Dr. X's Free Associations

What death anxiety in a child can teach us about ourselves

An 11-year-old family member attended an out-of-state sleepover camp earlier this summer. I'll call him Eric, which is not his real name. Tragically, one of the children in Eric's group drowned toward the end of their stay. As you might imagine, this was traumatizing for all of the young campers. The camp administration immediately brought in crisis counselors to work with all of the children.

When Eric returned from camp, he began to experience a great deal of anxiety every night at bedtime. He has also been troubled by a fantasy that one day he will find himself existing as a spirit who lives forever, all alone, in outer space. From space, he will watch everyone else die and he will see the final destruction of the earth. Eric especially agonizes over the thought of watching his entire family die. He knows his scenario is imaginary, but he fears that somehow it might come true.

Chicago's murder rate

While New York is on the way to another record low number of homicides, Chicago is on track for a 30% increase in homicides this year, after a record low last year. Some of the surge could be attributed to regression to the mean, although the numbers are now far above the mean for the last ten years. And while the numbers are still considerably lower than the peak rate in the '90s, the murder rate since 2000 has hovered at levels much higher than the rate in New York. In the first six months of this year, Chicago had 258 murders to New York's 193 homicides, and Chicago has less than half the population of New York City.

But there is another story buried in the numbers. The murder rate throughout most of the Chicago has declined significantly, but there are pockets of extreme violence, war zones really, that account for the stubbornness of the Chicago homicide rate. Last weekend, 41 people were shot, 9 fatally, most within a relatively small area.

Most of the adults in these neighborhoods are employed and just trying to make a decent life for themselves and their children, but a subset of neighborhood youth is terrorizing both the adults and the children. Try to imagine the death anxiety that grips these neighborhoods. It's difficult to make progress when basic safety is a constant issue.

Below, check out reactions when a reporter and the local alderman attempt to discuss a weekend shooting with some locals. Be sure to watch through to the part where they speak with an older, longtime resident of the neighborhood.

The GOP Convention

I have absolutely no interest in watching either party convention. When I was a kid, they were still interesting. Now they're so scripted, so predictable, I just find them one big snore. If anything interesting happens, I'll read about it. And there's always Youtube a few keystrokes away.

Vintage Photos: 1908

Cars lined up in Times Square, New York, for the start of the New York to Paris auto race.

Up is down, black is white

Students at our local Catholic parochial no longer wear uniforms, but the local public elementary school has a uniform requirement: dark footwear, khakis and polo shirts. The uniform is identical for girls and boys.

Vintage Photos: 1916

Ralph Coffin jumping his horse over Sylvanus Stokes' Rolls Royce. Photo by Harris and Ewing, 1916.

 

Talking with the auditory hallucinations

T.M. Luhrmann writes about an innovative therapeutic approach to auditory hallucinations that was pioneered by Dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme and his spouse, Sandra Escher:

The new post-psychoanalytic psychiatric science that emerged in this country in the 1980s argued that mental illnesses were physical illnesses. Many Americans and most psychiatrists took away from this science a sense that serious mental illnesses were brain dysfunctions and that the best hope for their treatment lay in the aggressive new drugs that patients often hated but that sometimes held symptoms at bay.

Neil Armstrong

Rebecca Rosen:

Like us, our heroes are mortal, but in the mark that Armstrong left on our world and the footprints he left on our moon, he feels a little less so.

More death anxiety

The psychology of death anxiety is a subject of special interest for me, but I've only recently begun to refer directly to death anxiety in my blog posts. Earlier in the week, I identified death anxiety as a common theme in critically-acclaimed television dramas.

A Common Theme

Four programs are frequently found at or near the top of all-time-best, television drama lists. They are: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos.

What do these shows share in common?

The answer is death anxiety and the many ways the characters react to it, attempt to master it, fail to master it and deny it.