In the nearly three years I have been writing this blog, I have made many comments about the lack of availability of mental health services. In yesterday’s NY Times, long time opinion writer David Brooks shared a compelling story of losing a very close friend, Pete, to depression. Here are excerpts from the article. This is worth your time!!!
……Over the next months, severe depression was revealed to me as an unimagined abyss. I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness. As the philosophers Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch have written, it is not just sorrow; it is a state of consciousness that distorts perceptions of time, space, and self.
The journalist Sally Brampton called depression a landscape that “is cold and black and empty. It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.”
I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect and love the person; it’s to show that you haven’t given up on him or her, that you haven’t walked away.
The years went by, and medications and treatment programs continued to fail. Pete and Jen began to realize how little the medical community knows about what will work. They also began to realize that mental health care is shockingly siloed. Pete saw outstanding doctors who devoted themselves to him, but they work only within their specific treatment silo. When one treatment didn’t work, Pete would get shuttled off to some other silo to begin again. Jen recently emailed me that when she had a cancer recurrence, in the middle of Pete’s depression, she had a “tumor board” — three different cancer experts (a surgeon, an oncologist and a radiation oncologist) — who coordinated her care. In our experience, there is none of this in mental health,” she wrote me. In many places, there is no one looking at the whole picture and the whole patient. “If one more mental health professional tells me ‘Everyone did their best,’ I will scream,” Jen wrote. “If this is our best, it is not nearly good enough.”
We had dinner a few days before Pete died. Jen and I tried to keep the conversation bouncing along. But apparently their car ride home was heart-rending. “How can I not be able to talk to my oldest friend?” Pete asked. “Brooksie can talk to people. I can’t.”…
I don’t know what he was thinking on his final day, but I have read that depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better. I have no evidence for this, but knowing Pete as I did, I strongly believe that he erroneously convinced himself that he was doing this to help his family and ease the hardship his illness had caused them. Living now in the wreckage, I can tell you that if you ever find yourself having that thought, it is completely wrong.
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Here is a word to the wise about Artificial Intelligence from a NY Times podcast with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Altman’s acknowledgment of A.I.’s downsides and his belief that no company, including his, should be trusted to solve the problems of conspiracy theories and misinformation on the internet. “Where we are right now is not where we want to be,” Altman said. “The way this should work is that there are extremely wide bounds of what these systems can do that are decided by not Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that.”
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The following is excerpts from an article by Detroit News investigative reporter Chad Livingood and modified by me.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s chance to make good on her 2018 campaign promise to “fix the damn roads” finally arrived Wednesday but like those before her she kicked the can down the pockmarked road. Whitmer’s proposed 2024 fiscal year budget contained no bold new solutions for fixing what really ails Michigan’s transportation infrastructure. Instead, the Democratic governor boasted about debt-financed highway construction and the status quo for local roads without any new taxes.
In Wayne County, just 13% of lane miles for local roads are rated in good condition, according to data from the Whitmer’s state government. In Macomb County, 50% of local roads were rated by engineers in bad condition. A decade ago, this figure was 44%, illustrating how hard it is for the county road department to keep up with crumbling infrastructure.
While Whitmer has injected $3.5 billion into state highways through new state debt local road conditions are where the real crisis exists. And Whitmer’s new budget plan does little to address crumbling local streets and county roads. Instead, the governor is leaning on President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, which even some fellow Democrats acknowledge is not making it to the local roads. Senator Veronia Klinefelt, D-Eastpointe, said Tuesday at a committee hearing. “There’s no plan for the local roads.”
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Quote of the Day: “If this is our best, it is not nearly good enough.” Jen from the above article on depression.
Orchid of the Day: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI for acknowledging the weakness of AI companies in controlling, monitoring, and managing misinformation and conspiracy theories on the internet. See above.
Onion of the Day: Governor Whitmer and the breaking of her promise to “fix the damn roads”. It is now official.
Question of the Day: Former VP Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor investigating the January 6 insurrection. Will this be the beginning of the end of the former presidents political career?
Video of the Day:
The beautiful voice of Andy Williams paying tribute to Burt Bacharach who died yesterday at age 94.