Anxiety Amusement(?) Parks! Also: Socrates or Soccerates?

Becoming a member takes very little time and you can do it for only five dang bucks a month. You know you should, you’ve been putting it off for years, just do it now.

Way way back in my college days, I spent a summer in Clinton, Iowa doing summer stock theater. One time, we had the night off and went to a little county fair kind of thing with rides and had a nice time. An actor in the troupe said, “It’s weird, isn’t it? We give people money for tossing us around. That’s what this is.”

That stayed with me ever since and I thought about it again when putting together this week’s episode with Gemma Correll, author/illustrator of Anxietyland, a graphic memoir about her experiences with a pretty severe anxiety disorder.

It’s kind of a put-the-pill-in-the-ice-cream approach to talking about an anxiety that has been pretty debilitating for Gemma. It’s packed with very fun and approachable cartoons that make the pain of the stories go down a little smoother. So for instance, when she talks about taking up heavy alcohol use as a means of self-medication, she anthropomorphizes the bottle of booze and it becomes a loyal friend with absolutely terrible judgement.

In the interview, Gemma tells me about how she just can’t handle elevators. The anxiety, even after many years of pretty successful treatment, just makes her freak out when those doors close. To that end, she’ll take the stairs even if that means many flights. The difference is that she used to say, oh, it’s for exercise but now she freely admits that it’s the anxiety.

I was a little surprised at how straight-forward Gemma is in conversation. Granted, you don’t expect cartoonists to talk like cartoons but I guess I expected something more comically extroverted than what I got. But I actually appreciate that. Gemma’s work reflects the inner life she has, a comic exploration of what is a wacky condition even though it’s also a completely serious one.

We also talk about moving to America (it seemed like a good idea at the time) and how if you have pugs, as she and her husband do, it’s kind of impossible to take life too seriously. And yes, we also talks about the therapist Gemma saw who was way into clowns, had an office festooned with clowns, and had a picture that may have been the therapist herself dressed up as a clown. That was a one-visit relationship.

Nordic walking!

Nordic walking is when you use those poles, one in each hand, so you get more of a full body workout than just walking, I guess, non-Nordicly. Researchers rounded up 64 adults for some research.

Researchers found that a supervised 10-week program significantly reduced symptoms of depression in adults. Participants with severe depression improved faster and more strongly during the first five weeks than those with moderate depression.

By the end of the study, between 35% and 53.6% of walkers had reached remission, meaning their symptoms had dropped below the threshold for clinical depression. Even better, participants could reap the benefits of the activity without any injuries or health problems during the program.

A brain with inflammation!

Okay, yeah, no one ever thought such a thing was great but new research analysis points to the growing body of evidence that inflammation is a major player in depression. Sure, go to therapy, explore your issues, but part of it might be your, I guess, puffy brain. Experts analyzed 101 studies of more than 4700 survivors of encephalitis.

The key findings were:

Around 27% of survivors experienced depression or behavioural problems

Around 1 in 5 experienced anxiety, disinhibition, or emotional instability even months or years after their illness

These mental health effects were just as common as neurological complications such as memory loss or seizures

Both infectious and autoimmune forms of encephalitis showed similar rates of psychiatric problems, though changes in mood were more frequent after infections

Significantly, few studies had offered patients consistent mental health follow-up, and methods for measuring outcomes varied widely, showing the need for standardised approaches.

This guy is going to walk all over Minnesota.

This guy is going to skateboard across the country.

He wanted to find outlet where he could help others reach out when they have issues with mental health. He thought about skateboarding the Appalachian Trail, but the logistics of that journey were difficult.

That’s when the idea of skateboarding across the country came to mind.

Just in time (a little late, actually) for World Cup, via kottke.

“Hegel is arguing that reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant — via the categorical imperative — is holding that ontologically, it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.”

If we book her, she will come!

We have to imagine that the life of an NPR White House Correspondent does not consistently feel relaxed, homey, sentimental, and warm. But you know what does? Field of Dreams, the 1989 Kevin Costner movie about an Iowa farmer with a field overrun by baseball ghosts. Danielle Kurtzleben, a White House Correspondent for NPR, is from Titonka, Iowa (population 491) and has probably seen the movie eleventy squillion times. She can quote large portions of the dialogue and proved it in our interview by reciting James Earl Jones’ “They will come” monologue in her most sonorous NPR voice. You’ll be asleep soon. By the way, do baseball ghosts sleep? Are there bunk beds out in the corn fields? Am I overthinking this?