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What Do We Really Know About Mental Illness?

What Do We Really Know About Mental Illness?

When Rachel Aviv was six years old, she stopped eating. Shortly after, she was hospitalized with anorexia. Her doctors were flummoxed. They’d never seen a child so young develop the eating disorder, yet there she was. Was it a response to her parents’ divorce? Diet culture? Innate asceticism? The episode remained mysterious. While Aviv made a full, relatively speedy recovery, she developed a lifelong interest in the borderlands between sickness and health.

In her new book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Aviv wonders whether she ever truly had anorexia at all, or whether the episode was perhaps too hastily pathologized. While she moved on from her bout of disordered eating without seeing it as a fixed part of herself, the girls she lived with in treatment—older, more self-aware—did not shake it off. Instead, their identities were subsumed by the anorexia. “Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially at the beginning, shape their course,” Aviv writes. “People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.”

If anyone knows the weight of stories, Aviv does. She’s a star New Yorker writer, capable of drilling into complicated, morally queasy situations and excavating definitive tales from the chaos. (Read her work on child welfare system overreach, please.) But Strangers to Ourselves is doggedly resistant to sounding definitive. Instead, it is insistent on ambivalence. The book is divided into four chapters, each one focusing on a different person with unusual mental health issues. (A prologue and epilogue delve into Aviv’s personal experiences.) These characters include Ray, a dermatologist who sues a ritzy mental institution for not giving him antidepressants; a Hindu mystic named Bapu, whose family has her institutionalized for schizophrenia; and a single mom named Naomi, incarcerated after she jumped off a bridge with her two sons in a suicide attempt, killing one. Their circumstances and conditions have little in common except extremity and uncertainty about what is really happening to them.

Aviv’s thesis is that there can be no grand unifying theory of the mind. “The theory of the chemical imbalance, which had become widespread by the nineties, has survived for so long perhaps because the reality—that mental illness is caused by an interplay between biological, genetic, psychological, and environmental factors—is more difficult to conceptualize, so nothing has taken its place,” she writes. Strangers to Ourselves is a look into this vacuum of understanding—about what happens when there’s no easily digestible story to explain what’s happening inside your head, when Freud and pharmaceuticals and everything else fails.

A later chapter, “Laura,” functions as an elegant but inconclusive interrogation of contemporary psychiatry. Connecticut blue blood Laura Delano was diagnosed with bipolar disorder early in life, and started her first psychiatric medication at the same time. She was a high achiever, attending Harvard, but she continued to struggle with her mental health; by her early twenties, she was heavily medicated and had survived a suicide attempt when she stumbled upon a book critical of psychiatric drugs. She decided to stop taking hers. Despite serious withdrawal symptoms as she weaned herself off pills, she preferred her life unmedicated. She became active in anti-psychiatric drug circles on the internet, eventually starting a popular blog. Aviv reveals that she found Laura’s writing while she was trying to understand her own relationship to psychopharmaceuticals—she has taken Lexapro for many years, and had wondered whether she might stop. Aviv does not go so far as to embrace the anti-psychiatry movement herself, although she treats Laura’s position with respect. She makes peace with her continued reliance on antianxiety medication for mental equilibrium, even as she ponders how little doctors know about why exactly it works. But she worries about how diagnoses can limit people’s understanding of themselves and what is possible.

In this regard, Strangers to Ourselves is an of-the-moment book. This summer, a paper reviewing the available literature on the link between depression and a serotonin imbalance concluded that there is no evident link. “The chemical imbalance theory of depression is dead,” The Guardian declared. Renewed skepticism of the biological model for understanding a wide variety of mental illnesses is rising. So Aviv’s persuasive writing on the necessity of considering the whole person, rather than their brain chemistry alone, is apt, albeit not particularly novel. Strangers to Ourselves joins a growing body of recent nonfiction complicating our understanding of the mind. In 2019, medical historian Ann Harrington published Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, a frequently eye-popping tour of psychiatry as it shifted from the Freudian to the biological model, underscoring how fraught chemical imbalance theory has always been. Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s 2021 book The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness delved into culture-bound syndromes and psychogenic illnesses, illustrating how intensely our environments and experiences can impact the ways our bodies and minds function. The strength of Strangers to Ourselves is in its engrossing case studies, which contribute vivid anecdotes to this ongoing conversation about the complex and perplexing nature of the mind.

Early on Aviv explains that she chose an episodic structure for the book, rather than one overarching narrative, in order to emphasize the sheer variety of emotional and psychic experiences, their fundamental irreducibility, their need for specific contextualization. Only a series of narratives could illustrate the point that there is no one singularly true narrative. “When questions are examined from different angles, the answers continually change,” she writes. This sentence is both undeniably true and maddeningly equivocal, like somebody saying “all music is good … depending on a person’s taste.” Sure, but so what? Taken individually, each story in Strangers to Ourselves is as typically excellent as Aviv’s magazine journalism, viscerally rendered and thoughtful portraits that slide into meditations on the mind. As a collection, though, they coalesce into an eloquent shrug. I wondered, upon closing the book, whether it might have left a firmer impression had it been published in serialized form—say, in a magazine—rather than gathered into a collection so opposed to clarity.

Better a sincere, beautifully written whimper than a disingenuous bang, of course. Aviv’s hazy but honest irresolution is much preferable to the blunt-force tendency to turn mental health diagnoses into cornerstones of identity, fixed personality traits rather than the often slippery, provisional snapshots of a person in one moment that they often are.

Scientists May Be a Little Too Excited About Weird Ideas

Scientists May Be a Little Too Excited About Weird Ideas

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist and creator of the popular YouTube series Science Without the Gobbledygook. In her new book Existential Physics, she argues that some of her colleagues may have gotten a little too excited about wild ideas like multiverse theory or the simulation hypothesis.

“If you want to discuss them on the level of philosophy, or maybe over a glass of wine with dinner because it’s fun to talk about, that’s all fine with me,” Hossenfelder says in Episode 525 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I have a problem if they argue that it’s based on a scientific argument, which is not the case.”

Multiverse theory states that an infinite number of alternate universes are constantly branching off from our own. Hossenfelder says it’s possible to create mathematical models that are consistent with multiverse theory, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about reality. “I know quite a lot of cosmologists and astrophysicists who actually believe that other universes are real, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of how much mathematics can actually do for us,” she says. “There are certainly some people who have been pushing this line a little bit too far—probably deliberately, because it sells—but I think for most of them they’re genuinely confused.”

Hossenfelder is also skeptical of the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we’re living in a computer simulation. It’s an idea that’s been taken increasingly seriously by scientists and philosophers, but Hossenfelder says it really amounts to nothing more than a sort of techno-religion. “If people go and spit out numbers like, ‘I think there’s a 50 percent chance we’re living in a simulation,’ I’m not having it,” she says. “As a physicist who has to think about how you actually simulate the reality that we observe on a computer, I’m telling you it’s not easy, and it’s not a problem that you can just sweep under the rug.”

While there’s currently no scientific evidence for multiverse theory or the simulation hypothesis, Hossenfelder says there are still plenty of cool ideas, including weather control, faster-than-light communication, and creating new universes, that don’t contradict known science. “This is exactly what I was hoping to achieve with the book,” she says. “I was trying to say, ‘Physics isn’t just something that tells you stuff that you can’t do. It sometimes opens your mind to new things that we might possibly one day be able to do.’”

Listen to the complete interview with Sabine Hossenfelder in Episode 525 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Sabine Hossenfelder on entropy:

Entropy is a very anthropomorphic quantity. The way it’s typically phrased is that entropy tells you something about the decrease of “order” or the increase of “disorder,” but this is really from our perspective—what we think is disorderly. I think that if you were not to use this human-centric notion of order and disorder, you would get a completely different notion of entropy, which brings up the question, “Why is any one of them more tenable than any other?” … There’s just too much that we don’t really understand about space and time—and entropy in particular, gravity, and so on—to definitely make the statement. I don’t think the second law of thermodynamics is as fundamental as a lot of physicists think it is.

Sabine Hossenfelder on creating a universe:

There is nothing in principle that would prevent us from creating a universe. When I talked about this the first time, people thought I was kidding, because I’m kind of known to always say, “No, this is bullshit. You can’t do it.” But in this case, it’s actually correct. I think the reason people get confused about it is, naively, it seems you would need a huge amount of mass or energy to create a universe, because where does all the stuff come from? And this just isn’t necessary in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The reason is that if you have an expanding spacetime, it basically creates its own energy. … How much mass you’d need to create a new universe turns out to be something like 10 kilograms. So that’s not all that much, except that you have to bring those 10 kilograms into a state that is very similar to the conditions in the early universe, which means you have to heat it up to dramatically high temperatures, which we just currently can’t do.

Sabine Hossenfelder on faster-than-light communication:

I think that physicists are a little bit too fast to throw out faster-than-light communication, because there’s a lot that we don’t understand about locality. I’m not a big fan of “big” wormholes, where you can go in one end and come out on the other end, but if spacetime has some kind of quantum structure—and pretty much all physicists I know believe that it does—it’s quite conceivable that it would not respect the notion of locality that we enjoy in the macroscopic world. So on this microscopic quantum level, when you’re taking into account the quantum properties of space and time, distance may just completely lose meaning. I find it quite conceivably possible that this will allow us to send information faster than light.

Sabine Hossenfelder on community:

When I was at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, they had a weekly public lecture. It was on the weekend—so a time when people could actually come, not during work hours—and afterward there was a brunch that everyone would have together, and I know that the people who would attend those lectures would go there regularly, and they would appreciate the opportunity to just sit together and talk with other people who were interested in the same things. This is something that I think scientists take for granted. We have all our friends and colleagues that we talk to about the stuff that we’re interested in, but it’s not the case for everybody else. Some people are interested in, I don’t know, quantum mechanics, and maybe they don’t know anyone else who’s interested in quantum mechanics. To some extent there are online communities that fulfill this task now, but of course it’s still better to actually meet with people in person.


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The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok

The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok

“I don’t want any students in my videos now, absolutely not,” she says, “Whether you have 10 followers or 100,000 followers, a weird person is a weird person who could find you.” Miss P’s students beg to feature in her videos, but she refuses to film their faces for safety reasons.

Yet Miss P does occasionally record students’ voices. She conducts a “roses and thorns” activity with her classes once a month, in which they each share something good and bad about their lives anonymously on a piece of paper; she sometimes TikToks herself reading these notes to the class. If a student’s voice is audible in the background, Miss P asks them if they would like it to be cut out of the video; she also asks a class’s permission before recording.

While individual students cannot be identified in “roses and thorns” videos, I felt odd when I first stumbled across one. Should the world know that one student is self-harming and another is addicted to porn; shouldn’t this information be kept within the confines of the classroom? Miss P understands this criticism but says her classroom is a safe space: “You see a little tiny piece, but the heart-wrenching stuff and the conversations we have, I don’t post that.”

Miss P says it’s often the students themselves who want her to record the activity. “They have so much pride that it’s their roses and thorns on the TikToks,” she says. Roses and thorns is also not a mandatory activity—Miss P has some classes who have never once participated, and individual members of the class do not have to write anything down. Her videos are flooded with supportive comments, such as, “You are definitely that teacher that will make a difference” (14,000 likes) and “I need you at my school” (2,000 likes).

There are some teachers within Miss P’s school who do not approve of her TikTok account, but her principal and the superintendent of her district are supportive. Like Miss A, Miss P believes schools need to start having more explicit conversations with teachers about social media, establishing firm rules about TikTok use.

“There should be lines; you can’t post everything,” Miss P says. She wishes, for example, that someone had shown her how to filter comments and warned her to check for identifying details in the background of videos. “But I do think it has the potential to be good,” she adds, arguing that TikTok humanizes teachers. “Some students think when my day’s over, I go under my desk and lay out a blanket and sleep in my classroom,” she says, “I think it’s cool to see teachers are people; they have lives and personalities.”

While browsing teacher TikTok, I’ve seen a small child in a polka-dot coat clap along to a rhyme in class and another group of young students do a choreographed dance to a Disney song. I’ve seen a teacher list out the reasons their kindergartners had meltdowns that week, and I’ve read poetry written by eighth-grade students. There is room for debate about the benefits and pitfalls of all of these videos, though no one yet knows how the students featured in them will feel as they age.

In April, TikTok surpassed Instagram as the most downloaded app of the year; it’s the fifth app to ever reach 3.5 billion downloads. As the service continues to grow in popularity, it is up to individual institutions to create clear guidance for their educators. Meanwhile, a new school year has begun—and with it comes a fresh round of TikToks.

Culture – Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Culture – Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ken and Roberta Williams are the cofounders of Sierra Online, the company behind such classic computer games as King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Quest for Glory. Their latest project, Colossal Cave: Reimagined by Roberta Williams, is a remake of the genre-defining Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

“It’s a wonderful game, and I would love to bring it back to the world,” Roberta says in Episode 523 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We want people to see that an older game like this can be brought back, and brought back in a beautiful way—and in a fun way—for today’s audiences.”

The game features modern graphics and sound, and even support for virtual reality devices such as the Quest 2, but is otherwise unchanged from the original text adventure. “We’re trying to stay super faithful to the original version,” Ken says. “If you’re doing history, you don’t want to change it. The old game has survived for 50 years. There’s still probably more people that play that game each year than play a lot of the indie games that come out. It’s a good, solid, well-designed game.”

Since selling Sierra in 1996, Ken and Roberta have spent much of their time sailing the world, a lifestyle that doesn’t generally lend itself to running a game studio. But Ken says modern communications technology has allowed them to work on Colossal Cave from anywhere. “In some ways the pandemic saved the game, because suddenly everybody uses Teams and Slack and all of these screen-sharing apps, and it’s practical now to work remotely on a project,” he says. “What we’re doing on this game couldn’t have been done five years ago.”

Ken and Roberta have assembled a team of almost 30 artists and programmers, most of whom weren’t even born when the original Colossal Cave was released in 1976. “None of them really knew what Colossal Cave was, and we’ve had to educate them,” Roberta says. “And I have to say that as we’ve worked with them on this game, in various ways—programmers, animators, artists—they have come to have such respect for this game, and I’ve been told many times, ‘I had no idea that this game was this good, and this interesting, and this deep and complex.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ It’s a really good design. And they have come to have such respect for this game, which is a really good sign.”

Listen to the complete interview with Ken and Roberta Williams in Episode 523 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Roberta Williams on The Black Cauldron:

[The Disney executives] came into the room, and they basically sat down and said, “We decided to change a lot of your game because it wasn’t fitting our script. There’s too many places where you’re letting the player wander around and nothing is happening, and you realize this is a movie, right? You have to follow the script of the movie.” … I went into Ken’s office and I said, “I’m not going to do this game with them because they just took my game and they changed it all around, and back to—basically it’s almost like a script for a movie again, and so what’s the point?” I just said, “I’m done. I’m not going to do it.” And he called them into his office, and he basically said, “She’s not going to work on it unless you leave her alone and let her do it her way”—that they had to trust me. And they came back into the conference room and they said, “OK, you can do it however you want.” And I did.

Ken Williams on success:

There are a lot of people like me who were born with parents that couldn’t send them to a good school, that weren’t able to afford to go to college because they had to quit and get married early, and yet somehow I managed to go from the bottom of the heap to the top of the heap, and really it was just through hard work. I don’t claim to be a genius of any sort. I’m just kind of a good old boy who works really hard. Even on this game, I get up before the East Coast people and I’m there after the West Coast people. I don’t fart around a lot. I really work hard. And I think that almost anybody who’s really willing to dig in and work hard can succeed. And Roberta’s the same way. We’re both highly focused, hardworking people.

Ken Williams on Sierra Online:

I wanted to create a company that my grandkids would know about, and that would still be around for multiple generations. All decisions at Sierra were based on the long-term, not the short-term, and that’s why we did so well. But when we sold it, suddenly everybody was looking at it saying, “It’s inefficient to have an operation in Portland and an operation in Seattle and an operation in Paris, and have programmers in Boston. Why don’t we just fire all of those people and consolidate to one location, and quit developing our own software and just publish software [like] other people do?” That brought it all down.

Roberta Williams on Farewell to Tara:

I hired a professional genealogist in Ireland, and then I hired one in New York, and I hired one in Iowa—the three places where [my ancestors] were—and I was getting a ton of information. I just kept getting more and more information, and was doing a lot of my own research, and I just loved doing it, until I accumulated three huge, thick notebooks full of papers and research, and I said to myself, “You know, I should write a book.” Because the story was actually kind of interesting. … I wanted to write it as a historical novel, and turn this real-life story into an interesting read. I didn’t want to write it just for family members only. I wanted to write it in such a way that readers of historical novels might actually enjoy it, even if it’s not their own family.


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Nobody Is Playing Netflix’s Games

Nobody Is Playing Netflix’s Games

It’s been nearly two years since Netflix began its big push into gaming, and the streaming giant’s presence as a household name isn’t quite translating. According to recent findings from analytics company Apptopia, 99 percent of the service’s users have never touched a single video game on the platform. If you’ve played any of their titles, congratulations: You are the one percent.

Although perhaps not shocking, this news is eyebrow-raising. Netflix lost some 970,000 subscribers last quarter, and it seems the company is unlikely to recoup them by recruiting gamers. The stats obtained by CNBC via Apptopia reveal that games on the platform have an average of 1.7 million daily users—a fraction of Netflix’s subscriber base of 221 million. The total number of downloads for those games is about 23.3 million.

Tech giants dipping into gaming is hardly new. Amazon and Google have tried their hand by hiring all-star talent and working on in-house studios. Yet despite their best efforts, big companies with money have been unable to brute force their way to success. Video games are a yearslong endeavor requiring the hard work and talent of teams that can range from a handful of independent creators to hundreds of developers across the globe. Even when they produce decent games, as Netflix has, it takes more than a few titles to lure people away from their PlayStation, Switch, Steam, or Xbox ecosystems—or even the new season of Bridgerton—to play them. Netflix knows that its biggest competition for attention on your phone comes down to apps like TikTok.

Part of the problem, for Netflix at least, might be about awareness. Despite acquiring outfits like Oxenfree creator Night School Studio and Dungeon Boss developer Boss Fight Entertainment, the company’s investment into games doesn’t show in the way it markets and promotes them. (Just look at sites publishing well-read how-tos for finding Netflix games.) The streamer doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to luring eyes to some of its more original ventures. The largely unknown fan site it launched in December had barely begun to germinate when it cut the majority of staff. It’s canceled dozens of shows after just one season—a list that continues to grow. With games, it seems, Netflix barely let users know they were there at all.

It would be easy to say the streaming giant isn’t gaining gamers because their offerings are bad, but they’re not. Titles like sci-fi strategy game Into the Breach and card game Exploding Kittens are established hits that have done well on other platforms ahead of their mobile releases for Netflix. Originals that expand the company’s streaming universes, like its Stranger Things games, have built-in fanbases. Critics have positive things to say, seemingly in spite of themselves. The games just haven’t been given time to gain traction.

Netflix did not respond to requests for comment about Apptopia’s findings or its handling of current titles, though the giant has been clear about its continued ambition for mobile gaming. The company has plans to offer roughly 50 games by the end of 2022, including new releases such as Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow’s next title, Immortality. Netflix is fond of iteration and its self-described “crawl, walk, run” model. Evidently, gaming is still in that infant stage.