Author: Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

Jeffrey Rubin grew up in Brooklyn and received his PhD from the University of Minnesota. In his earlier life, he worked in clinical settings, schools, and a juvenile correctional facility. More recently, he authored three novels, A Hero Grows in Brooklyn, Fights in the Streets, Tears in the Sand, and Love, Sex, and Respect (information about these novels can be found at http://www.frominsultstorespect.com/novels/). Currently, he writes a blog titled “From Insults to Respect” that features suggestions for working through conflict, dealing with anger, and supporting respectful relationships.

Categories
Bob Dylan crying grieving

Bob Dylan’s “Baby, Stop Crying”

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today, we discuss Bob Dylan’s song, “Baby, Stop Crying.”

According to Wikipedia, it was released in the summer of 1978 as a single and in a longer album version on Street Legal. The song charted at #13 in the UK and was a top-ten song in much of Europe, although it failed to chart in the United States. It features a strong saxophone solo, and a trio of female backup singers, providing a delightful counterpoint to Dylan’s raspy vocal performance.

For our purpose, the song provides excellent emotional jumping off points to discuss crying, and how to deal with it in a respectful manner. The first lines tell us,

You been down to the bottom with a bad man, babeBut you’re back where you belong
Go get me my pistol, babeHoney, I’d ain’t tell right from wrong
Baby, please stop crying, stop crying, stop cryingBaby, please stop crying, stop crying, stop cryingBaby, please stop crying

Here, as I interpret the song, the narrator is in a relationship with a woman. He calls her “babe” and “honey,” indicating affectionate feelings. He sees she has been brought to tears as a result of a relationship with a “bad” man. Although the man is labeled “bad,” the narrator hastens to say he’s not someone who really can tell right from wrong.

I’m not sure why the narrator suddenly is asking for the woman to get his pistol, but Dylan tends to throw into his songs a few inscrutable lyrics. My three guesses of what he is seeking to imply are: it’s meant to heighten the drama of the storyline; that he so can’t stand her crying he’s getting ready to shoot her; or he’s going to shoot the guy who has upset her. In any case, the narrator seeks to reassure his honey that she is now in a place where she belongs. At the same time, he’s pleading with her to please stop crying. Hmmm.

The next set of lines are,

You know, I know, the sun will always shineBut baby, please stop crying ’cause it’s tearing up my mind
Go down to the river, babeHoney, I will meet you there
Go down to the river, babeHoney, I will pay your fare
Baby, please stop crying, stop crying, stop cryingBaby, please stop crying, stop crying, stop cryingBaby, please stop cryingYou know, I know, the sun will always shineBut baby, please stop crying ’cause it’s tearing up my mind
Here, the narrator appears to be trying to cheer up the woman, noting the sun always
shines and he offers to pay for a trip to go down to the river. In literature, references to rivers often suggest a place that can take you to freedom, as is the case for Mark Twain’s story about Huck Finn and his friend Jim who is seeking to escape slavery.
Such efforts to cheer someone up often is well intentioned, but is it always wise? One of my readers, Sonia Perez, when I discussed a similar topic about crying a few years back, wrote:

“The worst thing people do is to try to cheer you up! When we are hurting, sad, lonely etc and we are crying all we need is someone that allows us to have our feelings and show they care…. I need to express what I am experiencing. I don’t need someone to determine when I have cried enough.”
In Bob’s song, the next few lines attempt to capture some of what Sonia is driving at.

If you’re looking for assistance, babeOr if you just want some company
Or if you just want a friend you can talk toHoney, call me and see about me
But then, the narrator again pleads with the woman to please stop crying. I understand that many folks in our society feel uncomfortable when they see someone they care about crying. In our society the pharmaceutical industry is spending millions to convince people that to be sad is some pathological condition requiring medication. One of my readers, Luc Thibaud, expressed some views that sit more comfortably in my heart:

“It’s OK baby, cry if that cry is in you.
Cry as long as you need to.
I won’t interrupt you; As you cry, I cry with you.
Crying won’t hurt, not crying will.
Your eyes are sore, your throat is so full of tears and you choke.
Take your time, blow your nose.
Your tears are holy and magic.
I love you and I understand you perfectly.”
The next several lines of Dylan’s song continue with the narrator pleading for his baby to stop crying and reminding her that the sun will always shine; and then he goes on to say,

You been hurt so many timesAnd I know what you’re thinking of
Well, I don’t have to be no doctor, babeTo see that you’re madly in love
Here, we see what this incident of deep sadness is about, unrequited love. It’s easy for most of us to sympathize with someone going through such an experience. The song’s narrator has it in his heart to do just that, but his honey’s crying is tearing up his mind.

For me, it feels natural to remain present and to communicate that I care when someone I care about is crying. But the fact is, some good, well meaning people find crying begins to wear on their nerves to such an extent that they just can’t bear it any longer. If you are in a relationship with someone and you find that at some point you can’t stand the crying any more, how best to respectfully handle this?

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

If it was me, I don’t think I would ask her or him to please stop crying. What about saying, instead, something like, “I’m going to take a walk for a few minutes to deal with some feelings that are coming up within me regarding what you are going through.” Then, just before leaving, going over to the person crying, and give a tender kiss on the cheek and a gentle loving touch on the back of the shoulder.

I wonder how others feel about this. I invite your thoughts and expressions of your emotional reactions.

My Best,

Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Depression Excercise and depression Music Therapy Treatments for Depression

Got Blues, Get Rhythm

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

This week, while thinking about what I might write for my next post, I happened to hear an excellent version of “Get Rhythm” by the rhythm and blues band, NRBQ. The song, written and first performed by Johnny Cash, can set your feet kicking up a storm. The lyrics begin,

Hey, get rhythm when you get the bluesCome on, get rhythm when you get the bluesGet a rock and roll feeling in your bonesPut taps on your toes and get goneGet rhythm when you get the blues

The song goes on from here to tell us that to get rhythm when you have the blues doesn’t cost much and yet “does a million dollars worth of good for you.” This concept particularly caught my attention because just a day before, I had read an article titled, “Exercise Leads to Best Outcomes for Depression.” A summary of the study’s findings stated,

A massive new meta-analysis has found that exercise through walking or jogging is better than antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy for treating depression. Antidepressants by themselves were the worst treatment for depression, with effectiveness that overlapped with placebo.

And earlier, I read an article on music therapy that indicates,

This comprehensive summary of SRs [systematic reviews] demonstrated that MT [music therapy] treatment improved the following: global and social functioning in schizophrenia and/or serious mental disorders, gait and related activities in Parkinson’s disease, depressive symptoms, and sleep quality. MT may have the potential for improving other diseases, but there is not enough evidence at present. Most importantly, no specific adverse effect or harmful phenomenon occurred in any of the studies, and MT was well tolerated by almost all patients.

A more recent study focuses specifically on depression:

Individual music therapy combined with standard care is effective for depression among working-age people with depression. The results of this study along with the previous research indicate that music therapy with its specific qualities is a valuable enhancement to established treatment practices.

In past blog posts, I’ve written about the nature of depression (see HERE) and explained that the way we handle such experiences can enhance the respect we have for ourselves and others have for us. In other posts I questioned the effectiveness of antidepressant treatment while expressing concerns about its well documented negative health consequences (see HERE). In contrast to the drug treatment approach, exercise actually enhances physical health while improving a person’s experience of depression. As a result of these thoughts that flowed from listening to “Get Rhythm”, it occurred to me that I have never discussed the value of dance for helping someone struggling with depression. So, here goes.

How Can Dancing be Helpful?

First, if limited money is an issue for you, note that dancing can be done for free. Just put on some music and dance.

Here’s a simple routine that can be fun and provide enough exercise to enhance your health. Play a rhythmic song and vigorously dance to it. After the song, take a break by doing a relaxing task, like reading part of an article or doing some meal preparation. After five minutes of catching your breath, put on another song and dance again. Do this ten times, and you have an excellent healthy fun workout.

To enhance this workout, if you are experiencing some strong negative feelings on the day of your dance workout, while dancing, allow yourself to deeply feel those feelings. Let your dance movements help you to express and release all of the negative energy.

Now, some people are experiencing depression because they are lonely. They might be stuck on how to go about meeting new people. Taking a dance class might be the perfect solution. Others who enjoy dancing will be there. Sharing this common interest while engaging in the physicality of dancing can be a very healthy way to deal with loneliness.

Finally, finding a music therapist is another option. Dancing is just a part of this treatment, but discussions of the poetry of songs, along with the feelings that music brings to the surface, can be a safe and helpful way to deal with troubling experiences.

Well, those are some of my thoughts for this week. Until next time, if you get the blues, get rhythm,

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Depression

Is Depression Really So Bad?

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. As this post’s title indicates, today I take up the question, “Is depression really so bad?” In doing so, I imagine many will conclude I must be out of my head or a complete numbskull. My challenging task for today is to see if I can convert such insults to at least a modest degree of respect.

As a start, let me be clear that I recognize and empathize with what I imagine the insulters’ position is likely to be:

Depression is every bit as bad as a majority of folks think it is, and even a whole bunch worse. Depression, these people are likely to point out, leads to some folks ending up committing suicide, or attempting it. Other sufferers of depression will end up being hospitalized at great societal cost, including costs to U.S. employers that has been estimated at $187.8 billion a year. This includes $134 billion in health care (health and mental health combined), $20.9 billion in absenteeism, and $32.9 billion in lost productivity. Finally, the anguish that comes from depression is nothing to make light of.

My case about the degree of badness of depression is worth considering is three pronged: 1. Repeatedly, the evidence indicates people who take antidepressants leads to more suicides and hospitalizations. 2. The available evidence indicates the consequences of using the arguments about suicide and hospitalization to convince people to take antidepressants leads to worse long term suffering of those folks experiencing depression. 3. When the nature of depression is clearly understood as a natural, potentially healthy process for dealing with stressful situations, it leads to less harm than believing that it really is so bad.

Evidence that Suicides and Hospitalizations Increase with Antidepressant Treatment

Convincing folks that depression is so serious because some people who experience it end up committing suicide or are hospitalized for suicidal thoughts is counterproductive. People who become convinced by this type of argument are more likely to get treatment with so called antidepressants when they find themselves becoming depressed. Moreover, such people, using the same argument will urge others who are depressed to get such treatment. This would be fine if the treatment sought would be just counseling/psychotherapy, but in modern countries, such as the United States and Great Britain, the first-line treatment is either antidepressant medication or a combination of antidepressant medication plus psychotherapy.

Despite this, according to a November 15, 2023 study appearing in Psychological Medicine by Harvard University researcher Nur Hani Zainal, such approaches can have dire consequences. Treatments that included antidepressant medications, either as a stand alone treatment, or in combination with psychotherapy, had significantly worse outcomes than psychotherapy alone for suicide deaths, suicide attempts, psychiatric emergency department visits, and psychiatric hospitalizations. This is a consistent finding that included 34 random controlled trials.

More specifically, the researcher wrote:

Forty-seven out of 1273 (3.7%) in the combined treatment arm and 24 out of 1240 (1.9%) in the psychotherapy-only arm had suicide attempts and other serious psychiatric adverse events, and this difference was statistically significant (OR 1.96 [1.20–3.20], p = 0.012)…

Thirty-one out of 1030 (3.0%) in the psychotherapy-only arm, and 67 out of 1192 (5.6%) in the ADM [antidepressant medication]-arm had suicide attempts and other serious psychiatric adverse events. This difference was statistically significant.

This analysis, along with others, suggests regardless of the treatment, over 94% of those going for treatment are unlikely to end up having one of the very serious consequences of depression. Framing the need for treatment by raising the prospect that very serious consequences are likely to occur without treatment, rather than being helpful, too often leads to antidepressant treatment, which the best science we have indicates this will increase the risk of such serious consequences.

The Effects of Antidepressants On Suffering 

The available research findings indicate so called “antidepressants’ can increase the likelihood of strokes, heart attacks, falls and even death. Antidepressants can cause side effects, including nausea, agitation, weight gain, lower sex drive and indigestion. Research also suggests that people often experience unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, known as antidepressant discontinuation syndrome, when they stop taking antidepressants, sometimes for weeks or months. Thus, people seeking relief from a challenging emotional experience who turn to the most frequent prescribed treatment–antidepressants–are actually increasing their risks of suffering from these various negative consequences.

A very recent study titled “The impact of antidepressants and human development measures on the prevalence of sadness, worry and unhappiness: cross-national comparison,” the researchers conclude,

“In this study, we examine the relationship among individual symptoms (sadness, worry and unhappiness), human development factors and antidepressant use in 29 OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ] countries. We report that increased antidepressant prescribing is not associated with decreased prevalence of sadness, worry or unhappiness. However, income, education and life expectancy (measured using the Human Development Index) are associated with lower prevalence of all these symptoms. This suggests that increasing spending on depression treatment may not be as effective as general public health interventions at reducing depression in communities.”

An estimated 18 billion dollars a year is being spent on these drugs, (approximately 100 billion dollars spent every six years). This amount does not include the cost of appointment hours of psychiatrists and other prescribing doctors that is part of the required process of people getting access to these drugs. This appears to be a lot of wasted money that can be used more productively in other ways. Given this cost, along with the drugs’ side-effects, and negative health outcomes, framing depression as being so bad so that it ends up encouraging people to take “antidepressants” may be unwise.

So, why do so many who are taking these drugs come to believe they are enormously helpful? There are three major guesses about this.

  1. Many people who become depressed start to feel better after a few months without taking this type of drug. If they do take the drug when they become depressed, and begin to feel better, they attribute it to the drug rather than the natural course of the experience.
  2. If they start to feel better while taking the drug, they may try to stop taking it. Because of the withdrawal effects that feel awful, they are likely to think these awful feelings are due to their depression returning, so they quickly return to taking the drug while now more convinced that the drug is helpful.
  3. Some people are very susceptible to the placebo effect, and therefore any drug that they are prescribed by a doctor leads to the perception that the drug is effective.

Depression as a Natural, Potentially Healthy Process

Conceptualizing depression as a mental disorder tends to fail to motivate active coping beyond taking a pill. Moreover, it fails to honor the labeled person’s perspective. In contrast, framing these concerns as potentially a healthy functional signal can lead to less self-stigma, and greater self-efficacy in making healthy life-style improvements.

One example of this line of thinking is provided in Joshua Wolf Shenk’s (2005) biography of Abraham Lincoln. There the author makes the case that Lincoln’s depression fueled his greatness. Similarly, David Yaffe (2017) has written a biography about the music legend, Joni Mitchell, titled Reckless Daughter. There, he writes of her frequent bouts of depression and quotes her saying,

“Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in that mire, of an epiphany.”

Schroder, et al. (2023), recently carried out a relevant study. As the authors describe it,

“We describe the historical development of popular messages about depression and draw from the fields of evolutionary psychiatry and social cognition to describe the alternative framework that depression is a “signal” that serves a purpose. We then present data from a pre-registered, online randomized-controlled study in which participants with self-reported depression histories viewed a series of videos that explained depression as a “disease like any other” with known biopsychosocial risk factors (BPS condition), or as a signal that serves an adaptive function (Signal condition) …. The Signal condition led to less self-stigma, greater offset efficacy, and more adaptive beliefs about depression.” 

In a recent blog post, I describe in far more detail this healthy way to understand the nature of depression (see HERE) and a no financial cost process to maximize its benefits. There the reader learns that transforming one’s belief that depression is a “really so bad” experience, to one that develops a friendship with the experience is doable. Once the transformation is complete, I prefer the term “melancholy” for it becomes a distinctly different experience without all the insults directed at oneself and thoughts of being mentally ill.

For many people, it takes more than reading a few paragraphs about this way of thinking. It typically takes some practice over a few months. By beginning with my very first blog post (see HERE) many will find that for free the practice sessions provided are sufficient. Having a counselor/psychotherapist that reacts to such folks’ depression experiences with kindness and empathy, rather than with insults and seeking to convince them that their experience is so terribly bad, can also be enormously helpful. Such counselors/psychotherapists provide a model that leads one to emulate this way of being supportive of themselves throughout their days even when their therapist is no longer present.

Conclusion

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

There is a subgroup of people who, upon becoming depressed, end up seriously considering, or even attempting, suicide. I am in no way attempting to make light of the experiences of people who reach this level of desperation. Some kind empathetic support can be very helpful to deal with such situations. What I am seeking to convey is that the vast majority of people experiencing depression don’t go to such extremes. For them, the argument that their experience is so bad they need to rush out and get someone to provide “antidepressant” treatment might not be wise.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s Song, “Don’t Blame Me”

by Jeffrey Rubin, PhD

Welcome to From Insults to Respect.

In a few days, Super Bowl Sunday will arrive. Sadly for me, my Buffalo Bills won’t be playing. I’m not blaming them, though.

Most of us assign blame based on adding together degree of intentionality and harm. Said another way, Blame = Intent + Harm. To me, the Bills did not intend to lose the crucial game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Additionally, the harm to me because of that loss consisted of a few days of disappointment. At this point, I’ve pretty much fully recovered.

Some people will blame a person, a group of persons, or even themselves for extensive periods of time. Their blame can lead to disrespecting the blamed person or persons to such an extent that they spend a great deal of time throwing insults at the blamed person, and it ends up diminishing the blamers’ quality of life. Therefore, we might want to consider whether we would be wise to transform some of our blaming to a more peaceful understanding.

As I thought about writing a post about this, word came to me that talented superstar Taylor Swift will be attending the Super Bowl. Then it occurred to me that one of her popular songs is “Don’t Blame Me.” Perhaps a little meditation on the song’s lyrics might be a fun and useful way to explore this issue. So, I invite you to join me in giving this a try.

Meditating On the Lyrics of “Don’t Blame Me”

The first few lines, sung with passion, are:

Don’t blame me, love made me crazyIf it doesn’t, you ain’t doin’ it rightLord, save me, my drug is my babyI’ll be usin’ for the rest of my life
Hmmm. I imagine different people will react to these words differently. Here’s my take.

The character that is being portrayed perceives that she might be blamed for how she acts when she’s in love, which she characterizes as crazy. She doesn’t want to be blamed for this and defends herself by making the argument that the right way to do love is to do these crazy things. Moreover, just like you shouldn’t be blamed for being addicted to a drug, she argues, you shouldn’t be blamed for acting crazy when you are in love. I’m not sure this is a convincing argument, but let’s move on to the next set of lyrics to clarify just what she means by acting crazy.

I’ve been breakin’ hearts a long time, andToyin’ with them older guysJust playthings for me
These three lines tell of her having fun with older guys even though she knows this ends up hurting them. Doing something that can hurt someone, when you know it will very likely end up hurting someone can add up to being blamed for the hurt. However, she does not here claim she intends to hurt these guys. Given the earlier lines, she appears to be doing this because she’s addicted, and therefore, perceives no control over her actions.
The lyrics go on to say,

Something happened for the first time,
In the darkest little paradiseShakin, pacin’, I just need you
For you, I would cross the lineI would waste my timeI would lose my mindThey say, “She’s gone too far this time”
At this point, she sees that some are blaming her for going too far, and it seems as well, that she recognizes her “darkest paradise” has her doing things that may not be sane.
The next stanza, she repeats the first set of lines and goes on to say:

My name is whatever you decideAnd I’m just gonna call you mineI’m insane, but I’m your baby (your baby)Echoes (echoes) of your name inside my mindHalo, hiding my obsessionI once was poison ivy, but now I’m your daisy
And baby, for you, I (I) would (would) fall from graceJust (just) to (to) touch your faceIf (if) you (you) walk awayI’d beg you on my knees to stay
She seems to be struggling with her emotions. I can certainly relate. The powerful feelings of love can lead us to do some things that strike us as terribly undesirable.

Here, she feels obsessed, and deeply concerned about how she would deal with her love abandoning her. She sees that she would go so far as to beg her love to stay, which is not a desirable situation to find oneself in.

The next set of lines again repeat the earlier ones about asking to not be blamed and asking the lord to save her. Then she says:

I get so high, ohEvery time you’re, every time you’re lovin’ meYou’re lovin’ meTrip of my life, oh
Here, she uses words that imply a drug-like experience (“I get so high,” and “Trip of my life”) to express the feeling of this obsessive love experience. However, with drug experiences perhaps we have some choice to take the drug or not. With some love experiences, we meet the person, start engaging, and before we know it, we’re in love.

The final lines of the song just repeat, over and over again, her pleading to not be blamed because if you are doing love right, this is just what happens.
Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

In my view, when people go through such experiences, if the blaming amounts to a bunch of name calling, and beating oneself up in other ways, than that’s going to make such challenging experiences worse. During such times, people might be calling you names, and you may be calling yourself names, especially if some degree of intention is perceived.

In our society, this is a common experience when what you are doing is hurting others and yourself. Perhaps it is wise to accept that the insults are based on old habits, but not helpful. Perhaps by accepting blame, in the sense of accepting responsibility, would be better. What I mean by this is that we fully observe the internal physical sensations that go with the recognition of the hurt, fully experience this during periods of meditation, along with a sense of confidence that these feelings will spur a search process for creating a better path forward. The search may not immediately produce the results you might wish for, but such challenging experiences through patience and self compassion, might be a more fulfilling path than one that takes to heart the various insults getting thrown around.

My Best,
Jeff
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Categories
CSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 DSM mental disorders mental health concern model Mental Illness

Mental Illness or Mental Health Concern?

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

The two dominant manuals for “diagnosing mental disorders” are the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases. (ICD). Their overarching concept is mental disorders. Synonyms are psychopathology, and mental illness. To access mental health services, most people are required to accept being labelled as having a mental illness. Not everyone respects this requirement.

These manuals continue this pathologizing despite the long history of such terminology being cogently criticized. In contrast to this pathologizing concept, there exists a peer reviewed published article that advocates an alternative method for accessing services, one that replaces the “mental illness” overarching concept with “mental health concerns” that includes the idea that these concerning experiences often serve adaptive functions. It is argued that this approach is a significant improvement over the pathologizing concept.

Criticism of the Mental Illness Concept

Professor William James

William James (1902/1961) was an early critic of the concept of psychopathology, referring to it as “simple minded” (p. 29) and “superficial medical talk” (p. 324). In his 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States (which were reconstructed by Eugene Taylor in 1984 from James’s notes), he stated that experiences that are commonly viewed as unhealthy or morbid are really “an essential part of every character” and give life “a truer sense of values” (p. 15). James went on from there to note that medical writers tend to,

represent the line of mental health as a very narrow crack, which one must tread with bated breath, between foul friends on the one side and gulfs of despair on the other…. There is no purely objective standard of sound health. Any peculiarity that is of use to a man is a point of soundness in him, and what makes a man sound for one function may make him unsound for another…. The trouble is that such writers use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. The medical terms become mere appreciative clubs to knock a man down with…. The only sort of being, in fact, who can remain as the typical normal man, after all the individuals with degenerative symptoms have been rejected, must be a perfect nullity. Who shall absolutely say that the morbid has no revelations about the meaning of life? That the healthy minded view so-called is all? (pp. 163-165)

In more recent time, Schroder, et al. (2023), carried out a relevant study. It presents data from a study in which participants with self-reported depression histories viewed a series of videos that explained depression as a “disease like any other” with known biopsychosocial risk factors (BPS condition), or as a signal that serves an adaptive function (Signal condition). The Signal condition led to less self-stigma, greater offset efficacy, and more adaptive beliefs about depression.

Additional recent criticism of the mental illness concept has been presented by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN). In its jointly published report titled “Mental health, human rights, and legislation: guidance and practice” (2023), it states:

The biomedical model of mental health is based on the concept of mental health conditions being caused by neurobiological factors (1, 2). As a result, care often focuses on diagnosis, medication, and symptom reduction, rather than considering the full range of social and environmental factors that can impact mental health. This can lead to a narrow approach to care and support that may not address the root causes of distress and trauma (p. xiii).

The same report also states:

Every person should have the opportunity to define what recovery means for them, and which areas of their life they wish to focus on as part of their own recovery journey. Recovery considers the person and their context as a whole, and no longer adheres to the idea or goal of the person “being cured” or “no longer having symptoms” (p. xiv).

Is it possible to respectfully address these issues?

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

I  have proposed an alternative classification system (Rubin 2018; Rubin in press) titled “Classification and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Concerns” (CSM). This approach does not simply exchange the mental illness concept with mental health concerns; rather, the mental health concerns concept is different in several important ways.

The CSM assumes each person seeking to access services as a unique individual. Rather than labeling anyone, it labels expressed concerns. Whereas the mental illness concept declares there is something wrong with the person, the CSM emphasizes, mental health concerns often turn out to be indispensable stages in acquiring valued fruits.

A mental health concern, as defined in the CSM, occurs when a person seeking mental health services expresses to a mental health service provider a concern about any of these topics: behavior, emotion, mood, addictions, meaning of life, death, dying, managing chronic pain, work, relationships, education, eating, cognition, sleep, and challenging life situations. This is an observable event that occurs at a specific time and place, and therefore avoids the well documented reliability and validity problems of the mental illness concept.

Once it has been established what the concerns are, a collaborative effort between the mental health service provider and service seeker, begin creating answers to a semi-structured psychological formulation that looks at:

  1. How distressing is each of the concerns that were mentioned on a scale of 1 to 7?
  2. When and in what situations is the concern most problematic?
  3. When and in what situations is the concern least problematic?
  4. What are personal strengths?
  5. Levels of functioning in the areas of sleep, eating, employment, education, relationships, on a 1 to 7 scale?
  6. What is a tentative theory of cause or causes, jointly created, that considers the full range of social and environmental factors.

Arguments for the Practicality of the CSM

In Some Settings Using Expressed Concerns Has Worked Fine

When I was doing my PhD practicum at the University of Minnesota’s Counseling Center, I worked there for a whole year and we had no need to use the “mental disorder” jargon of the DSM and ICD to communicate. When my advisor asked me to quickly tell him about my morning cases, I would reply with words like, “My 9:00 a.m. case is concerned about feeling depressed, my 10:00 case is concerned about his failing grades, my 11:00 case is concerned about how anxious she is in social situations.”

If my advisor wanted to know more about a case, we went into the psychological formulation type of information. This informal way to communicate among the professionals and graduate students at the counseling center flowed smoothly while we provided a wide range of mental health services.

The CSM Is Practical Because It Maintains the Concept of “Mental Health”

Currently, we have such enormous organizations as Mental Health America and its state and regional affiliates, the National Institute of Mental Health, university and college programs offering degrees in mental health counseling, and states offering certifications in this field. Psychologists, social workers, counselors, and psychiatrists regularly refer to themselves as providing services under the umbrella of “mental health service providers.” For these reasons, the CSM would maintain the concept of “mental health” so it can be comfortably and realistically accommodated into the many large organizations currently using it.

However, the CSM would use the term “mental health” in a way that is different from what is implied in the DSM and the ICD. The CSM would explicitly reject the idea that the opposite of mental health is mental illness. Rather, the word “health” in the CSM’s “mental health” would be phrased in a manner that indicates that professionals dealing with mental health concerns are part of the allied health professions. The reason for thinking of these professionals as health providers follows.
Many of the concerns that would fall under the CSM’s list of related topics have been identified in scientific studies as “physical health risk” factors. For example, people who express a concern about being addicted to alcohol are at increased risk of developing sclerosis of the liver (O’Shea, Dasarathy, & McCullough, 2010). Those who express concerns about eating more than average may be at greater risk of diabetes and heart disease (Mokdad et al., 2003). Quality of interpersonal relations, lack of sleep, depression with thoughts of suicide, and various other concerns or clusters of concerns can be studied for the degree of physical health risk that they pose.

A major goal of mental health providers under the proposed CSM system is to turn “physical health risk” factors into “physical health protective” factors. The degree to which this is successful can be studied using currently available methodologies. It is in this very specific sense that the mental health concern topics are viewed not merely as mental concerns but also mental health concerns. By being explicit about this change in conceptualizing mental health, we have good reason to believe that the CSM proposal holds promise for avoiding most of the negative baggage that comes with this type of terminology.

So, in brief, the CSM approach promises to reduce stigma, improve care, increase self-efficacy, and open new avenues of research. In going forward, I encourage people to begin the process of reconceptualizing what has been promoted as mental illnesses to a mental health concerns. Moreover, for those who have any influence with those in the world of psychology and psychiatry, please encourage them to adopt the CSM approach.

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Anti-establishment Establishment Politics

Is Trump Really Against the Establishment?

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

This week, I witnessed a guy saying he respected Donald Trump because he is a fighter against the establishment. A skeptic nerve in my body, like an overheated teapot, started going wild.

Upon thinking about this, it occurred to me that Trump is a big time businessman whose main businesses are high end hotels, residences, and private golf clubs. Doesn’t Trump seek to stay in the good graces of members of the establishment?

And then it occurred to me that he picked as his running mate, Mike Pence, hardly someone viewed as an anti-establishment kinda guy.

Having said that, I hasten to point out that I mean no disrespect toward the former vice president, nor to any who fall under the vaguely defined headings of “establishment” or “anti-establishment.” I’m quite certain many are folks of good character. Of those that I know personally, we might respectfully disagree on a political issue or two, but, unlike Trump who hastens to vilify individuals with whom he disagrees, that’s not an approach that sits well with me.

On the day I was writing this post, when I took a quick break I just happened to notice a remarkably relevant analysis by CNN. Dated December 16, 2023, it’s titled, “Donald Trump is now the GOP establishment.” To support this contention, the analysis utilizes data on the number and types of his endorsements, fund raising, and who is supporting him in the polls.

To explore this issue more deeply, I put the title of this post into the Google search engine to see what others thought about this. A top Google hit was by Quora, a social question-and-answer website. Someone there had asked back in 2016, when he first won the presidency, “Is Donald Trump really anti-establishment?” The most highly rated answers stated:

No. Look at the people with whom he has surrounded himself.

The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be ‘anti-establishment.’

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.

Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork…. If you voted for Trump because he’s “anti-establishment,” guess what: you got conned.

My Google search also came up with an article by NPR titled, “People Keep Talking About ‘The Establishment.’ What Is It, Anyway?” There I learned that the word “Establishment” has different meanings to different people. Among those reported in the NPR article are:

It’s kind of what we used to call ‘The Man,’ when you are against The Man. The establishment has become ‘The Man.’

[T]he Establishment’ … precisely because of its vagueness and its shapelessness, can be used in almost any country about almost any thing.

[T]he establishment was a conspiracy of a few secret kingmakers based in New York [who] selected every Republican presidential nominee from 1936 through 1960.

The establishment was also not blue-collar. The key to next November lies in the real fears and deep resentments which are beginning to agitate the working and lower-middle classes of white America.

It wasn’t the common man.

Powerful, rich, old, out of touch, secretive, moderate — these are how the establishment has been painted over the years. The players may have changed, but those connotations have stuck around for decades.

I was able to find a Google hit that supported the idea Trump was a successful anti-establishment president. It’s a statement released by the White House during 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, and clearly designed to promote his bid for reelection. Titled, “Donald Trump Fought the Establishment—and Won,” it begins:

Donald Trump won the presidency by challenging both the Republican and Democrat Party establishments. For too long, the political class of party leaders, paid consultants, lobbyists, donor-funded think tanks, and partisan media outlets ignored the concerns of millions of working- and middle-class American families.

It goes on from there to insult career politicians, and then it blames Democrats in Congress for Trump’s inability to achieve many of the things he had promised. It then provides a lengthy list of what it claims are Trump’s accomplishments that are benefitting the working-and middle-classes. The first item on the list states:

He replaced NAFTA, something both Republican and Democrat politicians had promised to do for years. His new USMCA rebalances trade, protects American labor, and levels the playing field for U.S. manufacturers and automakers.

This was actually a bipartisan bill supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. In the Democrat controlled House of Representatives the vote was 385 for, and 41 against. In the Senate with a one vote Republican advantage, the vote was 89 for, and 10 against. Trump, by supporting this effort and agreeing to sign the bill, eagerly takes credit for it without mentioning all of the hard work of all of those on both sides of the aisle that actually wrote the bill.

The second item on the list states:

He cut taxes for over 80 percent of Americans by lowering rates for middle-income families, doubling the child tax credit, nearly doubling the standard deduction, and lowering costs for employers.

Critics of this bill express concerns that actually eighty-five percent of the money saved by tax payers went to the wealthiest Americans, and those cuts were made ‘permanent’. The remaining fifteen percent of the dollars went to the remaining tax payers, and those cuts were made ‘temporary’ (ends in five years). Meanwhile, the loss of tax revenue results in an additional national debt of a trillion dollars per year, a debt burden left for tax payers in the future. To many, the tax cuts actually feel like a bribe, to secure votes in the following election cycle.

This claim that Trump is offering a sweeter reward to the wealthy establishment and a far less valued reward to those who are not wealthy brought to my mind a study by primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal. They trained capuchin monkeys to perform a certain task for which they receive, as a reward, cucumber slices. The monkeys performed the task just fine until they were permitted to see another monkey being rewarded with grapes, a higher-value payment. Suddenly many of the cucumber-receivers refused the cucumber, sometimes even throwing those measly, unfair cucumber payments at the experimenter who was giving out the reward. Behavioral economists call the behavioral characteristic exhibited by the monkeys “inequity aversion”—the tendency to turn down a perfectly good offer if others are getting a better deal.

Upon recalling this study, I wondered why so many people who are getting so much less than rich folks under Trump’s tax plan aren’t as angry as these monkeys. Then I realized that the monkeys that received the cucumber rewards could plainly observe the other monkeys getting the grapes. In contrast, in our society, many Trump supporters get their information from so-called news agencies and internet groups they belong to that support Trump’s anti-establishment hero image.

Trump’s tax plan, not only gives an extra sweet deal to the wealthy’s personal taxes, it also cuts corporate taxes as well, also reducing significant government revenue. Claims are conveniently made that these benefits will be trickled down, despite the lack of convincing evidence to support this. Meanwhile, executives, and disproportionately wealthy corporate shareholders, clearly reap economic gains from the Trump corporate rate cuts.

Dr. Jeffrey Rubin

As I looked over the rest of the 2020 White House list of benefits of the “Trump Fought the Establishment” document, I see items completely irrelevant to this issue, while others are designed to indeed help those who are not super well off in our society. However, in the end, when all of Trump’s economic policies are taken together, it seems to me the super well-off got the grapes and the rest of society got the cucumbers.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Antidepressant withdrawal problems antidepressants

Withdrawing from Antidepressants: A Woman’s Personal Experience

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

Regular readers to this blog know that I have some serious concerns about dealing with emotional experiences referred to as depression or melancholy with the so called antidepressants. Certainly, people should be free to make their own decision regarding whether or not to take these types of pills, and I recognize very intelligent people decide to take them. That said, because I have been employed as a PhD level psychologist, people from time to time have asked me for advice. This led me to evaluating the research on their effectiveness, risks, and side-effects. Having extensive training in evaluating this type of research, sadly, I’ve been dismayed at what I have, and continue to find.

There is an excellent site titled Mad In America that does an excellent job presenting the relevant science. Here, I’ll just say that the research indicates these drugs are not anywhere as effective as they are promoted to be, side-effects are worse than claimed, withdrawal effects are frequently awful, and there are safer, healthier approaches to handling these types of concerns than taking these pills. More and more troubling findings are regularly being revealed to the public. Just this week, The New York Times ran a story about numerous reports of a loss of sexuality from taking these types of drugs, and even upon stopping the drugs, the problem for many people persists.

Dr. Audrey Bahrick

The Times story provides the example of Dr. Audrey Bahrick, who started taking Prozac in 1993 when she was 37. At that time, she was struggling with a difficult job in a new city. Within one day of taking the pill, her clitoris and vagina felt numb. “It was like there was a glove over them — a very, very muffled sensation,” she recalled.

For a while, she said, the trade-off was worth it. The antidepressant made her feel energized and more resilient. But after two years, she stopped taking it for the sake of her relationship. The sexual symptoms persisted, however, and the relationship ended. “It never occurred to me that this would be something that would in fact, in my life, never resolve,” said Dr. Bahrick, who is now 67.

A major strategy that is used to convince people to start taking these drugs is terribly misleading. Doctors claim that it is crucial for depressed people to take antidepressants because depressed people are at an increased risk of committing suicide. This implies that the antidepressant diminishes the likelihood of committing suicide. The facts are just the opposite. The weight of the research evidence indicates these drugs increase suicidal thoughts, behavior and  likelihood of suicide (see HERE). To use the increase in suicides argument despite the evidence to the contrary has always been a very disturbing sales pitch to me.

Now, when reading about all of the serious concerns regarding this type of treatment, many folks who are already taking these drugs begin to consider chucking them. To help with this decision, and how best to go about doing so if they so choose, it helps to hear from people who have made that decision.

One Woman’s Personal Experience

May Cause Side Effects, by Brooke Siam, is one of the first books on antidepressant withdrawal to make it to the mass market. A wonderful interview with the author can be found HERE. Ms Siam’s work on antidepressant withdrawal has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Post, Psychology Today, and many more. She is also an award-winning chef and Food Network Chopped Champion.

When asked in her interview how she first got involved in the mental health system, she replied:

“This was in 2001 and the timing is important for context as the world was a little different then. I was 15 years old and my father had suddenly passed away. When I look back now, I don’t see someone who was going down a terrible path. I wasn’t suddenly into drugs or hanging out with the wrong crowd, my grades didn’t tank, but I was different than I was before. I was very stoic. I was a serious ballet dancer, so the mantra of ballet is to smile through pain, and so, my reaction was concerning to the adults around me.”

Siam was then referred to a psychiatrist, and at her first appointment was given a prescription for a psychiatric drug.

“I don’t remember which one. I think we started with Prozac and then moved on likely to Zoloft since those were the two that were approved for use in children and teens at the time. I had obvious physical reactions to both drugs and so, in the end, we ended up on a combination of Effexor XR and Wellbutrin XL, neither of which were approved for kids and teens at the time and still aren’t.” 

This approach of deciding in one psychiatrist visit to start throwing one type of pill after another at her because of a very understandable reaction to the loss of her dad is all too frequent from what I have been able to see during my many years of psychological practice. Often it’s not just the loss of a parent, but other grief experiences as well that leads to perfectly normal reactions that lead to this prescribing practice. Sometimes people are normally built to have periods of melancholy, and this too is pathologized and one pill after another begins to be prescribed.

Eventually, Siam began to believe this drug approach wasn’t doing her any good:

“…the only frame of reference I had as an unmedicated person was as a 14-year-old kid, I was in my 30s and I was on the same cocktail of drugs. I didn’t wear the same clothes I wore in high school, so why in the hell was I still taking the same cocktail of drugs every morning? There was just something about that that just didn’t make any sense to me because I knew I wasn’t the same body. My brain wasn’t the same, so if the science was sound why hadn’t it adjusted over time? That was the question that put me on this path.”

It was at this point that Siam began her journey to wean herself off the drugs. She covers such topics as what problems one might face along this weaning journey and suggestions on overcoming them. Her story is well worth reading.

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

Categories
Depression melancholy The Beatles The song "Rain"

The Beatles’s Song “Rain” as Melancholy Metaphor

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

In today’s world, if you are experiencing melancholy or depression, the pharmaceutical industry very much wants to sell you on the idea that you have an abnormal condition that is deemed an illness. You would think with the popularity of the blues type of music, periods of bluesy feelings would be viewed as normal as trees in a forest; nevertheless, the pharmaceutical industry has successfully sold prescribing physicians it requires drug treatments.

These drugs have a number of side-effects, and for those who come to decide the drugs are either not working for them, or the side-effects are intolerable, many find that upon trying to stop taking them the withdrawal reactions are awful. And yet, these drug treatments are appealing to many people because of the ease of popping a pill, and health insurance either completely covers the cost, or reduces the cost to such an extent that they are very affordable. Moreover, it is a medical doctor who is prescribing these pills, and since doctors have such extensive training they are viewed as the experts, and people succumb to their advice without much thoughtful consideration.

With this in mind, in my view, if you can find a way to avoid the drugs and learn to make friends with these base notes of experiences, you potentially will be healthier in the long run. In several of my earlier posts (for examples see HERE and HERE), I provide numerous examples of people who found various experiences typically labeled as depression and melancholy as helpful. For example, Joshua Wolf Shenk in his biography of Abraham Lincoln, makes the case that his depression fueled his greatness. Similarly, the music legend, Joni Mitchell, upon discussing her frequent bouts of depression observed,

“Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in that mire, of an epiphany.”

We learn further of Joni’s view of melancholy from her soulful rendition of her song “Hejira.” There she sings,

There’s comfort in melancholy
When there’s no need to explain
It’s just as natural as the weather
In the moody sky today

As another example, we learned in an earlier post that the great writer Leo Tolstoy came to understand his bouts with depression as crucial to his personal development as it provoked a gnawing questioning that eventually led to one insight after another.

The Beatles song, “Rain,” as I interpret it, provides us another expression of melancholy and depression as natural.

The Beatles’ song, “Rain”

This song was released on the 30th of May, 1966, as the B-side of The Beatles’s “Paperback Writer” single . According to Wikipedia, it was written by John Lennon although credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. It contains a slowed-down rhythm track, George Harrison’s distorted lead guitar, Ringo Starr’s nifty drumming, Paul McCartney’s droning bass line, and the last lines are vocals played backwards.

The first lines go:

If the rain comesThey run and hide their headsThey might as well be deadIf the rain comes
Here, the Beatles, it seems to me, are bemoaning how people view a rainy period negatively (They might as well be dead). Many people, when they have experiences referred to as melancholy and depression are similarly likely to interpret it as a negative, and they might as well be dead. This is often due, in part, to the way they were brought up.

There are parents who are not given to periods of sadness, anguish, and tears. For them, it’s “steady as she goes,” which is not a bad constitution to have. Their talent for averting their attention from evil, and living in the light of good offers benefits for our society for they can be counted on, day after day, to accomplish many tasks that have to be done for the smooth operation of our society. However, there is another constitution that complements this “steady as she goes” type.

Those with this complementary constitution experience far more acutely facts which strike them as wrong, and this wrongness is a genuine portion of reality. To them, rather than turning away from these feeling, their constitution has them staying with these feeling for an extended period so their life’s significance can be more deeply pondered and ultimately better understood. Though often nothing apparently positive comes from some of these periods, every now and then it serves to open their eyes to deeper levels of truth that end up benefiting them and society as a whole.

Now, when the “steady as they go” parents see their child feeling blue, this strikes them, from their perspective, as abnormal. These parents try to talk their child out of these sad experiences. A father seeing his little Susie not snapping out of her rainy day mood might even get testy, insisting he had enough of her whimpering. “Stop it already,” he may scream, “you’re acting like a horrible baby!” Offering a sympathetic ear would be far more helpful at such times, but children don’t get to pick parents who always act perfectly at all times.

Similarly, adults in general, if they have a “steady as they go” constitution, will readily accept the belief that they are the mentally healthy folks and anyone given to waves of bluesy feelings must have a mental illness.

Now, some of the folks who have a bluesy constitution may have learned to deal with their tumultuous feelings by trying to squelch them by drinking an excess amount of alcohol or consuming various other drugs. When this happens, they become at risk for a real physical illness from the toxic effects of these substances. Dealing with addictions can require support and the first part of that support is to come to understand that some people are given to bluesy moods, and that these moods are natural for them and has the potential to lead to something positive.

The next set of lines in “Rain” go,

When the sun shinesThey slip into the shade (when the sun shines down)And sip their lemonade (when the sun shines down)
When the sun shinesWhen the sun shines
RainI don’t mindShineThe weather’s fine

Here, the song contrasts the pleasantness of sunshiny days and the experience of rainy ones, which is also fine–different, but nevertheless fine in its own way. Metaphorically, we can come to experience our bluesy moods as a different type of mood that is also fine. We can come to learn that for many of us, melancholy is a period of time when, by feeling deeply about our various concerns, we process them more deeply than the more steadily happy folks. There are times when this processing leads to something creative. Biographies teach us that the most creative people are given to periods of melancholy and depression.

The next lines in the song go,

I can show youThat when it starts to rain (when the rain comes down)Everything’s the same (when the rain comes down)I can show youI can show you
RainI don’t mindShineThe weather’s fine

Here, the lines, it seems to me, are designed to encourage us to experience rain as every bit as an equal to a shiny day. It reminds me of a line from St. Basil–“Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his brow, and knows not that it brings forth abundance.” In my view, this is equally true for melancholy. Depression is a little different.

When people become depressed, they are prone to throw personal insults at themselves, typically choosing ones that have to do with feeling guilty about becoming depressed, past mistakes, being crazy, and being worthless. The psychiatric model has them thinking they have bad genes, a lifelong pathological condition, as well as having a condition that is stigmatizing. All of this leads to the person experiencing periods of self-loathing. As a result, they develop what some call a double depression–not only are they depressed, they are depressed that they are depressed.

In contrast, melancholy is a richer, and more powerful approach for addressing our concerns, even the most challenging ones. It doesn’t waste time with all of the insults, though, because of old habits, some may still leap into consciousness. When they do, those in melancholy can observe them without believing they are true. Rather, they recognize them as old unhelpful habits, allow themselves to experience the physical sensations that come with them, and then, when those sensations pass in their own good time, they move on to other emotional work that needs to be done.

The next few lines from the song are,

Can you hear me?That when it rains and shines (when it rains and shines)It’s just a state of mind (when it rains and shines)Can you hear me?Can you hear me?

Here, we are encouraged to view the experiences that come with rainy days and sunny days as just states of mind. This is equally true for uplifting days and days filled with angst.

Now I understand that some people who have reached such a deep level of self-loathing will find it hard to learn to transform their depression into the more natural and supportive state of melancholy. They may have experienced a trauma in their past so awful, they can’t seem to get beyond it. Feelings of getting relief by ending their life may intrude into their thoughts.

The natural ways to deal with this is to take daily walks, particularly in natural settings, talking with a supportive family member or friend, and getting enough sleep. The “Expressive Writing Technique” and meditation are very beneficial and cost free (See HERE for free descriptions of how to use these two techniques). Professional counseling and mindful self-compassion courses can help to get people through particularly challenging times.

The final few lines of “Rain are:

Sdeah reiht edih dna nur yehtSemoc niar eht fi (rain)Niar (rain)Senihs nus (rain)

These lines seem like nonsense words but are actually from a recording tape played backwards. Perhaps it’s meant to suggest that when we view rainy days as “we might as well be dead” we are viewing the experience backwards. Perhaps we would be better off to turn that idea around so it tells us to live fully even when the sun shines and when it rains, and appreciate the full spectrum of human experience.

My Best,
Jeff
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Categories
respect tolerance

Respect and Tolerance

Jeff Rubin

Welcome to From Insults to Respect.

As the title of this blog indicates, here we are interested in respect. The topic of respect is quite broad, and for a fairly complete coverage of its different definitions I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on respect that can be retrieved for free HERE. The article covers not only the different meanings of the respect concept, it also delves into various relevant philosophical issues. However, for people who want to take practical steps to improve the respect others have for them, and their own self-respect, they will be disappointed. This blog’s posts aim to fill this gap.

Improving one’s level of respect others have for us and one’s own self-respect matters intensely, for it shapes and structures our lives. And when individuals find they are unable to stomach themselves it profoundly diminishes the quality of their lives, and even for some, their desire to continue living.

There is a type of respect that is not the focus of this blog, the type one gets for being a doctor, a major leaguer, a Pulitzer Prize winner. People who actually get to personally know such individuals find that they display interpersonal actions that lead to either a deeper more longer lasting level of respect or disrespect. Similarly, they have intrapersonal skills that lead them to enhance their self-respect or end up tearing themselves apart. This blog is a seedbed for anyone seeking to grow their interpersonal and intrapersonal skills that enhance respect.

The posts you find here, along with my free novel, A Hero Grows In Brooklyn, about a boy growing up in Brooklyn struggling with issues related to respect, focus on suggestions that don’t cost even a penny. As someone who originally came from a family with meager financial resources, who, in my early life, lived with five family members in a tiny apartment above a hardware store with the elevated train roaring past our windows every few minutes along Brighton Beach Avenue, I feel a deep connection with those who can’t afford expensive private counseling or mindful self-compassion workshops, as helpful as these can be. Now that I’m retired I feel a great sense of satisfaction to be able to “give away” these ideas to folks regardless of financial circumstances.

As an example, in one of the early posts I discuss the value of learning to tolerate criticism, and upon hearing it, to respond respectfully. There, I describe the following four levels of responding to negative criticism:

1.  This level requires displaying one or more of the following:

      • Weeps or sobs with tears or pouts without also using level 4 responses
      • Physically attacks the criticizer
      • Damages property

2.  This level requires displaying one or more of the following:

      • Insults the criticizer (either with words, hand gestures, the sticking out of a tongue, the rolling of the eyes, or smirks)
      • Glares at the criticizer
      • Threatens the criticizer
      • Punches, kicks, or throws an object without physically hurting someone or damaging anything
      • Criticizes the criticizer without first fully addressing the original criticism.

3.  This level requires displaying one or both of the following:

      • Displays defensiveness without directly insulting the criticizer (raising voice’s volume or pitch)
      • Displays a lack of interest either by verbally indicating this, or with nonverbal cues, or complete silence. 

Illustration by Deanna Martinez4.  Level 4 individuals listen to the criticizer in a supportive, warm, friendly style, and then make it clear that they fully understand what was said.  Moreover, they put the criticizer at ease by making statements that indicate that the wise learn from criticism.  Some time is spent on showing that they are thinking about the criticism.  If, after thinking about the criticism the criticism is deemed to be correct, they make a statement frankly indicating, “I can see your ideas have merit and I intend to use them in the future.”  If they are not sure if they agree, they make a statement indicating that they are very interested in what was said, plan to think a little more about this over the next few days and then they will be ready to discuss this further.  If, after thinking about the criticism, the criticism is deemed to be incorrect, a statement is made designed to disagree without being disagreeable.  More specifically, a sense of humor, some listening in a caring way and a few smiles help to traverse rough terrain.  As the episode winds down, the criticizer is encouraged to feel comfortable communicating suggestions in the future.

I then explain that in my research, individuals upon viewing video recordings depicting people responding to criticism with each of the four levels, rated those who displayed the highest level as more likable, respected, and mature then those responding to criticism at lower levels. In subsequent posts, I explain that to really improve one’s skill level in a manner that overcomes old entrenched habits most people must go through several practice lessons. These practice lessons also are cost-free and are described. Additional posts from time to time reinforce this set of skills. All of this training is available by going to the first post, and working through to each subsequent post.

Today’s Topic

While thinking about what to write for today’s post, I happened to come upon an article in the American Psychologist by Bernd Simon about respect and tolerance. The article begins:

Mutual tolerance among all members of a society is vital for its functioning as a fair and stable system of cooperation (Rawls, 20005). This is true especially for plural societies, where people differ from each other in many ways and regularly disapprove of each other’s beliefs, practices, or ways of life.   

Upon reading this, it occurred to me that individuals who lack sufficient tolerance in their community are likely to stir up a great deal of anger, conflict, and disrespect toward a whole bunch of people. If you are okay about doing this, have at it. However, for those who would find that their lack of tolerance has been creating situations that fails to be fruitful, and therefore want to consider making some changes, the article led me to offer some suggestions.

Practice over one month by taking two minutes daily to consider the value of respecting others who differ from yourself in many ways as understood as deserving equal rights, equal freedom, and equal concern. Respect for others as equals has the potential of restraining people’s disapproval of other’s beliefs, practices, or ways of life, without removing such disapproval, and thus make tolerance possible.

Now, for some, because of their minds flashing on many horrendous acts, they fling the whole tolerance concept right out the window. “Why should I consider being tolerant when such awful things as murder, rape, terrorism, and other illegal acts appear daily in our media! Am I supposed to be tolerant with all of this going on?!!!” But, the vast majority of our neighbors are reasonably law abiding. Consider what the cost would be to you if people who disapprove of your lifestyle were to be intolerant of you, and therefore, treated you disrespectfully. Might we be wise to treat others as we would have them treat us? Isn’t it better for us to treat law abiding citizens with respect, and they treat you equally respectfully?

In Simon’s American Psychologist article, research is reviewed indicating that those who are tolerant of out-groups are more likely to be willing to engage in intergroup cooperation and have higher levels of well-being. Additionally,  when people in the out-group are treated with respect, they are more likely to reciprocate and respond in kind. This expression of respect for others is thus reflected back leading to an increase in the tolerant person’s own self-respect.

So, there you have it, some thoughts about respect and tolerance, along with a little technique to enhance the reader’s tolerance. I hope you give this some thought because I’m thinking living in a world where more people are tolerant and respectful would be good for us all.

My Best,
Jeff

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Depression melancholy

Bob Dylan’s “Melancholy Mood”

Welcome to From Insults to Respect. For many of us who have endured a brutally hot summer, the approaching of autumn sure is a welcome.

This past weekend, I happened to be checking out some stuff on YouTube and came upon a wonderful version of the song, “Melancholy Mood,” sung, believe it or not, by Bob Dylan.

 

The amazingly prolific song writer and musical performer typically sings songs he personally penned, but in 2016 he released an album titled Fallen Angels, and “Melancholy Mood,” is one of its twelve classic American songs.

“Melancholy Mood” was written by Walter Schumann and Vick Knight back in 1939. Upon its initial release, several big band performers cut versions, including Harry James’s orchestra with a very young Frank Sinatra doing the vocals. Harry’s instrumentation of the song naturally featured his dynamic trumpet playing, but there is none of that in Dylan’s version. Instead, we get some gentle, pensive guitars. And though it’s hard to beat the rich vocal tones and wonderful phrasing of Sinatra, Dylan’s vocals, as music critic Ray Padgett describes it, “underplays the emotion perfectly.”

The song immediately caught my interest because it brought into focus the topic of melancholy, which, as regular readers well know, I have discussed on several occasions (see for example, HERE, HERE, and HERE). In these earlier posts, I contrasted my views on the differences between melancholy and depression. To me, when we experience melancholy we have made friends with this experience, recognizing it as a natural process in which life hasn’t deserted us forever, and there may be some epiphanies in the mire.

Joni Mitchell

As Dylan’s fellow musician and song writer, Joni Mitchell, describes melancholy in her beautiful song, “Hijira.”

”There is comfort in melancholy where there is no need to explain, it’s just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today.”

Similarly, in an article titled “The Case for Melancholy,” Ms. Laren Stover writes,

sadness 3“What ever happened to experiencing the grace of melancholy, which requires reflection: a sort of mental steeping, like tea?”

From the perspective of William James’s, when we are in melancholy we are sure we will be up again just as we are sure, when elated to be down again.

“Six months, or any cycle of time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount…. The good time will come again, as it has come; and go too.”

In contrast, depression arrives periodically just as melancholy does, but it is combined with insults thrown at oneself for being depressed without questioning if the insults are valid. Some refer to this as having a double depression because not only are we feeling depressed, but we are depressed about being depressed. Words come out of the depressed person such as, “I don’t have time for this! I’m crazy, mentally ill! This is the end of the road for me!” These are more than just words;  there is a furious deep belief that these words are completely true, and a sense of hopelessness is overwhelming.

So, with this as background, let’s take a look at the lyrics of “Melancholy Mood” to see how they depict the melancholy experience. The first few lines are,

Melancholy mood forever haunts me
Steals upon me in the night, forever taunts me
Oh, what a lonely soul am I, stranded high and dry
By a melancholy mood

So far, the lyrics have Dylan expressing a mood in which he will be forever going through. He is stranded high and dry, with no means to move to a better place.

It’s not clear if the word forever, as used here, means that the singer will be always in this mood, or he will forever have periods of this mood that will come and go. A recognition that this mood is something he will have to go through, but good times will come again would be more like what melancholy means to me. At this point in the song, Dylan might be depicting someone drifting into depression. And yet, he is not clearly insulting himself. Perhaps he is just putting into words the gloomy sense one feels at such times.

Let’s move on to the next stanza

Gone is every joy and inspiration
Tears are all I have to show, no consolation
All I can see is grief and gloom, till the crack of doom
Oh, melancholy mood

These words beautifully capture the melancholy moods that I experience. There is no sign of words that are insulting the singer. Even if there is, it would not automatically mean the person has fallen into depression as I define it.

To this day, because of old habits, as I fall into melancholy, I find old habits that I learned as a youngster will spring to mind, like, “I hate myself!” or “I’m such an idiot.” But when these words shoot into my consciousness, I now well recognize that they are not at all helpful in dealing with my current state, and I let them fly away, without trying to suppress the underlying feelings that accompany them. The main difference, for me, between a melancholy mood and depression is whether or not I am convinced that the words that spring to my mind are absolutely true or not. If not, then I’m in a melancholy mood. If I really am convinced that every nasty thing that comes to my mind is true, I’ve become depressed.

Another aspect of the above four lines from the song’s lyrics also worth thinking about, is the phrase, “till the crack of doom.” It suggests there will be no relief ever arriving. Such a hopeless view suggests a depression type of experience if the person saying them truly believes this. If he or she just notices these words coming into consciousness without accepting they are absolutely true, this is more consistent with melancholy.

Moving on to the next few lines, they point to a specific reason for the person grieving:

Deep in the night I search for a trace
Of a lingering kiss, a warm embrace
But love is a whimsy, as flimsy as lace
And my arms embrace an empty space

Here, the desire for romantic love is powerfully expressed. As we move on to the last four lines, along with the accompanying melancholy guitar rifts, we fall under the spell of the song’s grieving feelings.

Melancholy mood, why must you blind me
Pity me and break the chains, the chains that bind me
Won’t you release me, set me free, bring her back to me
Oh, melancholy mood

From these final words, we learn that it is not the desire for just any romantic love the singer is sharing with his audience. Rather, the words tell of someone grieving over the loss of a romantic relationship involving a particular woman. He is pleading for the mood to release him from this grief by bringing the woman he loves back to him.

The song suggests an important function of melancholy moods. We see the person depicted in the song articulating what his desire is, and spending time with his feelings. This just might lead to processing within his mind about what led to the breakup, and what might he do to reignite the shared romantic love he once had. Or, if not that, maybe the processing of the mood will lead to some thoughts of what he might do better in a future romantic relationship that will lead to a better outcome.

Well, in any case, that’s some of my little musings on a recent song I’ve been listening to. I share it in the hopes it will deepen understanding of the nature of melancholy and depression.

May you all have a colorful autumn.

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.