The Bluestocking 369: Weirdness and Leveson
"Now I battle boredom, and that’s a winnable fight."
Happy Friday!
This weekend, I’m trying something new — a Substack live. The historian Lucy Worsley and I will be chatting at 7pm on Sunday (18 May) about genius, women in history (there is talk of discussing Catherine de Medici, which I’m obviously thrilled about) and Pride and Prejudice.
There is no such thing as a link to this; you need to be online on the Substack app or web dashboard and you’ll get an alert. You can also watch the event afterwards as it’ll be recorded.
Helen
The Weird World of Robin Ince (Substack)
While the story of Robin’s diagnosis is presented as clear-cut, the story of his medication is more complicated and fragmentary. At some point afterwards he began taking anti-anxiety medication, which seem to have helped a lot; and took SSRIs, which apparently did not. He has not tried ADHD treatments, valuing the “chaos of my mind for my work.”
I’ve been on a similar journey. In my early 20s I was struggling with my own mental health and visited my GP. Over the course of two or three visits, two things become clear: that mental health services were basically non-existent, and that the ‘diagnosis’ I received depended almost entirely on the story I told. When I emphasised feelings of anxiety, I was prescribed beta-blockers; when I talked about hopelessness and depression, SSRIs. I was left to effectively develop my own treatment plan through trial and error.
Robin writes at length about the poor quality of mental health services, describing the case of a man who “was triaged by a cold non-specialist who was literally just ticking boxes based on questions and not listening to his actual answers.” It’s hard to see how you would trust this kind of culture to lead to accurate diagnosis or effective treatment, and yet a recurring theme of Robin’s book is his visceral dislike of sceptics who question modern diagnostic rates of mental health disorders.
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Sensitive piece by Martin Robbins on the value of diagnosis (yes, I am quoted) and how imprecise and tentative mental-health support can be.
A visual artist has recreated every witness at the Leveson Inquiry, for reasons that are past me. (Thanks to Jim Waterson for the tip.)
Quick Links
“Last year I was battling the greatest entertainment system the world ever unleashed. A student would listen to my pleas, say they would get up, and then immediately fuck off on their phone again. Why would you play in the gym when you could sit against the wall and watch endless entertainment personally curated for your tastes? Now I battle boredom, and that’s a winnable fight.” A New York teacher on what happened after their school banned phones. This feels like the most obvious no-brainer policy to me; the fact that Labour won’t adopt it (when British voters demonstrably love soft authoritarianism) seems like a sad reflection of the lobbying power of Big Tech (Substack).
Plug zone: I joined Katie Herzog on Blocked and Reported to talk Supreme Court (UK), Joe Rogan vs Douglas Murray, and why Silicon Valley loves group chats. Plus a little preview of The Genius Myth (Substack).
“Bezos has yet to clarify what, exactly, a focus on “free markets and personal liberties” might mean for the Post’s Opinions section. He and Sánchez are both devoted readers of Bari Weiss’s Free Press, a Substack publication that espouses a broadly anti-woke ideology. Last year, the couple hosted a book party for the author Jonathan Haidt, which was attended by Kardashian, John Legend, and Tom Hanks; Weiss moderated the evening’s conversation.” A New Yorker longread on The Washington Post.
A fun piece absolutely slating Sam Altman’s olive oil use.
“I do not think genius can exist unless the potential genius believes in the possibility of being understood. I think the reason some writers refuse to publish in their lifetime is that they're protecting that sense of possibility.” Naomi Kanakia just got a rave write-up in the New Yorker for publishing her new creative work on Substack. I enjoyed this non-fiction post on safeguarding your talent (Woman of Letters).
This week on Strong Message Here, Armando and I discussed shibboleths—words or phrases that people are urged to say, to show which side of an issue they are on. We took “trans women are women” and “genocide in Gaza” as our two main examples. (Pity our producer Gwyn, who signed up to edit a comedy programme and instead got handed the two most incendiary topics the BBC can cover.) If you want more of me and Armando, we are doing a live event in June around my book launch. Tickets here.
See you next time!
The Emma I want to be: Has already read the New Yorker piece rather than adding it as an 'I will get to that tab'
The Emma I actually am: Has already watched the Tom Cruise clip twice.
I do think an underrated part of mental health management is learning to distrust your own first instincts or impressions. In many cases, the way you understand people, pick up their social cues, react to their actions, can be misunderstood through the warping lens of mental illness. The modern solution of the world being more accommodating is important. But in the process the equal responsibility of the sufferer to acknowledge his impaired judgment, to second-guess himself, to apologize when misjudging, seems to have been absolved. It’s now referred to as “masking”, and the expectation is regarded as almost an abuse of the sufferer. But if you refuse to acknowledge where your behaviour has crossed a reasonable social norm, all you are doing is declaring a Victim Olympics, where the rules of engagement are always set by whoever is suffering the most.
The other day, I started crying when the cafeteria guy accidentally added sauce to my meat. I’m anxious, depressed, pregnant, heat-addled. I have every diagnostic justification for my reaction. But it was still an overreaction and a shitty way to treat a server, so I apologized. I don’t think mental-illness-indentitarian approaches encourage understanding where you have overstepped.