Birthday: Mid-Life Edition

I've been thinking a lot about birthdays this week. Mostly it's because my birthday was this past week. Before getting on with these evenings musings of an irreverent (and aging) psychologist, why not return to the scene of my original birthday for a couple of moments? Here I am with my mom and dad, two days old, and just a little squished up bundle of potential. 

It dawned on me that I passed a tipping point somewhere between these pictures and today. I stopped growing and started decaying. There were no parties on that day--no cakes were eaten, no cards were received, and no party hats were worn. There were no forms of recognition and no fanfare on that day when I crossed the invisible line. 

Science guides me to think that tipping point happened sometime in my mid 20s. My body was developmentally at it's strongest. My brain was at the apex of its ability to process information. With that in mind, the moment I crossed that line probably happened somewhere in Vermont. I was a graduate student working on the first masters degree that I would complete.


Here, if you look closely, is me around the time of the peak of my physical development. As you can see, my hair was also near the maximum length of its development.

It's bothered me, a little bit, to realize I am decaying. This realization isn't a particularly delightful thought.  What's worse is that I have also recognized that from an actuarial standpoint, there are more years on the road behind me than there are on the road ahead of me.

Bummer. If I live a normal life expectancy I'm actually a little more than half way dead. 


Double bummer. 

All things decay. I've known this in an intellectual way for most of my life. However, it wasn't until recently that I've learned to find comfort in knowing since I too am thing, I shall decay. It's not as if I really have a choice in the matter. I'll decay just the same, whether I want to or not.

The hints of my decay are hovering around the edges of my perception.  There are the inevitable aspects of decay. They are cosmetically annoying. The dark hair that suddenly burst forth from my chest and face announcing the arrival of a new man is gradually turning grey with the frost of age. There are also the unexpected aspects of decay. I've  begun to notice the subtle ways my middle-aged self is either invisible to younger people or commands an unexpected authority--an authority that I've not yet learned to be entirely comfortable with. 

There is something else I've discovered too. Somewhere in this time, between the summer and autumn of my life, I'm finding the joys of adulthood. What are these joys? Keats suggests our adulthood, the long autumn of our lives, is the season that ripens the fruit, harvests the fruit and makes the music.

I'm hope I have plenty of life left to make the transition from summer to autumn. I think I have some pretty good crops that can be ripened and harvested. The music sounds good, too. 

This makes the grey hair a very welcome sign--a sign of the harvest that is yet to come. In the end, it's the spaces between growing and decaying that life really happens--every moment--every day. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even have a life if we didn't also have decay and death.


There is not beginning without and ending.

Plus their is always hair dye, should all else fail. 

To Autumn

by John Keats

The Map is not the Territory: On Scientology, Intelligence, and Critical Thinking

Regular readers of my random ramblings no doubt note that I'm a lover of diversity. I also strive to be respectful of a variety of beliefs. There are limits. I've apparently found one of mine.

"Everything in moderation including moderation" --Oscar Wilde

My clinical psychology practice is in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts. It's hard to spin around on Massachusetts Avenue without knocking over another psychologist. There are a lot of us concentrated along red brick sidewalks. This dense grouping of psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists apparently makes the square a good place for the occasional protest by anti-psychiatry and anti-psychology forces within Scientology.

I've been working in Cambridge for the better part of eight years now. From time to time the folks from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights New England canvass the streets and put leaflets on the windshields of the cars lining the streets. I recently got this flyer pictured on the left when I was parked in front of a senior citizen housing complex.

I'm all for having full throated and complex discussions about all sorts of different ideas. The neighborhood around my office is populated by communists, cults, political protesters (the Falun Gong folks have put on some amazing street performances/protests), and of course there is the endless supply of people wanting me to save the whales, children, environment, etc.

Most of what is presented in Harvard Square is one sided. The information from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights is no different. I actually enjoy encountering this sort of material--and enjoy when a young (or old) client brings it with them into an appointment. Almost every autumn, for example, a teen comes into my office with their latest discovery from the LaRouche youth movement.  Together we look at the information with a critical eye. We think of ways to get different viewpoints. We think of ways to fact check. I create a space where the teen can come to their own opinion, in their own way, in their own time. 

This sort of dialogue has had transformative and far reaching effects. A young person (or any person, really) starts looking at their own life with a critical eye: they explore, fact check, try out different viewpoints, and eventually find a more expansive understanding of their inner (and outer) lives.

Sometimes however, the one sided nature of the debate turns nasty. Sometimes it's even dangerous.

There are important issues to consider with the over use of psychiatric medications (look here to check out Robert Whitaker's blog Mad in America and here to check out Daniel Carlat's blog for two excellent places to start your own research). The "Whistleblowers of Elderly Psychiatric Abuse", however, really got me frosted the other morning.

What frosted me about the flyers left in front of the senior housing is that it preys on fear and peddles that fear on a vulnerable population. The claims made in the flyer, in some ways, are not outlandish. There are serious concerns that patients and doctors need to sort out together about the use of psychiatric medications.  Likewise, there are also serious concerns to consider when a patient is contemplating electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

To explore ECT more, click here to check out the Mayo Clinic's information page about the procedure,  here to read another overview, or here.

Leaving propaganda on cars surrounding a senior housing complex is just too much. Of course many senior citizens are perfectly capable of doing their own critical thinking. Some however, are not. Some just get scared, aren't equipped to have a good dialogue with their physician, and are left to suffer needlessly.

Rather than leave the propaganda behind anonymously, why not really engage people in a multi-sided dialogue about psychiatry, medication, mental health treatment, and health care decision making?

On a lightly related issue, the folks leaving the anti-psychiatry propaganda also left behind a coupon to visit the local Scientology church. To have your IQ, personality, and aptitude testing.

I have to admit, I'm curious about this one. Much ink has been spilled about what constitutes "intelligence." No one really has an answer for it. The best we have is our performance on specific tasks that are statistically compared to the performance of large populations of people who take the same test.

"The map is not the territory" -- Alfred Korzybski

I wonder how long this is going to take us all to figure out? In the end, I think that's what this somewhat rambling blog post brings me. Whether we are talking about psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, religion, or intelligence, we collectively seem intent on thinking one group or another has direct access to a final statement of what reality is. In the end the best any of us can ever do is have access to our own perceptions to a set of beliefs or ideas.

Madness. Religion. Intelligence. We've created many different abstractions to understand these phenomena. They are all just that: abstractions or reactions we derive from our perceptions. None of them, on their own, are representative of reality.

I think this makes our world so much more interesting and exciting. It also makes it possible for us to all look together at one thing and marvel and all the different ways we experience and understand the phenomena around us.

River Deep, Mountain High: Aging and Wisdom

The other day I was walking Maggie in Cambridge and came across the most curious scene. An older gentleman--maybe about 70--was trying to parallel park his Subaru. There was a woman standing on my side of the street complaining, a woman on the other side of the street complaining, and a couple inside of a car complaining. Admittedly, the gentleman was having difficulties--no doubt exaserbated by the nearly constant complaining of the people on the street. The complainers were inconvienced. They wanted to pull their car out and had to wait.

The man finally gave up and drove away. The complaining woman on my side of the street--maybe 20 or 25 years old, said, "People who are over 50 should just have their license taken way." I flapped my mouth open and closed for a few moments while I contemplated a response. I wanted to tell them to stop their complaining. I wanted to tell them to find some compassion and patience. I wanted to tell them that 50 was far from old.

I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut (a surprise, because I usually don't). I realized that for the first time in my life I felt old. I felt the distance between me and a younger generation. They were there, and I was clearly somewhere else (on my way to being over the hill). Not a very pleasant feeling. Particularly since I'm still years away from the age when they think my license to should be revoked.

Wait a minute. How did Tina Turner get into this blog post? Since I got the Private Dancer LP for my birthday years ago I have not missed an opportunity to mention Tina Turner. That's one reason why she showed up in this post. Another reason is that  I just so happened to bet listening to River Deep Mountain High while I was walking and stumbled upon this scene. Tina was well over 50 in the above clip. While according to the people I saw on the street she should have her drivers license revoked, she clearly was still able to sing.

Of course, we can rewind and listen here to a woman much younger than 50 sing like no one else can sing. I've still not yet decided which version I like best. Do you have a preference?



I do have a point here. Before I get to it, one more digression. This one summer, when I was in summer band camp, my orchestra director Dwight Oltman threw his baton at me. "You young people have no passion. You haven't lived an have no idea was real emotions are." I was so annoyed at him. Clearly a 16 year old hormonally charged adolescent boy knew all about passion and emotion. Right?

Not really. I don't hold it against myself for thinking  knew everything when I was 16. I was supposed to feel that way. I also don't really hold it against the people on the street who had such harsh thoughts about the older driver. With their young age comes a rather narrow world view. I think it has to be this way: the younger absorbed in their own internal perspective viewing the world from their internal point of view and the older absorbed in an outward perspective viewing the world from multiple points of view.