Blog Archives

Playing games for mental health

2/21/2014

Below is an interesting talk on online games and their contribution to positive mental health. It is delivered by Jane McGonigal, a gamer and game developer. She was inspired to research this area due to her own experience following a brain injury when she became depressed and suicidal. One in three people who suffer a traumatic brain injury, also experience suicidal ideation and it happened to her. Although this may seem counter-intuitive, she shares research from East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Additionally, research at Stanford University has been documenting how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, and more committed to our goals.

She shares something from scientific literature that I have not come across; namely post-traumatic growth following a traumatic event. Ironically, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets. She developed a game called "Super Better" with four quests intended to boost four areas of resilience; physical, mental, and emotional, and social resilience.

1. Physical Resilience: To facilitate this you literally do not sit still. Stand up, take three steps, make a fist in the air, and move them over your head. The point is to move frequently.
2. Mental Resilience: Snap your fingers and count backwards from 50. Or alternatively, count backwards from 100 going down by 3 each time.
3. Emotional Resilience: Find a window and look out of it. Or if you are indoors or cannot access a window, pick your favourite animal and google baby (animal 0f your choice). Also try to experience three positive emotions for every negative one.
4. Social Resilience: Text or e-mail someone with a quick thanks or shake hands with someone for six seconds.

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Saint John Coltrane

2/16/2014

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As much of a fan of jazz and Coltrane as I am, even I think this might be a bit much. In San Francisco there is an African Orthodox Church that is entitled St. John Coltrane. Devotees come from all over the world to worship at this church.

As one of the interviewees in the documentary below notes, there are many fanatics who follow people but only Coltrane inspires, literally, religious fervour. Coltrane was, by all accounts, an intensely passionate man which is reflected in his music. In interviews, ironically, he is very quiet, gentle and laid back but his music was anything but. The documentary notes that he was dominated by female influences growing up and his mother, who he resembles, was very spiritual. While Coltrane was involved in heroin and alcohol, a spiritual awakening in 1957 inspired him to move in another direction. In fact, he lost his place with Miles Davis due to his lack of reliability when he was in the throes of his addiction. But eventually he did become sober. He felt that he would lose his music and made a promise to God that if it returned he would become a preacher with his horn.

He had a hit with "My Favourite Things" which is in the Music Interludes on this page and you can listen to it there. It became his signature song. Improvising it was unique as it is a familiar song and melody. He played it over an over again throughout his career.

Themes that emerge from those who knew him was this almost unquenchable wellspring of creativity that would explode in, sometimes, an inchoate way through his instruments. People feel like listening to him is a religious experience. Certainly, A Love Supreme, stands as a unique homage to his religious ecstasy. A Love Supreme, to me, personifies his spirituality. Friends describe how he composed A Love Supreme far from the busy New York, Manhattan scene. During the composition of A Love Supreme, he would meditate in the morning and then drive to the studio. Part of what makes A Love Supreme unique is that the music is also a poem and you can almost hear words in each of the notes. Coltrane is incredibly vulnerable in his music; his passion, fear, love, and raw emotion explode from the sax. Many listening have had to walk out as it was so intense.

Ascension, another piece, has been described as those who played with him as a draining experience of 45 minutes of prolonged, intense, play. His music split the jazz community in that many felt that he lost the melody, plot, rhythm and the music seemed like a jumble of disjointed tones all over the place. Towards the end of his career, he moved more and more to pure sound and raw experimentation with no seeming cohesion or underlying structure. The roots of the music were in eastern mysticism. Coltrane also got into LSD and that might have "informed" some of his work.

For my part, his later work is too far out there for me to follow and it resemble too much psychotic breaks with reality. Still, I respect and admire his work, his art, and listen as respectfully as I can for what wisdom might be there. When an interviewer asked how he would like to be remembered, Coltrane replied, "as a saint". And so the title of this post, St. John Coltrane.

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Violence against women - it's a men's issue: Jackson Katz

2/7/2014

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This is a very provocative talk but Jackson Katz. Jackson Katz has done a lot of work with military and other groups addressing sexual exploitation and violence. He argues how men have been erased from violence against women issues. He shares grammatically how language conspires to render men invisible. Basing his example on the research of Julia Penelope, he writes.

"John beat Mary."
John is the subject. Beat is the verb. Mary is the object. Good sentence. Next he moves to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice.

"Mary was beaten by John."
Now it's all about Mary

Then he discusses how the language of beaten has been supplanted by the legal term battered.
"Mary was battered."

And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is,
"Mary is a battered woman."

So now Mary's very identity -- Mary is a battered woman -- is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.

He goes on to discuss how we can change definitions of men, boyhood, systems, and structures. By framing the issue as just a "woman's issue", we do a disservice to the change that is required in society and in culture.

The same system that produces men who abuse men, produces men who abuse other men so we have it in our best interest to change and look at male culture. He works primarily with the US military and athletes. He looks at it from the point of view as the "bystander" approach instead of the perpetrator/victim binary which of course can be man/woman or woman/man or man/man,or woman/woman. The bystander approach takes a different tack than this.

Well worth the time it takes to listen.

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A Conference Call in Real Life

2/1/2014

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For all those who have ever had to teleconference, this is hilarious!!

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My Pensées

The title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal. This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health and education. I write and am a social justice advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.