Not so fast on ‘alcohol is good for you’

Most those highly hyped studies that claim that? They don’t meat the scientific smell test, and, shades of Big Tobacco, they’re financed by the alcohol industry. That’s complete with paid-off scientists denying the research subsidies had any effect.

George Vaillant 42 years later

George Vaillant, a psychology professor at Harvard, inherited what was then the Grant Project. Under Vaillant’s hands, it became the largest- and longest-ever longitudinal study of human psychology.

Atlantic Monthly has an update on Vaillant’s work after 42 years.

Although not planned as such, the survey has many invaluable spinoffs, including seeing how manic-depressive or bipolar illness was eventually distinguished from schizophrenia, the state of development in psychology in general, information on human happiness and its whys, and more.

The more includes it becoming an invaluable longitudinal source on drug and alcohol addiction and recovery.

Apropos of that and other things, the Atlantic story has a couple of good rhetorical questions:

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way?

Probably not, unless, riffing on Thomas Szasz, we rely on groupthink societal definitions of what the “good life” is. Or, what “happiness” is, for that matter.

That said, Vaillant himself developed some intriguing findings about “positive” emotions:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

I will vouch for that indeed.

Of course, so could Vaillant.

He got married three times, and after six years with Wife No. 3, went back to Wife No.

The frustrations

I think the biggest recovery frustration is knowing that I lost a certain amount of both “self” and opportunities for career, relationship and other development in the real world, but …

Not knowing how much.

As I sit single (has some advantages), with a job paying less than $30K (Texas is a low cost-of-living state, but still), and in a career I drifted into after trying to walk in my dad’s footsteps all the way to graduate divinity school.

And, as Eliot said in Sweeney Agonisties, I do measure my life in coffee-spoons, often.

Take child sexual abuse and child PTSD seriously

Let’s stop blaming priests, or dirty old men on park benches, and instead look inside the four walls of home, or relatives’ homes, a lot more. And, let’s recognize that this causes “PTSD on the home front” (now that, due to the Iraq War, we’re sadly aware of PTSD). That, and more, is in my annual April column.

I thought secular recovery groups were more scientific

It’s all right and good for a group like Lifering Secular Recovery to bash Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous for their reliance on a higher power, confession of sins, etc.

But, for Lifering to have the founder of an acupuncture-based addiction clinic as a principal speaker at its annual convention is, at least least, a bit uninformed and at the most, a bit hypocritical.

For the real poop on acupuncture and acupressure, read the Skeptic’s Dictionary.

A reply to 'Invictus'

Am I indeed the captain of my soul?
I find it hard to believe that is so.
Translating the individual “I”
To the global core of humanity
I think that it’s well-nigh impossible.
The individual human psyche,
Convoluted and self-referential,
Means the “I” is not quite that simple.
As for that “master” subroutine inside,
The one that supposedly masters “I”?
The king always faces peasant revolts.
If not that, a master can go haywire.
And, when that happens, then who masters it?
– April 2, 2009

INVICTUS, by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

"Process" addictions....

Does giving them a name make them any easier to deal with? If I had had the same problems with drinking as I do with Internet p*n-surfing, I'd be drunk in a gutter and hoping for death right now. Being lonely, bored, fearful, anxious or whatever does NOT help.. and acting out just makes all of that worse.

Has anything changed in 11 years?

SUNSET DRIFTING

The sunset this evening
Was like the one I saw
In Jacksboro eleven years ago.
Where have all those years gone?
Treading water?
I haven’t even done that, economically.
I have done that, and more, career-wise.
I have higher levels of confidence, dedication and skills
Than in Jacksboro.
All in the name of a career
In an apparently dying industry.
A non-Jungian symbol for my life?
I’m not quite dead yet, though.
And neither is my current job,
Nor my career hopes.
The sunset is long faded into night now,
As I try to reflect on what emotions it stimulated
Besides a bit of nostalgia
And a full measure of semi-poignant reflection.
No, my past eleven years don’t feel “wasted,”
But, whatever “better” means for me,
I wish I were “better” off than I am.
Whoever I am.

— March 18, 2009

Seeking entry to Middle-Earth

My senior year in high school, I was surely battling some unrecognized depression. My dad was in graduate school; his divinity school had those “mushroom lights” around most of the sidewalks on campus.

Anyway, I had already read “Lord of the Rings” once, and was re-reading it. It prompted me to try to call out to Earendil one night while walking by the mushroom lights, as described by this extended-haiku poem.

A ELBERETH GITHONIEL

Earendil, hear;
A Elbereth Githoniel;
Elrond, set me free.

So said a young teen,
Depressed and seeking escape —
Frodo’s Middle Earth.

But nothing happened;
No transmogrification;
Mushroom lights stayed fixed.

Homeward back I trudged
Depressed and distressed yet more
With no one to hear.

Is this all Fourth Age?
Elbereth availed me not —
I still lack magic.

Want to quit drinking? Address quitting smoking, too

New studies show a synergistic effect between the two addictions. They also show that cigarette-smoking alcoholics smoke more than non-alcoholic smokers. And, while I'm not in Big Pharma's pocket, and don't normally tout particular products, it appears Chantix can help on the smoking side.