Competition from China alone is going to put an end to this ideological navel-gazing in the not-too-distant future. We must position ourselves to present the public with a credible alternative when the crisis hits. This is my focus, not the shadow-boxing of Republicans vs. Democrats.

It's a difficult subject to study because people are not likely to reveal their more taboo fantasies. Furthermore, in my field we tend to believe that most of our fantasies (sexual and otherwise) are kept safely beneath our own awareness.

As a Psychiatrist, I can tell you that quite normal people commonly contain all sorts of aberrant and "abnormal" fantasies which they would never act on or tell even their spouses about.

For what it's worth,  Sexual fantasies: Are you normal?

Addendum,  There Are Very Few 'Uncommon' Sexual Fantasies:

 The study found that one of the most common sexual fantasies, after the five “typical” ones, is submission, with approximately 65 percent of women and 53 percent of men fantasizing about being submissive. More men than women fantasized about dominating their partners. Still, there remains a distinction between fantasy and reality.  Of the women who fantasized about being dominated, half said that they wouldn’t want to actually be dominated in real life. Reading 50 Shades of Grey, for example, could be an outlet to imagine these fantasies without acting on them.

Some people love horror tales and frightening, high-suspense movies, while some cannot tolerate them.

Every person has his own zone in which fearful things are exciting and interesting.

The scariest costume this Halloween would be to wear an ebola costume. The Psychology of Irrational Fear - Why we're more afraid of sharks than car accidents, and of Ebola than flu

That is, unless you are on a low- or zero-carb weight loss diet.

Sugar Is Not Toxic. Reese's and Snickers are Maggie's officially-endorsed Halloween treats.

American pop-cultural history: How Candy Conquered Halloween

The more confident a person is in his own wisdom or understanding, the more likely he is to be off base. That's the old Dunning-Kruger Effect. 

More info on the topic:  We Are All Confident Idiots.  A quote:

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed.

Governments try to control what kids eat, and they'd like to control what you consume also.

However, government planning rarely can do anything right not only because central planning can never work but because government is plain dumb.

Dietary fats do not cause vascular disease, and dietary fats do not make you fat. From The Last Anti-Fat Crusaders - The low-fat-diet regimen is turning out to be based on bad science, but the USDA has been slow to catch on:

 The most current and rigorous science on saturated fat is moving in the opposite direction from the USDA committee. A landmark meta-analysis of all the available evidence, conducted this year by scientists at Cambridge and Harvard, among others, and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, concluded that saturated fats could not, after all, be said to cause heart disease.

There is reason think so, at least for the moment.

Sad to say, Psychiatric meds cannot really fix anything, just ameliorate and prevent. But that is true of many meds. I do not think that our meds have anything to do with the underlying problems whether in the soul, in the genes, or in the wiring. As I am wont to say, a headache is not an aspirin deficiency disorder.

Our ability to control or prevent psychotic episodes is remarkable, but still the patient is never fully well. Quit the meds, and it can return.

Seems like everybody wants to be a therapist or counselor these days.

Everybody has problems of various degrees, and indeed sometimes it is helpful to talk it over with a trusted person. I have no problem with Biblical counseling. Anybody in a "helping profession" needs to know his limits and needs to be humble about his capacities.

My guess is that biblical counseling as some form of psychotherapy (as opposed to help with relationship to God which I would call Pastoral Counseling) can be most helpful for those whose guilt is honestly come by. By that I mean people who have every reason to feel troubled by guilt and remorse because they have done wrong, have not earned self-respect or earned a feeling of deserving God's love (which is another complicated topic). In other words, non-neurotic guilt.

The Rise of Biblical Counseling

Discussions about free will are too often binary. It does not take a neuroscientist or a philosopher to see that choices of action (or inaction) occur in the context of a complicated web of culture and tradition, peer pressures, character, emotional state, etc.

From Daniel Dennett's  Are we free? Neuroscience gives the wrong answer:

 What a coup it would be if your neuroscience experiment brought about the collapse of several millennia of inconclusive philosophising about free will! A curious fact about these forays into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views worked out by mere philosophers. For instance, all the experiments in the Libet tradition take as their test case of a freely willed decision a trivial choice—between flicking or not flicking your wrist, or pushing the button on the left, not the right—with nothing hinging on which decision you make. Mele aptly likens these situations to being confronted with many identical jars of peanuts on the supermarket shelf and deciding which to reach for. You need no reason to choose the one you choose so you let some unconscious bias direct your hand to a jar—any jar—that is handy. Not an impressive model of a freely willed choice for which somebody might be held responsible. Moreover, as Mele points out, you are directed not to make a reasoned choice, so the fact that you have no clue about the source of your urge is hardly evidence that we, in general, are misled or clueless about how we make our choices.

"My therapist (social worker, Psychologist, whatever) asked me to phone to come in to get a prescription."

"Do you take my insurance?"

"Do you take Medicare?"

"I need help with my Disability application."

"I need a doctor to renew my Adderal."

"I'm sorry, no, but I would be happy to talk with you" to all of the above.

Actually, the title is What You Learn in Your 40s

A fine piece by a feisty woman of the world. A quote:

 There are no grown-ups. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it only once we are the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. Everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

The Triumph of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

I enjoy Schneiderman's posts, but this one is too black-and-white. He was Psychoanalytically-trained, and so was I. I no longer practice classical Psychoanalysis but I do a lot of what I term "Psychoanalytically-informed supportive therapy" which is sort-of what CBT is.

CBT, DBT, whatever. CBT is no big deal. There are always new therapy fads with new names but they all have one of two goals: glueing together someone who has become unglued, or carefully unglueing somebody who is so over-glued that they cannot live. Or something like that.

That's an absurd oversimplification, I know.

Dr. Ekman's work is fascinating, but Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth?

 Ekman’s ideas about why lies are detectable from exterior appearances come by way of Freud, who once wrote, "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." Ekman quoted the line in his first foray into lie detection, a 1969 paper in Psychiatry titled "Nonverbal Leakage and Cues to Deception," written with Wallace V. Friesen, a UCSF research associate at the time.