Maggie's Farm

Emerson College's Insurer Will Cover Transgender Student's Transition Surgery.

These people who seem to believe they are the spawn of aliens, animals inside a human body, boys who believe they are girls, and all the other sorts of silly fantasy lives that people put on display today, are people with only the slightest grip on reality.

I would never claim that we shrinks and psychoanalysts have the power to change such unfortunate fantasies/delusions, but seeing other physicians collude with such fantasies disturbs me more than a little bit.

Many rightly criticize Psychiatry for over-pathologizing human variation, but normalizing total weirdness is another matter. Strange is strange, and nobody should be afraid to say so in fear of the Thought Police.

He has a new book out, about what he learned from the Harvard lifetime study. He is delightful. The podcast is here.

Why we have our best ideas in the shower: The science of creativity.

I always figured that it's because there were no distractions, same as driving alone with the radio off (which I recommend).

I entirely agree with the comment:

Wakes and funerals already exist to serve the immediate needs for mourning and recognition of the loss. Participation in normalizing rituals is probably far more helpful than therapy in the immediate aftermath of a such a loss.

We all agree that human monogamy is not "natural" in any animal sense. It's a stretch.  If marriage matters to you, and you've been married over a year or ten, this could a pretty useful talk, and takes the topic further and more intelligently than the supermarket magazines ever will.

Just one of the secrets seems to be experiencing one's spouse in different situations and seeing them being effective or impressive in different ways - socially, professionally, intellectually, adventurously, morally, humorously, physically, talent-gifted, etc. We can never know everything about another person and it is much easier to become familiar with a spouse's flaws than with their varied strengths, many of which may be hidden from us.

For one example, when on occasion I have barged into my husband when he is deep in prayer, I do see him with new eyes. For another, when I see him regaling people with wacky stories at a party.

The secrets to desire in a long-term relationship:

As the man says, "their definitions expel me and, in fact, most mental health professionals."

I like to claim that the DSM is an Obsessional Disorder.

Daniel Greenfield asks the question Who Needs The Family?

That's easy for me to answer: I do, and I always did. A person without family, tribe, and community is a person adrift, a lone wolf, a lost soul. Governments have nothing to do with it. He says of socialist schemes:

    The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other, parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is also falling apart.

    A building cannot be built on nothing...

At best, the merger of
romantic love and marriage is relatively recent and relatively localized.

We have posted in the past about the history of romance being converted into covenant marriage. Marriage has always been in transition, and, for better or worse, it is in transition now.

As I have said countless times here, I don't know how people can run an orderly, complicated, and productive life without a committed partner, much less create a family with all of the things family entails - finances, traditions, social life, stability, values and religion, disciplines, etc. The very wealthy always could do that, but not otherwise.

I never forget the story of how Thomas Lincoln (Abe's father, a prosperous and prominent Kentucky farmer and real-estate investor at the time) hopped on his wagon and drove to the nearest city, leaving the kids in charge of themselves, to quickly fetch a new wife after Nancy died. I believe he fetched the first widow he could find, Sarah.

Today, he would be arrested for leaving the kids on their own.

I have made the case here, in the past, that PTSD is not so much a disease or "disorder," but a normal variant in response to disturbing events. The mental health field, these days, is pathologizing everything and everybody.

I have seen persistent PTSD complaints in all sorts of people, far more civilians than military. Life affects us deeply, and can shatter us, unless we are heavily armored or lacking in emotional response. I have seen them in sudden announcements to divorce, spousal death, deaths of a child, job loss, fatal car crashes, young police officers, and witnesses to the 9-11 jumpers.

We Westerners live in a mostly safe world, insulated from so much of the pain, distress, and horror which were routine in past generations. An ordinary snowfall, or a loss of electric power, is now a really big deal, a tragedy. We are so safe and comfortable that we have lost the tools to cope with tough situations, scenes of horror, and painful memories. These things do, indeed, change us. Comfort and safety have made us innocent, in a way. Police and doctors deal with these things routinely, and develop thick skins, professional distance.

I read this today: Government Can Do More to Treat Veterans with PTSD. The number of returning veterans afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has reached crisis proportions.

By government, they mean the VA. "Qualifying" for disability is a terrible idea. Getting into life is the best plan, whether one wants to or not. No matter what happens, it's best to buck up and get on with it.

There is no treatment, no cure, for being human. There is no cure for PTSD complaints other than the old-fashioned "tincture of time." Entrepreneurs out there sell cures which are snake oil. All we Psychiatrists really have to offer these people is care, emotional support, help with substance abuse, and, if they wish, emotion-blunting medicines. There is no magic cure for life's horrors and misfortunes other than alcohol and drugs, and they tend to make things worse in the end.

Some psychoanalysts like Kohut and Kernberg have theoretical ideas about it. Sometimes I think that the word, and whatever idea exists behind the idea, is a sociocultural construct more than anything else.

That is not to say that we are not individuals with our own personality tendencies.

Here's an essay: The Self in Self-Help - We have no idea what a self is. So how can we fix it?

As I have often said, there is no useful general definition of happiness. Unhappiness and misery are much more easily defined.

Do all people need a sense of mission or purpose to be "happy" - other than the basic mission of survival and comfort? I very much doubt it. The wonderful psychiatrist Victor Frankl was indeed sustained by his search for meaning in the camps, but that is far from ordinary life and he was far from an ordinary man.

Here's Emily Esfahani Smith's There's More to Life Than Being Happy. I am not sure what I think about that report.

For me, contentment is a good, loyal husband, a good love life, good work, enjoyable if sometimes difficult kids, good friends and good acquaintances, exciting hobbies and sports, integrity and a clean conscience, a dog, a relationship with God, and books to read. Changing the world is a fool's errand for crazy people and narcissists who do not want to focus on the substance of their own brief lives. Can't do without them, though. Part of the fabric.

Mass killings, and serial killings, are in decline. Murder overall, in fact, is in decline except for in some (Blue) cities like Chicago and Detroit which nobody seems to get excited about very much. 

Everybody is seeking scapegoats for mass killing, especially when it's white suburban kids instead of the slow mass murder of inner city black kids, and everybody hops onto the hobby horse they want to ride. Movies and video games, firearms, bomb ingredients, the mentally ill, etc.

The problem is that these mass events are so rare as to be utterly upredictable. We cannot put an armed guard at the door of every classroom. And trust me, you cannot lock up, indefinitely, every paranoid or angry person who has thoughts of killing people. You'd have to lock up half the commenters at Daily Kos. Thoughts about killing, like thoughts of suicide, are very common.

Furthermore, mass killers like Timothy McVeigh and serial killers like Ted Bundy were not even mentally ill in any usual sense. Evil, not ill. Not to mention Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer. A military Psychiatrist, no less (and a presumed Jihadist). Or the 9-11 killers.

Terrible events are black swans and probably not preventable. Dangerous people rarely seek help with their problems anyway, and criminals ignore laws. Nobody who is hell-bent on mass killing is likely to tell anyone.

From the NYT yesterday,  Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say.

Here is Top 10 Myths About Mass Shootings

As I have mentioned here before, I don't know how it is possible to run a complex household effectively without two or more adults in it. We know that marriage has seen a marked decline in the lower socioeconomic strata, thus contributing to a vicious circle of poverty, malfunction and dependency. From what I have read, marriage is still going strong in the middle and upper-middle strata. I suspect that is because middle class people desire a coherent, orderly, busy life which is enriching to everybody in the family - and one reason why divorce is so traumatic: it's not just about money, it's about structure.

From Exodus from Marriage:

“The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent and seems unique,” the distinguished historian Lawrence Stone said a few years ago. “At no time in history, with the possible exception of Imperial Rome, has the institution of marriage been more problematic than it is today.”

You know you are reaching true adulthood when you read articles about The Kids These Days and end up grimacing. We have posted about the hooking-up culture in the past, about "friends with benefits," and about how the youth are mating randomly and promiscuously like rabbits in the woods and yet are spared the reputational problem which would have occurred when I was 20.

The example from The New York Times is about girls: The End of Courtship?

Voyeurism is fun, but tacky. From what I see in life, which is quite a lot, it seems to me that these stories are the exception rather than the rule. From what I see, the average middle-class American girl avoids casual sexual encounters and wants to be treated respectfully if not lovingly. There is a bell curve, and the left tail of the curve is sociopathic.

So much for the girls. For the 20's guys, there is no doubt that it has gotten very easy to get lucky in the bars these days, if that is how one chooses to live. The modern trends of feminism are great for the guys: they get much more sex and sexual variety without committment, and the women make their own money. Unless you feel that relationships are a serious matter and that using others is a form of low life, that is.

Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a much-commented-about essay (about herself, of course, in whom she seems excessively interested) last week, Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life.

There are some grim aspects to her report from the front lines of the follow-your-impulses approach to life, but, in the end, I have to comment that I think it's just great that, in America, there is the freedom and opportunity to construct a life any way one chooses.

As long as I do not have to end up supporting it, that is. Despite all of her opportunities, I fear we all may end up supporting her in her old age, if she achieves it. True bohemians are supposed to die young-ish, of TB, cirrhosis, drug overdose, AIDS, broken heart, or other such romantic maladies:

I have written about the illusion of a state of Happiness in the past here. In doing so, I have always pointed out that it's a term without a meaningful definition. However, it has always seemed to me that happiness implies, for some, an imaginary infantile state in which all wants and needs are met rather than the state of stress, difficulty, and challenge which many of us seek.

For a simple example, I have a friend who never feels "happier" than when struggling for hours in a fruitless effort to master a Chopin piano piece.

Transient joys and delights certainly occur, as can periods of contentment with their implication of acceptance of, or resignation to, the limits of reality.

Leszek Kołakowski poses the question Is God Happy? (h/t Althouse) as a way to reflecting about the human capacity for happiness. He says:

Happiness is something we can imagine but not experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and suffering of the past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but it has never been seen. It has never been seen.

Kolakowski clearly adopts the definition of happiness to which I alluded earlier, ie, the serene absence of any disturbing thoughts or feelings. Sounds more like a mindless beach vacation to me than something anybody would aspire to for more than a few days. Sounds like heroin.

Regarding the question re God's happiness, it's an absurd question. God is not human.

Readers know my interest in the workings of the human conscience and the structures of human morals. The (our) devils are relentless in pursuit of the low-life, the dark side.

Hawkins at Pajamas: Here ... are a few signposts that will alert you to stop, pause, and take stock to make sure you’re not on that gentle slope.

How's that for a catchy end-of-holiday-season header? (Metazoans is the new name for the Animalia Kingdom - those creatures with differentiated tissues like sponges, earthworms, and people.)

I have been attempting to familiarize myself a little with the rapidly-expanding science of Epigenetics lately. When I took pre-med Genetics, it was a marginal topic. Now that the fundamental workings of DNA are fairly well understood, epigenetics has become a hot field ("epi" because it's the things - heritable things - that effect cell-differentiation, growth and development, etc. on top of the basic DNA template, but are affected by the environment). Shades of Lamarck.

Epigenetics is interesting partly because it's one of the ways that a metazoan species can be affected by environmental influences during growth and development. Molecular tools for shaping the final product. The complexity of metazoans (as contrasted with fungi, bacteria, and protozoans, for example) requires complex epigenetic processes. Heritable things which switch on or switch off gene expression.

Here's the simplest short piece I could find: What Is Epigenetics? Easy to follow if you ever took intro Bio.

The wiki entry is actually a good intro, but tough sledding unless you had a decent college education or are a bio reader.

Over the next few decades, we can expect interesting new discoveries about how epigenetic processes affect human psychology.

I have spared our readers all of the more technical and experimental things I've been reading. If I can interest one person in the topic, great.

I've been preaching this since long before Gary Taubes' books came out. That's because I have a colleague who studies the physiology of insulin. From what I know, Taubes is right. A quote re Dietary Incorrectness at Powerline:

Taubes disputes the connection between dietary fat and high cholesterol. He challenges the thesis that dietary fat is detrimental to our health. He rejects a balanced diet. He advocates a high-fat diet. He opposes dieting. He doesn’t object to exercise, but he asserts that it makes you hungry. It’s almost funny. He is the dietary equivalent of politically incorrect.

Taubes is a serious science reporter, not a crank. As I say here ad nauseum, and as Taubes explains, if you want to get trim, quit the carbs. None. That includes fruit, which isn't any good for you anyway. It's just sugar. As the man says, after 14 days off all carbs they will not appeal to you so much anymore. (There is an addiction-like quality to carbs.) And if you want to be fit, youthful, sexy, intelligent, and vigorous, then exercise or do physical work too. If you want to lower your triglycerides, get better genes or take Lipitor.

It's not complicated. It's a free country, food is cheap and exercise is free. Do what you want to achieve the goals you desire. Don't tell me it's hard to do, because everything in life is hard to do except eating, surfing the net, and watching TV.

They feel they must for PR, grandstanding, or as a power grab, but it won't matter in the end. From my readings about the Newtown nightmare, the killer was a distinctly odd, fairly bright but low-functioning kid, maybe autism spectrum or childhood schizophrenia spectrum, schizoid, or something like that. A harmless oddball. Some colleagues of mine have suspected a psychotic break, but I doubt it. Wired a bit wrong from the beginning I suspect, but this is not uncommon at all. Everybody has a loose wire and it's a matter of degree.

As the over-stressed parents of such kids learn, there are no cures for these problems. Often, no effective treatments either other than zombifying them with antipsychotic medicines. Sometimes a residential placement with lots of support can be useful but not curative in any way - and would need to be voluntarily undertaken. The killer's family had plenty of money, access to all of the resources that a wealthy family in wealthy and treatment-rich Connecticut and his devoted mother could provide, but nothing much could be done because there was little to do.

Not only is help limited in power, the humbling fact is that mental health professionals are essentially unable to predict either violent, homicidal or suicidal behavior except in the most acute situations. We try, often over-react, but these are black swan events which are unpredictable by definition. We cannot lock up every unusual, isolated kid who enjoys war games any more than we can lock up every angst-ridden teen with thoughts of suicide. And if we could, for how long? Kellerman writes about deinstitutionalization but that's not what this is about. Angry and unhappy people are everywhere.

Furthermore, many if not most people who could use a hand from mental health professionals have little interest in pursuing that. Interestingly, the ACLU recently blocked a Connecticut law which would have made outpatient treatment mandatory for some patients. Not that mandatory "treatment" can do much good. That's why people needing help slip through the cracks: they don't want it.

The sanest, least hysterical essay I have read on the topic is from Megan McArdle: There's Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre. One quote from her excellent piece:

Unlike many libertarians, I am fine with a ban on automatic weapons. But no need to hop over to Change.org to start a petition to ban them; machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1934, and since the 1980s, it has been illegal to manufacture and sell any automatic weapon. Apparently unbeknownst to Twitter, we have also already made it illegal for the mentally ill to buy or have guns, and have background checks aimed at prevented just that.

But beyond the strange calls to make serial killers pray more and outlaw things that are already illegal, the most interesting thing is how generic they were. As soon as Newtown happened, people reached into a mental basket already full of "ways to stop school shootings" and pulled out a few of their favorite items. They did not stop to find out whether those causes had actually obtained in this case.

It's the age-old "something must be done," but, as Megan points out, bad cases make bad law. The only consoling fact is that mass murder has been declining in the US since 1929. Guns have little to do with it. People determined to wreak havoc can do it in many sorts of ways, from making bombs to driving cars or airplanes into buildings, and do so across the world. The US has no monopoly on killing sprees, contra Michael Moore. If one looks around the world, it can seem as if civil behavior, as Americans understand it, is the abnormal.

Gun laws? Bomb laws? Other criminal laws? Evil-doers ignore and bypass laws while honest people end up having their freedoms limited by them. Naturally, when dramatic events happen in the world - 9/11, crash of housing bubble, mass murders, storms, etc., the pols and "advocates" and rent-seekers jump avidly onto their favorite hobby-horses and ride them for all it's worth for their own reasons. People want to assign blame on anything, it seems, other than, in this case, the seemingly demonic perpetrator.

As cold as it may sound today, crushing tragedy is part of the human condition and has always been. No "mental health system" or politician or policy will change that unless we all decide to live in a prison camp. We do believe in being armed, though, to minimize the odds of becoming a victim. That's why we have lightning rods on our roof, too.

In the meantime, we all mentally re-live the nightmare in our minds and wish it to be undone, to go away, to not be real, to be impossible.

Latest update: Killer's mom was attempting to get him committed to hospital

I am pleased that we posted on Father Rohr this morning. I have no interest in posting on the topic of dramatic mass murders on this site, because I have already said all I have to say about it already on previous postings.

Dramatic or undramatic, evil is pervasive. There is not a single human heart without some. We read about guns, mental illness, government policy, a bad culture, inattentive parents and others, etc. These are all distractions. The relevant topic is human evil in all of its forms. We do not like to think about that.

Believe it or not, I saw a headline saying "Gun kills 26 in Connecticut."

A planet without humans would be a planet without good and evil. The utopian narrative goes something like this: "If everybody is properly served, controlled, treated, drugged,  provided for, etc etc, horrible things might be eliminated from the world." That thought is truly crazy and is the reason we have trademarked the term "psycho-utopianism" on this website.

A simple jump rope is possibly the best cardio exercise device one can own. It is also the cheapest and most portable.

Jumping rope will burn also 11 calories per minute (more than anything else) while offering almost total body fitness. If you have the fitness and endurance to jump rope for half an hour, you can burn off one candy bar or one donut but few people could go that long even if they wanted to. At a very fast pace, maybe a donut in less than half an hour. However, nobody I've seen can go that long.

At my gym, it's mainly men who jump. Amazon has all sorts of jump ropes. Many people like the beaded ones and the weighted ones.

Done properly on the toes, it's a low-impact exercise. Most people seem to jump in 30-second to three- or six- minute stints. It is demanding for people over 25.

 Here's 3 Benefits of Jump Rope Fitness

10-Minute Jump Rope Cardio Workout

Jumping rope for boxers

If you google jump rope exercise you will find hundreds of articles about technique and the benefits.

Dr. Helen discusses the recovering adult teenager Tucker Max: American Immaturity: How We Grow Up After We Grow Old.

Her post reads a bit like an old fogey complaining about "these kids today," but she is talking about adult-aged kids, not real teenagers. Some of the comments are interesting. I am convinced that difficult realities and challenges are what creates adults.

Here.

I learned a lot about ADD and ADHD at a recent conference. I am slowly coming around to thinking that it's something worth looking for and paying attention to. There are a number of complicated issues surrounding the diagnosis which I will not get into now.