Dive into the archives.
- June 2011: Depleted in America
It is lonely in America. Sometimes, of course, our loneliness is stuffed full of self-satisfaction; but it often plummets in depletion to despair and confusion. These too are lonely states. From Reisman’s “The Lonely Crowd” to Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”, a trajectory of social development was begun with two recent contributions weighing in from the [...]
- Making Sense of This Non-Depression
Woke up this morning to the radio announcer’s chirp confirming that the Recession was over and that most economists agreed. OK, it won’t be reflected in employment statistics, and there will be a lot of people out of work, but things are good. We’ll see by the Third Quarter. The S&P is over 900, the [...]
- Stunned By the Dow
Watching the market drop precipitously, again, I wonder at my friends’ silence. Exhaustion? Too much time since the last drop, too much hope spent (“my broker is a genius….see here, we’re up again!”) one time too many. Stunned? Incapable of considering the implications: too too too too to wrap the mind around. As I write, [...]
- Outflanking the Recession Avalanche: Fighting Depression
Like most of us, I’ve become a newspaper junkie: whether paper or on-line, luxuriating in the onrush of information as markets fluctuate and both corporations and nation-states tremble in the shadow of Moody’s. It’s a pleasure akin to visiting the dental hygienist: the discrete pain of acceptable bloodletting. But then, I have to be in [...]
- “Recession Psychosis”
My psychotherapist colleagues knew it was coming, but Saturday’s Times confirmed it: the severe symptoms of anxiety, despair, and even sucidality they’re calling “recession psychosis”— not a formal DSM diagnosis— but descriptive enough. Studies of unemployment reflect that downsizing is the only traumatizing life event which prevents sufferers from returning to their pre-morbid ‘setpoint” of [...]
