Aliens in New Zealand

There's a reason that scientists don't put much faith in eyewitness accounts, and it's not just because of hoaxers and liars.

Eminent astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tells a story about a policeman who was driving on a winding mountain road at night, and called in to his dispatcher with a frantic account of pursuing a UFO.  The light in the sky, he said, was bright white, and was bobbing and weaving as he followed it.  Nothing natural could move that way, the policeman said.  It had to be a spaceship from another world.

It turned out that the policeman wasn't chasing a spaceship at all, he was chasing... the planet Venus.  It was low over the horizon, and as the policeman maneuvered his car along the winding road, it appeared to move back and forth.  He was so focused on the combination of keeping the "UFO" in sight and not running off the road that he honestly didn't realize the apparent bouncing about was because of his motion, not the "UFO's."

So, as Tyson put it, we need something more than "I saw it."  In science, that simply isn't enough.

Which is why the "eyewitness account" that hit the news last week from a 70-year-old New Zealander is not really carrying much weight with the scientific world.  Alec Newald gave an interview in which he finally made public a claim that in 1989, he was driving from Auckland to Rotorua, and was abducted by aliens...

... for ten days.

"I was like what the hell is going on here?" he said.  "I was driving the car and it felt like a tonne of bricks had landed on me, like someone had poured cement on me.  I felt like I was pushed into the seat of that car.  I was paralyzed, I couldn’t turn the wheel or apply the brakes or do anything."

Newald says he lost consciousness, and woke up in a "cavernous space filled with blue flashing lights."  At first, he thought he'd died and this was the afterlife, although why the afterlife would have blue flashing lights is a bit of a mystery.  Maybe heaven has KMart-style Blue Light Specials, I dunno.

Shortly afterwards, Newald said he became aware that he was basically incorporeal, further supporting his guess that he was in spirit form.  "I was just like a wispy ghost with no form at all," he said.  "I found I could maneuver myself by moving my consciousness forward or sideways."

But that was only the beginning.  Newald felt a "tap on the shoulder," which is itself a little odd as I wouldn't think an incorporeal ghost would have a shoulder to tap.  But he turned, and found himself confronted by a strange sight.

Looking up, I realized we were being approached by three aliens, the tallest of them looking like my escort from earlier on.  The second one was just a little shorter and was male as far as I could tell. The third was smaller, much smaller, and walked ahead of the other two.  He, for want of a better word, was slightly built with a roundish head and rather unusual, squinty eyes which were well-spaced and placed rather lower down than are our own.  He had a very small mouth, but I did not notice any ears or much of a nose.  His physical appearance, however, was of almost no consequence, for I was immediately struck with an almost overpowering feeling of his presence.  I cannot say it was hypnotic, if anything, the opposite. It was as if his energy was being projected and absorbed by my body.

He then was told to step into a machine, which would "build a body" for him -- and that the aliens were trying to modify their own bodies so they could exist on Earth.

Alec Newald's drawing of one of the aliens he saw during his abduction experience

Newald says the aliens kept him for ten days, showing him around the place.  They were entirely friendly, and at the end of the time, he was returned back to Earth, and found himself back in his car on the way to Rotorua, as if no time at all had elapsed.  But despite the fact that this crazy experience had left him back where he started, he didn't find it so easy to deal with.

"It's a very hard pill to swallow," he said.  "Try absorbing that and continue to live your life as if nothing has changed...  Perhaps an even bigger surprise was, with the exception of a few, the more I tried to share this information the harder my life became.  I was ostracized by people you might have expected support from.  In fact, even before I tried to share any of the things I’d learnt, my life started to become more than difficult.  It became impossible to continue on as before."

Okay.  So here's the problem.  Alec Newald might have been abducted by aliens.  I am of the opinion -- and I'm up front about the fact that it is just an opinion, based on what I think is a logical argument but no facts whatsoever -- that life is probably very common in the universe, and chances are, there's a good bit of intelligent life out there, too.  It's possible, but less plausible, that some highly advanced civilization crossed interstellar spaces to Earth and kidnapped a dude in New Zealand for study.

But in order to be confident that this actually happened, scientists and skeptics need more than Mr. Newald's account.  It just doesn't meet the minimum standard for evidence that would be considered a reliable support for a scientific claim.  Note that I'm not saying Mr. Newald is lying; but as Tyson's story of the Venus-chasing policeman shows, our sensory-perceptive and cognitive systems are not exactly 100% reliable.  "Trust your eyes" is not what a skeptic should be saying; closer to the truth is "don't trust anyone's eyes, especially your own."

So unfortunately, I'm not jumping to the conclusion I've seen more than once in media sources that wrote about Alec Newald's claims, that this represents an unshakable support for intelligent alien life visiting the Earth.  I don't know what happened to Mr. Newald -- whether he really did get kidnapped by benevolent extraterrestrials, or he had some kind of dissociative experience, or is conflating a dream with reality in his memory, or is simply making it all up.  What I do know is that this account doesn't change the situation with respect to alien intelligence -- there's just not enough to this claim that it should be taken as proof one way or the other.

***************************

In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Birds of unusual size

Because today is election day, and if I stress any more about the results I'm going to burst into flame, today at Skeptophilia headquarters we are focusing on: enormous birds from Madagascar.

There has been a lot of research recently on "Elephant Birds," which (as you might expect from the name) were not your average chickadee.  They belong to the family Aepyornithidae in the clade Palaeognathae, which also includes ostriches, tinamous, cassowaries (better known as the Australian Badass Death Bird), and kiwis.  The name "Palaeognathae" means "old jaw," because they retain the structure of the palate and jaw closer to their reptilian ancestors.  (All the other birds are in the clade Neognathae -- "new jaw.")

Elephant Birds' closest living relatives are kiwis, which is kind of amazing given the fact that the largest species was four meters tall and weighed an estimated 650 kilograms, while kiwis look like bizarre walking footballs with feathers.  Sadly, the Elephant Birds were all extinct by 1,200 C.E., and no one knows exactly why, but overhunting by humans is a definite possibility.

Reconstruction of Aepyornis maximus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Acrocynus, Aepyornis maximus 01 L.D., CC BY-SA 3.0]

The most recent study was of the brain cases from fossilized Elephant Birds, and from this they concluded that the whole group was likely to be nocturnal animals that had poor vision and relied largely on their sense of smell.  It makes sense; the same is true of kiwis.  The logic behind the conjecture is explained in the paper "Nocturnal Giants: Evolution of the Sensory Ecology in Elephant Birds and Other Palaeognaths Inferred from Digital Brain Reconstructions," by Christopher R. Torres and Julia A. Clarke, of the University of Texas at Austin.  The authors write:

Palaeoneurological studies can provide clues to the ecologies and behaviours of extinct birds because avian brain shape is correlated with neurological function.  We digitally reconstruct endocasts of two elephant bird species, Aepyornis maximus and A. hildebrandti, and compare them with representatives of all major extant and recently extinct palaeognath lineages.  Among palaeognaths, we find large olfactory bulbs in taxa generally occupying forested environments where visual cues used in foraging are likely to be limited.  We detected variation in olfactory bulb size among elephant bird species, possibly indicating interspecific variation in habitat.  Elephant birds exhibited extremely reduced optic lobes, a condition also observed in the nocturnal kiwi.  Kiwi, the sister taxon of elephant birds, have effectively replaced their visual systems with hyperdeveloped olfactory, somatosensory and auditory systems useful for foraging.  We interpret these results as evidence for nocturnality among elephant birds. Vision was likely deemphasized in the ancestor of elephant birds and kiwi.

A study earlier this year, by James P. Hansford and Samuel T. Turvey of London's Institute of Zoology, revised what we know about the group's taxonomy.  Their paper, "Unexpected Diversity Within the Extinct Elephant Birds (Aves: Aepyornithidae) and a New Identity for the World's Largest Bird," which appeared in Royal Society Open Science in September, identified a new species, the aptly-named Vorombe titan.

So this is all pretty impressive, considering that we're talking about a group of extinct birds whose most recent common ancestor with anything that's still alive was sixty million years ago, only five million years after a giant meteorite ended the dinosaurs' hegemony.  Another cool thing is that given how recently they became extinct -- only eight hundred years ago, give or take -- they're a possible candidate for a Jurassic Park-style resurrection.

Which would be amazing.  Of course, I'd prefer it to happen somewhere other than upstate New York.  We have enough trouble with fluffy bunnies in our vegetable garden, much less 650-kilogram ostriches on steroids who come out at night and hunt by their sense of smell.  And remember that these things are kissing cousins to the cassowaries.  We can't rule out their being ill-tempered, as well.

So maybe it's just as well they're extinct.  For one thing, if they were still around, it'd only be a matter of time before Donald Trump decided to train them to protect the borders, and the next thing we knew there'd be hordes of FX-17 Giant Flightless Tactical Assault Birds running amok in Arizona.  And heaven knows we don't want that.

***************************

In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Storm's a-risin'

You might recall that when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast in October 2012, devastating large areas and taking 147 lives, we were quick to find out what had caused the monster storm.

It wasn't warm water and low shear in the western Atlantic.  It wasn't, in a larger sense, due to climate change providing more heat energy to juice up big storms.  No, it was caused by the most powerful meteorological force known:

Gays.

This, at least, was the contention of John McTernan, who said that Sandy was divine punishment for our acceptance of LGBTQ people.  Which makes me wonder why God's aim is so bad.  Sending a huge-ass storm to target one, fairly spread-out group of people, is poor planning.  My guess is just as many holy people were harmed by Sandy as unholy ones.

Oh, well. "God works in mysterious ways."

It's nice to know, though, that our LGBTQ friends aren't the only ones who are capable of stirring up killer storms.  On right-wing commentator Chris McDonald's show The McFiles, we learned a couple of weeks ago that Hurricane Florence was created by Democrats to destroy any evidence that they're committing massive voter fraud in North Carolina.  Here's the exact quote:

I saw where North Carolina had done the voter fraud stuff for the machines, for this, that, and the other; they had caught it or something like that and they were going after it.  I said, ‘Oh boy.’  Sure enough, there is was; here comes the hurricane.  Bigger than life, there is was.  And I just found out, literally, though another source of mine, contact this morning, sure enough, they said it was in fact made by man and generated by the HAARP system, basically, and it was meant to try and flood North Carolina and flood out the evidence of what was going on with the voter fraud.

My opinion is that if Democrats could create and steer storms, there'd already have been tornadoes at Lindsay Graham's doorstep.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But as we've seen before, there's no claim that is so completely batshit crazy that it can't be bettered, and we saw this last week with a proclamation by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who said that we've seen yet another storm that has nothing to do with plain old ordinary meteorology.  Hurricane Michael, which devastated the panhandle of Florida, was sent there by Democrats because they're angry about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what Taylor said:

Does anyone else think it's strange that Justice K is sworn in and we have a major hurricane inbound?  DS scared?  They should be.  Retaliation?  Absolutely.  We will not be intimidated.  Warriors arise, time to go to work!  You know what to do...

Okay, I have just a few questions about this.

1. Isn't it kind of funny that when the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) get mad, they only send hurricanes to places that always get hurricanes anyhow?  And only during hurricane season?  If the Democrats (and/or the gays and/or God) sent a hurricane to Omaha, Nebraska in February, I might be impressed.
2. Even if you believe this, it's another example of abysmal aim.  The storm came nowhere near Brett Kavanaugh.
3. If Taylor's "warriors" do arise, and go to work, what the hell are they planning to do?  Maybe they're taking a page from the Persian Emperor Xerxes's book, wherein he attempted to bridge the Hellespont and his bridge got destroyed in a storm, so he sentenced the ocean to three hundred lashes.  His men duly carried out the sentence, whipping the waves.  I'd have done the same thing, since saying to Xerxes, "I'll do no such thing, because it's a really stupid idea" was a good way of finding yourself next in line.  And unlike the sea, which probably didn't care, I'm guessing when a human gets three hundred lashes it hurts like a motherfucker.
4. Does Mark Taylor always come up with this kind of stuff?  Because right now he sounds like someone whose skull is filled with cobwebs and dead insects, but who is somehow still talking.

So anyhow.  I can pretty much guarantee that none of the above-mentioned storms were generated by anything but atmospheric conditions at the time, and no one is able to summon a storm on command and then steer it.  Maybe God can, I dunno.  I'm certainly no expert in that realm.  But even he seems to be a little sketchy about the "steering" part.

I know that's kind of prosaic, and not nearly as interesting as divine retribution or evil HAARP-using Democrats or gays generating hurricanes with their giant rainbow-colored Storm-o-Matic.  But really, people.  Get a grip.  We're coming into snow season here in the Frozen North, and we have enough trouble with the ordinary kind of weather.  If every time we have a Winter Storm Warning I have to worry about whether it's an ordinary storm or some group with a vague vendetta creating bad weather to make me miserable, it's gonna be a really long winter.

***************************

In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Vote for your life

I made a comment a couple of days ago on social media that American citizens should vote on Tuesday as if their lives depended on it -- "because they do."

One person who responded to this said, "Come on.  Stop with the alarmist talk, it doesn't help anything or anyone.  My life depends neither on whether I vote nor who I vote for."

My response is that privilege will do that to you.  But you'd have to be blind not to see that not all Americans are so fortunate, and making this claim implies that you don't give a rat's ass what happens to them.  What I said was neither hyperbole nor a ham-handed attempt to stir people up; it was simply a fact, if not for everyone, for a great number of people who are finding their rights curtailed and in some cases their identities legislated out of existence.

Let me give you just one example -- Representative Matt Shea, of Washington State, who is on the ballot for re-election on Tuesday.  Shea is a religious nut job who just published a four-page "manifesto" outlining what should be our approach to fighting wars on God's behalf.  The part that stands out is this:

Rules of War

• Avoid bloodshed if possible.
• Make an offer of peace before declaring war.
• Not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness.
• Must surrender on terms of justice and righteousness:
• Stop all abortions;
• No same-sex marriage;
• No idolatry or occultism;
• No communism;
• Must obey Biblical Law.
• If they yield, must pay share of work or taxes.
• If they do not yield -- kill all males.

Yes -- there is a man running for Congress, as an incumbent, who believes that I (as a male supporter of same-sex marriage, and someone who doesn't obey biblical law) should be killed.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, of Spokane County, has turned over the "manifesto" to the FBI.  As well he should.  It is a direct, specific threat against a (large) group of American citizens based on one thing and one thing only -- religion.  If someone can explain to me the difference between this and ISIS's continual cry of "kill all the infidels," I'd appreciate it.

Gustave Doré, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1877) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As for Shea, he said the comments were "taken out of context," making me wonder in what context they could possibly be put that would make them acceptable to any reasonable human being.  "First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare," Shea said in a video.  "This document, in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly."

Which I'm calling bullshit on.  If you read the document, he is clearly not outlining, in some kind of academic way, the rules of holy warfare in Bronze-Age Israel.  He goes into some detail about the command structure of God's Army, using terms like "corporal," "sergeant," "captain," and so on.

Now, I'm no biblical scholar, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is that these are not terms that were used by Joshua's soldiers at the Siege of Jericho.

Oh, and he says that to be part of God's Army, guys need to be circumcised.

Is it just me, or are these ultra-religious nutcakes really fascinated by guys' naughty bits?  I swear, people like Shea care more about what I do with my dick than I do.

The scariest part of this is that this is not some lone loony crying out in the wilderness; this guy is in a credible position of being re-elected.  Not surprising considering our leadership; Vice President Mike Pence is himself an evangelical hard-liner, to the point that after the shootings at the Pittsburgh synagogue last week, he couldn't even bring himself to get an actual Jewish rabbi to offer words of comfort.  The guy who did the speaking -- Loren Jacobs -- is a member of the "messianic Jews," sometimes called "Jews for Jesus," who believe that Jews in general are destined for hell, and will only be saved if they accept Jesus.  (The other upside, I guess, is that they get to keep their cultural Judaism, which is why people like Jacobs don't speak of this as an actual conversion.)

So yes, voting for one of these people is saying that you don't care if people in demonized groups live in peace or get murdered.  At least own up to it and stop trying to soft-pedal the truth.

In my fifty-odd years of being aware of politics, next week's election is far and away the one that is the most crucial.  It feels like we're at a crossroads between turning our nation around, reclaiming the tolerance and acceptance that have always been part of our national heart, or accelerating the slide into fascism.  So let me amend my statement in the previous paragraph; not only is voting for people like Shea accepting Trump's brutal, ultra-Christian, white nationalist view of what the U.S.A. should be, not voting is the same thing.  Because it's fucking well certain that the people who are on Shea's side -- and Trump's -- are not going to sit this one out.

So next Tuesday, vote.  Shed your complacency.  Find others who aren't sure if they want to make the effort, and give them a gentle nudge.  Offer to drive people to the polls.  If we can't do this, I fear that we are in for a very, very dark time ahead.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fear itself

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about the horrifying suicide rate in the United States, and that overhauling mental health care needs to be a priority, last night I ran into a study showing that such debilitating conditions as anxiety and paranoia can be ameliorated significantly by using virtual reality therapy.

I can vouch for the difficulty of going through traditional therapy for depression and anxiety.  I have (at the time of this writing) been at one time on another on four different antidepressants and three different anxiolytics.  There was a merry carousel of nasty side effects, including thermonuclear-level acid reflux, a drop in libido to nearly zero, overwhelming fatigue, a loopy, disembodied sensation, and nausea.  One of the antidepressants had the effect of amplifying my anxiety to the point that I felt like I was in a mental lightning storm, and had nearly constant suicidal ideation.  (They took me off that one pronto.)  Another one worked, at least to some extent, but evidently my body habituated to it and the positive effects didn't last.

So the idea that there are other options is a real godsend to people like me, who fight mental illness every single day.  And the initial trials with virtual reality therapy show that it is at least as good as conventional therapy -- and doesn't come with side effects.

One patient in the study, a young man with paranoid schizophrenia, practiced for three months using a headset that brought him into the VR world of a coffee shop filled with people.  The patient and the researcher could adjust the controls to change the number, proximity, and friendliness of the people in the shop.  When an anxiety-producing situation is encountered, the patient is asked questions like, "What other explanation could there be for why the man in the red shirt is frowning at you?"

After the duration of the therapy, the young man's anxiety and paranoia had decreased significantly -- to the point that he was able to perform in a poetry slam in front of five hundred people.

[Image available through the Open Government License Photo: Sergeant Rupert Frere RLC/MOD]

The study, which appeared in the journal Lancet earlier this year, was a joint effort between researchers from several universities in the Netherlands.  "The key ingredient to an effective treatment for anxiety disorders is … you need to face your fears," says Stéphane Bouchard, a clinical cyberpsychologist at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada.  But instead of throwing patients out into a real world with real triggers -- social situations, spiders, heights, confined spaces, whatever -- mental health professionals (or the patients themselves) can control their exposure and dial up the intensity only when they feel like they're ready.

The reason it works is that it allows people to encounter the sources of their anxiety, and experience the emotions they elicit, in a completely safe environment.

That doesn't mean it's easy.  A VR program to ease arachnophobia caused one woman to draw her legs up onto her chair and sit like that for fifteen minutes.  "I’m not sure if anyone ripped the headset off," said Philip Lindner, a clinical psychologist at Stockholm University, "but a lot of people definitely started crying."

The technique has shown promise in treating PTSD, and there is now a program at Emory University in Atlanta to use it in treating Iraq War veterans who were left with lingering mental scars from the trauma they endured.

So I'd gladly volunteer to try this.  Given the relatively poor track record -- with me, at least -- of conventional therapy and medications, I'm certainly game to try something different.  So if VR headsets to treat anxiety become available, sign me up.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Mental health priorities

What do you hear about more on the news, homicides in the United States, or suicides in the United States?

Unless you're watching drastically different news media than I do, you answered "homicide."  The media, and many people in the government, harp continuously on how dangerous our cities are, how we're all terribly vulnerable, and how you need to protect yourself.  This, of course, plays right into the narrative of groups like the NRA, whose bread and butter is convincing people they're unsafe.

Now, don't get me wrong; there are dangerous places in the United States and elsewhere.  And I'm not arguing against -- hell, I'm not even addressing -- the whole issue of gun ownership and a person's right to defend him or herself.  But the sense in this country that homicide is a huge problem and suicide is largely invisible reflects a fundamental untruth.

Because in the United States, suicide is almost three times more common than homicide.  The most recent statistics on homicide is that there are 5.3 homicides per 100,000 people.  Not only is this lower than the global average (which in 2016 was 7.3 violent deaths per 100,000 people), it has been declining steadily since 1990.

Suicide, on the other hand?  The current rate is 13.0 suicides per 100,000 people, and unlike homicide, the rate has been steadily increasing.  Between 1999 and 2014, the suicide rate in the United States went up by 24%.

It's appalling that most Americans don't know this.  A study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington, Northeastern University, and Harvard University showed that the vast majority of United States citizens rank homicide as a far higher risk than suicide.

"This research indicates that in the scope of violent death, the majority of U.S. adults don't know how people are dying," said Erin Morgan, lead author and doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.  "Knowing that the presence of a firearm increases the risk for suicide, and that firearm suicide is substantially more common than firearm homicide, may lead people to think twice about whether or not firearm ownership and their storage practices are really the safest options for them and their household...  The relative frequencies that respondents reported didn't match up with the state's data when we compared them to vital statistics.  The inconsistency between the true causes and what the public perceives to be frequent causes of death indicates a gap in knowledge."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wildengamuld, Free Depression Stock Image, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This further highlights the absurdity of our abysmal track record for mental health care.  Political careers are made over stances on crime reduction.  How many politicians even mention mental health policy as part of their platform?

The result is that even a lot of people who have health insurance have lousy coverage for mental health services.  Medications like antipsychotics and anxiolytics are expensive and often not covered, or only are partially covered.  I have a friend who has delayed getting on (much-needed) antidepressants for years -- mostly because of the difficulty of finding a qualified psychiatrist who can prescribe them, the fact that his health insurance has piss-poor mental health coverage, and the high co-pay on the medication itself.

No wonder the suicide rate is climbing.  Dealing with mental health is simply not a national priority.

It's time to turn this around.  Phone your local, state, and federal representatives.  My guess is that at least some part of the inaction is not deliberate; I'll bet that just as few of them know the statistics on suicide and homicide as the rest of the populace.

But once we know, it's time to act.  As study co-author Erin Morgan put it, "We know that this is a mixture of mass and individual communication, but what really leads people to draw the conclusions that they do?  If people think that the rate of homicide is really high because that's what is shown on the news and on fictional TV shows, then these are opportunities to start to portray a more realistic picture of what's happening."

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Perchance to dream

For the past three nights in a row, I've dreamed that I was being charged by a large, snarling dog.

Besides the repetitive nature of the dream -- I can't recall ever having recurring dreams before -- the weird part is that of all the animals to pick, dogs are the ones I'd be least afraid of.  I tend to be a dog magnet.  Even dogs that are kind of skittish recognize me as a kindred spirit.

To be absolutely honest, dogs generally like me better than people do.

Plus, you'd be hard-pressed to find two less threatening dogs than the ones I have.  I've never seen either one act aggressively toward anything but squirrels.  As an illustration, two nights ago, Guinness, our large, goofy American Staffordshire Terrier mix, was lying in my wife's spot when she decided to come to bed.  So I grabbed Guinness by all four paws and rotated him clockwise by 180 degrees.  His only response was to sigh heavily, and he ended up with my arm around him and his head resting on my shoulder, where he fell asleep again in a matter of minutes.

Fig. 1: What neither of my dogs looks even remotely like.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons; original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/statefarm/6993960366/]

So the content of the dream is as odd as its repetitive nature.  The first time I had the dream, I woke up at the moment the snarling dog was about to leap and sink its teeth into my throat, and shouted so loud it woke my wife up.  This, too, is something that hardly ever happens.  The second time, I dreamed I was using my left arm to ward off the dog's attack, and woke up to find I'd flung the blankets away from me.

I'm not at all sure why this is happening.  I started a new anti-anxiety med a few weeks ago, and all I can say is that if this is one of the side effects, it is not helpful.  The idea should not be to take something I'm not anxious about, and make me anxious about it.

This comes up not only because of my recent experiences, but because of a study that appeared last month in Nature called, "Peace of Mind and Anxiety in the Waking State are Related to the Affective Content of Dreams," by Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, and Antti Revonsuo of the University of Turku (Finland).  The authors write:

Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams.  However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology.  We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of well-being...  Healthy participants completed a well-being questionnaire, followed by a three-week daily dream diary and ratings of dream affect.  Multilevel analyses showed that peace of mind was related to positive dream affect, whereas symptoms of anxiety were related to negative dream affect.  Moreover, waking measures were better related to affect expressed in dream reports rather than participants’ self-ratings of dream affect.  We propose that whereas anxiety may reflect affect dysregulation in waking and dreaming, peace of mind reflects enhanced affect regulation in both states of consciousness. 

So this is a little troubling, given the screaming and thrashing about I've been doing recently.

Fig. 2: What I apparently don't look remotely like when I'm sleeping.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chad fitz, Sleeping man with beard, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Pilleriin Sikka said, "There is evidence that REM sleep may help regulate emotions but we need more studies to find out whether dreams and the emotional experiences in dreams have any important role...  Our dream emotions are not just a totally random creation of our brains and minds, but they are related to our waking ill-being and well-being.  Those who are more anxious in their waking life also experience more negative emotions in their dreams, whereas those who have more peace of mind while awake have more positive dream emotions.  This also means that the content of dream reports may reflect a person’s mental health."

I wonder what Sikka would have to say about the contents of my wife's dreams.  Whereas I (up to this week, anyhow) have tended to have vague, unsettling dreams that don't stick in my memory long, Carol dreams whole feature-length movies.  The plots are complex and impossibly convoluted, with subplots and twists and changes of scene, and she remembers them for some time upon awakening.  (In fact, my current work-in-progress, a speculative fiction novel called The Harmonic Labyrinth, got its inspiration from one of my wife's dreams.)

Her problem is that dreaming this way doesn't exactly lead to feeling rested in the morning, but I suppose it's still preferable to ripping the covers off and throwing them on the floor in an attempt to avoid getting disemboweled by a raging dog.

So the Sikka et al. study at least shows us a correlation between the emotional tone of dreams and our waking emotional state.  However, it still doesn't explain the more detailed content, which is pretty bizarre sometimes.  I've always thought that those "Your Dreams Explained" books you see sometimes, that tell you stuff like if there's an eggplant in your dream it means you are going to change jobs soon, are complete horseshit.  Not only is there no scientific support whatsoever that there's any kind of one-to-one correspondence between what appears in your dream and its meaning for your life, it makes no sense that any meaning that does exist would be consistent from person to person.

So maybe seeing an eggplant in your dream means something entirely different for you than it would for me.

Anyhow, it's all an interesting step forward in understanding the psychology of sleep.  Me, I'm just hoping for a restful night tonight, not only for myself but for my wife, who is sick and tired of my yelling and pulling the covers off at two AM.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]