Weekly Review Issue no.5
On being a monster, kind care as a compass and lessons from a dying therapist
Hiya!
I write these Weekly Review’s to give you some interesting things to read and reflect on, on the the topics and areas that I’m currently researching and learning about. Along with that comes a dose of music because I think music is very important to living a happy life, and this give you an algorithm-free way to listen to something new (hopefully).
I hope you will find at least one thing here that will improve or change your day and week. Let’s get to it.
This week for me
This is my last week of work before finishing up for the year. We’re going up to Scotland for Christmas and Hogmanay. Cannot wait. Two weeks back home, like a mouse to their nest, to rest with family and friends.
This has been, on reflection, one of the most difficult and challenging years, certainly in my career. Truly not a good year for me. It was very hard to deal with (for reasons that I may go into one day) But in the latter half of the year, came with a lot of personal growth. The thing is that it took a lot to let go, which is why this week I’ve come back to this image.
So here’s to letting go - but first - the links!
Research on the edges
👩🏻🌾 Lessons from my dying therapist: care less, have fun – and accept the inevitable
Her beliefs are more ancient Greek than flower child, and they help me. Dying becomes less terrifying when it’s less a brutal cessation of being and more a return to some original state with your meta-family: Mother Gaia, Father Uranus and Grandma Chaos. I find the idea reassuring, particularly if Sara is floating about in there somewhere.
🧟♂️ We are all monsters
It is easy to act ethically in good conditions. When we feel threatened or confused, humans can become unboundedly destructive.
Pretending this is not true makes the problem worse. It is only when we acknowledge that maybe we would have tortured an innocent person to death, in Milgram’s experiment, that we can start the transformational work to make that less likely.
🌍 The 2020s Are the World’s Most Depressed, Stressed Decade…Ever
The chart isn’t just measuring “pessimism” — that’s too simple a way to think about — but stress, really: depression, anxiety, negative affect, bad feelings. It’s an attempt to catalogue, in a sense, what scholars have begun to call “terror management theory,” and that’s not about terrorism, but psychology — what happens to us when bad feelings seem to overwhelm us. The central of terror management theory is very simple, and very powerful, and it traces back to the Existentialists, like Sartre and Camus: life is scary enough to begin with.
🧘🏾♂️ Huge trial finds mindfulness makes some teenagers’ mental health worse
This is the risk when people get evangelical and dogmatic about their particular mental health intervention, whether it’s Christianity or eugenics or psychoanalysis or lobotomies or insulin-induced comas or ‘the rest cure’ or Prozac or CBT or mindfulness or Stoicism or psychedelic therapy or ‘trauma-informed therapy’. When they become convinced it will ‘save the world’. They never ask themselves: ‘could this actually do harm?’
🫶 Careful, kind care is our compass out of the pandemic fog
To care is human; policies, systems, institutions, or technologies cannot care. Care requires a person to notice another’s human situation and to respond to it.5 In healthcare, that response should be safe and based on the best evidence, but also specific, and co-created with and for each patient. Healthcare must also be kind, aiming to simplify treatment plans and navigate increasingly respectful healthcare services. Industrial healthcare is not designed to support careful and kind care6; the pandemic has shown us the need to act differently.
New frontiers of technology
Give a loved one HereAfter and record their most meaningful memories. Let the whole family hear the stories they tell through a powerful, interactive app.
🎧 Listen
I’ve been creating playlists on Spotify for near 10 (😱) years. I do it for myself, but I do have friends in design studios who have used them as background soundtracks, which is nice. Here is December’s playlist for you, which always has a bit of a Christmas vibe to it. You can also click on my profile to listen to the other 151 of them.
🤔 Last thought
This is the last Weekly Review for 2022. Thank you so much for reading, your sharing and subscribing and your comments. I’m so excited for many things that I’ll be doing next year, and look forward to sharing with you but first, let’s really just stop and rest. I hope you get that time and space to do that. I really do think everything else can wait.
See you in 2023 ✨
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”