Weekly Review Issue no. 10
Celebrating Imbolc, conducting a life review, and how COVID-19 changed how we think about death and dying
Hello and welcome back to another Review. This is the 10th issue, hurrah! Thank you for subscribing and reading. If you think someone might appreciate what I discover and write about, please feel free to share, via the button below.
A quick note: when I include academic papers in my Review, I will do my best to include an actual PDF rather than a link to the journal page - which usually puts the actual paper behind a paywall. I work for an academic institution so take for granted I can get free access. It irks me that the general public cannot. So be sure to click through if something interests you!
This week for me
We passed important threshold this week: Imbolc.
Imbolc was historically meant to mark the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox in Neolithic Ireland and Scotland. It’s a time of purification (relating to new births and mothers milk) but also receptivity to the new season and the slow emergence of spring.
For me, this marked the first week of the year. As much as I love Hogmanay, and I do use the transition in the calendar year to reflect on the year and outline my goals/ambitions for the year, I do not feel obliged to really start them until this week. It’s a running start essentially for me, rather a cold one. Now I feel relaxed into doing the things I want to do this year, with a touch more morning and afternoon light and the promise of Spring a bit more on the horizon.
Let’s get onto the links!
📖 Research on the edges
🦠 A thematic analysis investigating the impact of COVID-19 on the way people think and talk about death and dying (link to PDF)
What other than the oversaturation of death statistics every time I turn on my computer? I guess we’re suddenly in a, erm, very dystopian world where dying and sickness and, and the possibility of these things happening is very much more, erm, in our reality, you know?
Important to see this work to explore how people express their experiences of COVID-19 in relation to death and dying. I think it’s underestimated the impact the pandemic has had on us collectively. There is a ‘snap back’ to normality for a lot of us but I think its foolish to think there is not something lurking subconsciously for many of us.
So why do a life review now, even if you're not nearing the end of life? The short answer: time. "One thing we often see in the dying is that only when they realize that the end of life is near do they give themselves permission to really start thinking about those things they really want in life," Dr. Grumet says. The problem, he adds, is that by waiting until their deathbed to do this life review, hospice patients often find it challenging to do some of the things they've always wanted to do in their last days because they may not be physically well enough to do those things.
Death Awareness as Wellness was not on my death & dying bingo, though in retrospect its obvious why it is. This sort of article points to the movement of Death Positivity as a component of wellness that is mostly positive, but immediately I think: is this for me? Everything points to this being for women - does the average bloke think to do this? If not, why not? Is self-care, like care, seen as a feminine trait?
📚 Where Is the Evidence for “Evidence-Based” Therapy?
“Evidence-based therapy” has become a marketing buzzword. The term “evidence based” comes from medicine. It gained attention in the 1990s and was initially a call for critical thinking. Proponents of evidence-based medicine recognized that “We’ve al- ways done it this way” is poor justification for medical decisions. Medical decisions should integrate individual clinical expertise, patients’ values and preferences, and relevant scientific research.
But the term evidence based has come to mean something very different for psychotherapy. It has been appropriated to promote a specific ideology and agenda. It is now used as a code word for manualized therapy—most often brief, one-size- fits-all forms of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).
This is a few years old, but no less a present issue. In the mental health space that I can see - which I suppose leans more to the private industry as much as the academic/research side - there is a perception that you must build evidence of your intervention for it to be ‘safe/correct/appropriate’ (delete as applicable). I suppose what this paper is saying is: many of the significant mental health therapies we use don’t really have an evidence base, so…? I don’t claim to know enough on this, but I think its important to challenge whatever dominant mantra is being used to understand exactly what we mean when we talk about ‘evidence’.
While stress deleteriously impacts humans worldwide and attacks all segments of societies at this moment in human history, it is disproportionately devastating to individuals in vulnerable situations such as pregnant women. Unlike other vulnerable conditions, the deleterious impacts of stress during pregnancy are doubled as they affect the mental health of the mothers and the unborn offspring. Human natural experiments provide evidence for the devastating health consequences in offspring as a result of exposure during pregnancy to existential and acute trauma such as war and natural disasters.
After reading this title (metabotrain… you what?) because it came via someone I follow who too is interested in intergenerational trauma, I tried my best to understand what it talks about. The crux of what it appears to say is there is a pharmacological intervention that can provide long-lasting protection against intergenerational-trauma induced depression. I find this fascinating as I feel that intergenerational trauma is another underrated phenomenon. I look at this through the lens of my own understanding and journey into my family’s recent past (read: World War 2) as a piece of the puzzle around inherited mental health problems. So this may be a bit niche for you dear reader, but interesting nonetheless!
🎧 Listen
Continuing the Imbolc vibe, this was on rotation this week. I feels like a thread of inspiration for Philip Glass in its organ and choir, and still has a very contemporary feel to it. It feels like something coming out of the morning mist, sunlight breaking through a winter branch…
🤔 Last thought
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”