Fascism, Depression and Suicide, and Long COVID - Dinner Table Digest № 42
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I have some news about my health to start us off today! I just came back from an appointment with my oncologist after my latest CT Scan, and I was told that not only did everything still look good inside, we’re now at the point where we can move to once-per-year scans. While CT scans are not the most invasive of procedures, they do emit a lot of x-rays, radiation that can, with enough exposure and time, develop into its own cancerous mess. So the goal is to keep them to a minimum wherever possible. At the ten year mark (2025), provided everything still looks good, we’ll likely discontinue the scans altogether.
Now, onto today’s links!
Sections: A Friend in Despair / Fascism By Any Other Name / Long COVID as a Neurological Disease / How to Talk with your Friends who have Long COVID
How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair? - David Brooks - New York Times
David Brooks runs through the raw difficulty of supporting a friend who is going through a serious depression, one that ultimately ended in suicide.
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. …
As Pete spoke of his illness, it sometimes seemed as if there were two of him. There was the one enveloped in pain and the other one who was observing himself and could not understand what was happening. That second self was the Pete I spoke to for those three years. He was analyzing the anguish. He was trying to figure it out. He was going to the best doctors. They were trying one approach after another. The cloud would not lift.
I am told that one of the brutalities of the illness is the impossibility of articulating exactly what the pain consists of. Pete would give me the general truth, “Depression sucks.” But he tried not to burden me with the full horrors of what he was going through. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, at least until the end, or not at all.
Oblivion - Ankor
From the Catalan alt-metal band Ankor, a song called Oblivion, a reflection on the abyss of depression and self-hatred,. The ending takes my breath away every time I watch this.
Calling a Fascist a Fascist Is Descriptive—Not a Slur - Paul Hennessy - Common Dreams
I am not afraid to call a fascist a fascist, nor am I afraid to call a Nazi sympathizer as such, as I have done repeatedly whenever Waterloo Region Record columnist Luisa D’Amato platformed the Nazi apologist Faith Goldy and her ‘useful idiot’ Lindsey Shepherd. In my view, it’s important use clear language to describe threatening ideologies, rather than using euphemisms and dancing around the issue. Paul Hennessey seems to agree:
Roughly a quarter of Americans, according to a recent survey, are authoritarian followers and wannabee authoritarian leaders must compete for their loyalty and votes.
This leads to a performance art sort of “arms race” among those who aspire to lead the growing fascist movement in the United States and ultimately, thus, around the world. The stakes are high so they are working hard to one-up each other.
— When one authoritarian leader/Republican with higher ambitions criminalizes abortion, the next will go after birth control.
— When one bans discussion of Black history in schools, the next will ban books and prosecute teachers.
— When one throws hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters off the rolls, the next will criminalize voting so he can arrest and parade Black people before the cameras.
— When one bans mask mandates, another will invoke a grand jury to investigate vaccine manufacturers.
— If one villainizes Hispanic immigrants as “murderers and rapists,” another will put into place a vast surveillance system to identify workers in America sending money to relatives in Mexico.
Republicans have decried Social Security and similar programs as “socialist big government” that threatens Americans’ freedoms since the 1930s, but these same politicians today are busily erecting fascist big government systems to spy on their citizens, threaten girls and women with imprisonment, deny representation to racial minorities, and prevent access for their citizens to basic rights like healthcare — all while cutting taxes for their morbidly rich sponsors.
Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments - Stephani Sutherland - Scientific American
In the first of two pieces on the burgeoning problem of Long COVID we learn that scientists and clinicians now see neurological deficiencies as a key component of the disease.
The most common, persistent and disabling symptoms of long COVID are neurological. Some are easily recognized as brain- or nerve-related: many people experience cognitive dysfunction in the form of difficulty with memory, attention, sleep and mood. Others may seem rooted more in the body than the brain, such as pain and postexertional malaise (PEM), a kind of “energy crash” that people experience after even mild exercise. But those, too, result from nerve dysfunction, often in the autonomic nervous system, which directs our bodies to breathe and digest food and generally runs our organs on autopilot. This so-called dysautonomia can lead to dizziness, a racing heart, high or low blood pressure, and gut disturbances, sometimes leaving people unable to work or even function independently. …
Most of the first recognized cases of long COVID were in patients who needed extended respiratory therapy or who had obvious organ damage that caused lasting symptoms. People reporting neurological symptoms were often overlooked or dismissed as traumatized by their initial illness and hospitalization. But as 2020 came to an end, says Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “we started getting to a place of sorting through what was really going on ... and it became very evident at that time that neuropsychiatric symptoms were quite prevalent,” most commonly fatigue, malaise, brain fog, smell loss and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as cognitive problems and even psychosis.
What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID - Jennifer Senior - The Atlantic
In this piece, the author gets deeply personal about what it is like to live with Long COVID, making some suggestions about how to support your friends who are still bedridden months after contracting COVID.
The nature of my dizziness changed, feeling more like a gyroscope was spinning in my head, or like I was being pulled slantwise by magnetic raindrops, every damn second. Then came the whale of all symptoms: My head started to vibrate, painfully, every time I walked or talked.
People have asked me a lot about this. I really don’t know how else to explain it. I mean, imagine a tuning fork inside your brain. Every time I take a step, I feel it in my skull. Ditto when I speak. My latest combo of meds blunts most of the pain that comes with it. But the vibrating remains, and it’s driving me mad. I’m waiting on my insurance company to approve Botox injections to my skull. (Oh, the irony of being a 53-year-old woman praying for Botox in a place where it will have no visible aesthetic benefit.) …
You see the problem, right? My aching chest, my breathlessness—it all means more doctors. And I am really, really sick of doctors. Most of them know nothing, and if they can’t help you, they have little time for you. Many of them dramatically underestimate quality of life as an issue.
The shape-shifting nature of long-COVID symptoms also makes our medical system ill-suited to deal with long COVID. (Actually, it’s ill-suited for a thousand reasons. But this is one.) Telling your long-COVID story in 15 minutes, which is what most doctors have for you, is not possible. You develop shorthand. You resort to metaphors. Both are problems. One doctor asked if I thought there was an actual gyroscope in my head, for instance. “Uh, this is a vestibular problem I’m describing,” I said, “not a psychiatric one.” Asshole.
The worst part? Because no one understands what causes long COVID, even the best doctors can only treat your symptoms separately. My blood pressure gets two medications. My vibrating head gets a third. My vestibular symptoms get a fourth. My pain gets a fifth. Inflammation gets a sixth. The microclots I may or may not have, which may or may not cause long COVID, require three different supplements, which may or may not work.
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Very happy to hear the good news Peter!