Thursday, June 28, 2007
The New York Times
June 28, 2007
Mommy Is Truly Dearest
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
I TELL her everything.”
“She always takes a middle-of-the-night call.”
“I’m not comfortable not speaking to her every day.”
The women who uttered those words — professionals in their 20s and 30s — were not talking about their shrinks. They were talking about their mothers.
Alison Cochrane, 30, who teaches English as a second language in Flushing, Queens, has a boyfriend and a coterie of friends on whom to lean. Nevertheless she calls her mother, Denise Martinez, 54, at least four times a day.
“She’s the first person I tell everything to,” Ms. Cochrane said.
And she means everything.
“I talk to my mother about sex,” Ms. Cochrane said. “Intimately. I can say ‘Mom, Joe is absolutely amazing.’ And I’m not embarrassed.” (The same cannot be said for Joe.)
There have always been close-knit mother-daughter relationships. But social, demographic and technological changes have made it more common for adult daughters to keep their mothers’ apron strings tied tighter — and for longer, say researchers who study the transition into young adulthood.
Today, it is not unusual for unmarried middle-class women in their 20s or 30s to share with their mothers the diary-worthy details of their lives, plan weekly outings with them and call the Mommy Batphone when they need backup.
Even Paris Hilton — who has been labeled many things, though never a momma’s girl — revealed that it is her mother, Kathy Hilton, to whom she turns in a crisis. When last month a judge ordered the 26-year-old back to jail, she did not call out for a lover, her lawyer or God. In her hour of need, she cried, “Mom!” Upon being released Tuesday, she ran into her mother’s arms.
Developmental psychologists and sociologists say this phenomenon of attachment is only now beginning to be studied. They have identified several factors that could be contributing to an intensified mother-daughter symbiosis: technology that makes it easy to stay connected; the smaller number of children in each household; young adults who are prolonging decisions about career, marriage and children; parents who want to have a less-hierarchical relationship with their offspring; and parents who feel the need to keep their grown children close at a time when anxiety and depression levels among young adults are at some of their highest points ever.
Additionally, parent-child contact during the college years has dramatically increased. Professors say that many students these days stroll around campus talking into cellphones — and not to one another. It is not surprising, experts say, that some of that behavior spills over into the post-college years, including a reliance on parents to continue to pay the bills.
“There is a higher level of dependence,” said Vivian Gadsden, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “In that way they are very much a product of this period in our history.”
Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., the chairman of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the trend is ripe for research.
“The fact is that very little is known about this topic,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Our research network is doing a slew of studies on changing relations among young adults and their parents, but the research is still in the field.”
Many of the women who spoke of their closeness to their mothers also said that they had a warm relationship with their fathers, though hardly as uncensored.
“My mom is absolutely my best friend,” said Jennifer White, 25, a paralegal in Manhattan. “We do everything and anything.”
Karen Bauer, 36, of Englewood, N.J., and her mother have spent every Saturday afternoon for 14 years having lunch and shopping. “I won’t give that up for anything,” said Ms. Bauer, an executive assistant. “I’ve turned down jobs because they wanted me to work on Saturday.”
Wendy Spero, 32, took the analogy further, likening the relationship to that of husband and wife: so long, significant other; hello, significant mother.
“I was on the phone with her for hours and hours in school,” said Ms. Spero, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles. “She would literally stay on the phone with me for six hours. No friend would do that. Such insane unconditional support. With a friend, at no point did I feel I could reveal that much of my neuroses.”
Last week Nia Tyler, 24, moved from New York to Boston, where she is an intern with New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit organization that trains school principals. On Saturday Ms. Tyler’s mother, Rosalind Bowser, 60, arrived to drop off luggage and take Ms. Tyler grocery shopping because she was not eating healthfully.
“She came up here to talk and just guide me through,” Ms. Tyler said.
“My mom is my support,” she said, adding that she and her mother discuss everything from the necessity of having food staples in the house to what it means to be a black woman in America. “She’s my eyes and ears when I can’t see or hear things for myself.”
Mothers, in turn, said they find it gratifying to pass on career, financial and everyday wisdom to their daughters, and satisfying to converse with them as equals.
“She’s become a woman in her own right,” said Ms. Bowser, who works for a public health program. “And I will take some credit for that.”
Trish O’Connor, 31, of Queens said the support and understanding from her own mother is unequaled. Though she has a boyfriend and plenty of pals, she said it is different sharing good news with a mother.
“There’s a different level of proudness,” Ms. O’Connor said. “I know that if something happened, of course my boyfriend is going to be happy for me and proud of me. But my mom is going to be really proud of me. It’s her day if I tell her good news.”
As Ms. Spero put it: “There’s no other person who’s as invested in your life as you.”
One would think that after giving birth to, nursing, teaching and disciplining a daughter for 18 years, a mother might want some distance. But not necessarily. “Parents don’t want that anymore, especially moms,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” “They want to be close to their kids.”
“That’s the payoff for these moms,” Dr. Arnett said. “Their daughters get to the age where they can go out together and talk about these things.”
Denise Martinez was thrilled when her daughter, the teacher in Flushing, decided that living 20 minutes away from her was too far and instead bought a condo only two blocks away. “I just love it,” Ms. Martinez said. “I wish we could afford a two-family house together. I tell her, if mommy came into money ...”
Additionally, the American family is smaller, which means parents have more time to spend with the children they have. At the same time, those children are taking longer to finish school, marry and have babies. So parents and children alike often have a period of freedom after the teenage years during which they can cultivate more intense relationships not only in person, but also via cellphones and instant, text and e-mail messages.
“In 1960 the median age for marriage for women was 20,” Dr. Arnett said. By 25, women had two or three children, he said.
You didn’t “have a lot of time to sit around and chat with mom,” he added.
Some psychologists, though, question how healthy today’s closeness is.
“People have mixed feelings about this phenomenon,” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. He said he has two daughters, 21 and 23. “We want our kids to be autonomous,” he said, “but I don’t want them to forget about me.”
Dr. Gadsden, of the University of Pennsylvania, said that if mothers are orchestrating their daughters’ lives and regularly attempting to take away the hurt, they could be turning them into overly needy adults.
“Parents over the last 25, 30 years have been far more indulgent than they necessarily needed to be with their children,” Dr. Gadsden said. “Some problems have to be solved by yourself.”
Ms. Bowser, whose daughter just moved to Boston, agrees.
“I’m missing her already but I say ‘Oh, I miss you’ casually,” Ms. Bowser said. “But I do miss her. But you see that’s a part of growing up, too. She needs to be away from me sometimes. She’s 24. My God, when I was 24, I was up here on my own.”
Some psychologists said the worry may be unfounded; there are no long-term studies proving that being so entwined with one’s mother is detrimental.
“There’s no evidence for it,” Dr. Arnett said, adding that he interviewed hundreds of mothers and daughters for his book and found no proof, “not the slightest, that it’s anything but good.”
In general, psychologists view communication as positive, Dr. McAdams said, and that “any long-term studies will probably bear that out.”
“It would be unlikely that they would find that talking too much with your mom in your 20s leads to bad marriages in your 30s,” he said. “If anything, it might go the other way.”
Even in the 19th century, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette referred to a girl’s mother as “that truest and most loving of friends.”
“Fortunate is the daughter,” a passage reads, “who has not been deprived of that wisest and tenderest of counsellors.”
These days, with the help of technology, mothers can make sure their daughters are rarely deprived of their counsel.
“She’ll pay for my cellphone bill,” said Ms. White, the paralegal in Manhattan. “As long as she gets a phone call.”
She laughed. “It’s been like eight times already today.”
June 28, 2007
Mommy Is Truly Dearest
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
I TELL her everything.”
“She always takes a middle-of-the-night call.”
“I’m not comfortable not speaking to her every day.”
The women who uttered those words — professionals in their 20s and 30s — were not talking about their shrinks. They were talking about their mothers.
Alison Cochrane, 30, who teaches English as a second language in Flushing, Queens, has a boyfriend and a coterie of friends on whom to lean. Nevertheless she calls her mother, Denise Martinez, 54, at least four times a day.
“She’s the first person I tell everything to,” Ms. Cochrane said.
And she means everything.
“I talk to my mother about sex,” Ms. Cochrane said. “Intimately. I can say ‘Mom, Joe is absolutely amazing.’ And I’m not embarrassed.” (The same cannot be said for Joe.)
There have always been close-knit mother-daughter relationships. But social, demographic and technological changes have made it more common for adult daughters to keep their mothers’ apron strings tied tighter — and for longer, say researchers who study the transition into young adulthood.
Today, it is not unusual for unmarried middle-class women in their 20s or 30s to share with their mothers the diary-worthy details of their lives, plan weekly outings with them and call the Mommy Batphone when they need backup.
Even Paris Hilton — who has been labeled many things, though never a momma’s girl — revealed that it is her mother, Kathy Hilton, to whom she turns in a crisis. When last month a judge ordered the 26-year-old back to jail, she did not call out for a lover, her lawyer or God. In her hour of need, she cried, “Mom!” Upon being released Tuesday, she ran into her mother’s arms.
Developmental psychologists and sociologists say this phenomenon of attachment is only now beginning to be studied. They have identified several factors that could be contributing to an intensified mother-daughter symbiosis: technology that makes it easy to stay connected; the smaller number of children in each household; young adults who are prolonging decisions about career, marriage and children; parents who want to have a less-hierarchical relationship with their offspring; and parents who feel the need to keep their grown children close at a time when anxiety and depression levels among young adults are at some of their highest points ever.
Additionally, parent-child contact during the college years has dramatically increased. Professors say that many students these days stroll around campus talking into cellphones — and not to one another. It is not surprising, experts say, that some of that behavior spills over into the post-college years, including a reliance on parents to continue to pay the bills.
“There is a higher level of dependence,” said Vivian Gadsden, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “In that way they are very much a product of this period in our history.”
Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., the chairman of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the trend is ripe for research.
“The fact is that very little is known about this topic,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Our research network is doing a slew of studies on changing relations among young adults and their parents, but the research is still in the field.”
Many of the women who spoke of their closeness to their mothers also said that they had a warm relationship with their fathers, though hardly as uncensored.
“My mom is absolutely my best friend,” said Jennifer White, 25, a paralegal in Manhattan. “We do everything and anything.”
Karen Bauer, 36, of Englewood, N.J., and her mother have spent every Saturday afternoon for 14 years having lunch and shopping. “I won’t give that up for anything,” said Ms. Bauer, an executive assistant. “I’ve turned down jobs because they wanted me to work on Saturday.”
Wendy Spero, 32, took the analogy further, likening the relationship to that of husband and wife: so long, significant other; hello, significant mother.
“I was on the phone with her for hours and hours in school,” said Ms. Spero, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles. “She would literally stay on the phone with me for six hours. No friend would do that. Such insane unconditional support. With a friend, at no point did I feel I could reveal that much of my neuroses.”
Last week Nia Tyler, 24, moved from New York to Boston, where she is an intern with New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit organization that trains school principals. On Saturday Ms. Tyler’s mother, Rosalind Bowser, 60, arrived to drop off luggage and take Ms. Tyler grocery shopping because she was not eating healthfully.
“She came up here to talk and just guide me through,” Ms. Tyler said.
“My mom is my support,” she said, adding that she and her mother discuss everything from the necessity of having food staples in the house to what it means to be a black woman in America. “She’s my eyes and ears when I can’t see or hear things for myself.”
Mothers, in turn, said they find it gratifying to pass on career, financial and everyday wisdom to their daughters, and satisfying to converse with them as equals.
“She’s become a woman in her own right,” said Ms. Bowser, who works for a public health program. “And I will take some credit for that.”
Trish O’Connor, 31, of Queens said the support and understanding from her own mother is unequaled. Though she has a boyfriend and plenty of pals, she said it is different sharing good news with a mother.
“There’s a different level of proudness,” Ms. O’Connor said. “I know that if something happened, of course my boyfriend is going to be happy for me and proud of me. But my mom is going to be really proud of me. It’s her day if I tell her good news.”
As Ms. Spero put it: “There’s no other person who’s as invested in your life as you.”
One would think that after giving birth to, nursing, teaching and disciplining a daughter for 18 years, a mother might want some distance. But not necessarily. “Parents don’t want that anymore, especially moms,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” “They want to be close to their kids.”
“That’s the payoff for these moms,” Dr. Arnett said. “Their daughters get to the age where they can go out together and talk about these things.”
Denise Martinez was thrilled when her daughter, the teacher in Flushing, decided that living 20 minutes away from her was too far and instead bought a condo only two blocks away. “I just love it,” Ms. Martinez said. “I wish we could afford a two-family house together. I tell her, if mommy came into money ...”
Additionally, the American family is smaller, which means parents have more time to spend with the children they have. At the same time, those children are taking longer to finish school, marry and have babies. So parents and children alike often have a period of freedom after the teenage years during which they can cultivate more intense relationships not only in person, but also via cellphones and instant, text and e-mail messages.
“In 1960 the median age for marriage for women was 20,” Dr. Arnett said. By 25, women had two or three children, he said.
You didn’t “have a lot of time to sit around and chat with mom,” he added.
Some psychologists, though, question how healthy today’s closeness is.
“People have mixed feelings about this phenomenon,” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. He said he has two daughters, 21 and 23. “We want our kids to be autonomous,” he said, “but I don’t want them to forget about me.”
Dr. Gadsden, of the University of Pennsylvania, said that if mothers are orchestrating their daughters’ lives and regularly attempting to take away the hurt, they could be turning them into overly needy adults.
“Parents over the last 25, 30 years have been far more indulgent than they necessarily needed to be with their children,” Dr. Gadsden said. “Some problems have to be solved by yourself.”
Ms. Bowser, whose daughter just moved to Boston, agrees.
“I’m missing her already but I say ‘Oh, I miss you’ casually,” Ms. Bowser said. “But I do miss her. But you see that’s a part of growing up, too. She needs to be away from me sometimes. She’s 24. My God, when I was 24, I was up here on my own.”
Some psychologists said the worry may be unfounded; there are no long-term studies proving that being so entwined with one’s mother is detrimental.
“There’s no evidence for it,” Dr. Arnett said, adding that he interviewed hundreds of mothers and daughters for his book and found no proof, “not the slightest, that it’s anything but good.”
In general, psychologists view communication as positive, Dr. McAdams said, and that “any long-term studies will probably bear that out.”
“It would be unlikely that they would find that talking too much with your mom in your 20s leads to bad marriages in your 30s,” he said. “If anything, it might go the other way.”
Even in the 19th century, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette referred to a girl’s mother as “that truest and most loving of friends.”
“Fortunate is the daughter,” a passage reads, “who has not been deprived of that wisest and tenderest of counsellors.”
These days, with the help of technology, mothers can make sure their daughters are rarely deprived of their counsel.
“She’ll pay for my cellphone bill,” said Ms. White, the paralegal in Manhattan. “As long as she gets a phone call.”
She laughed. “It’s been like eight times already today.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
BBC NEWS
Misery: the secret to happiness
The key to a happy relationship could be accepting that some miserable times are unavoidable, experts say.
Therapists from California State University, Northridge and Virginia Tech say accepting these problems is better than striving for perfection.
And they blame cultural fairytales and modern love stories for perpetuating the myth that enjoying a perfect relationship is possible.
The report was published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.
The pursuit of relationship nirvana can be potentially damaging
Jan Parker
The authors, Dr Diane Gehart and Dr Eric McCollum say it is a "myth that, with enough effort we can achieve a state without suffering."
And they say healthcare professionals may not be helping the situation.
"The field of mental health perpetuates this myth with the very concept of "mental health," which implies a state without suffering," they say.
Potentially damaging
But this belief can eventually cause people to believe that with enough effort they can eliminate suffering.
And experts say this is an unrealistic aim in relationships, and striving to achieve it can lead people to feel they have failed.
Jan Parker of the Association of Family Therapy said: "The authors are right to point out that the pursuit of relationship nirvana can be potentially damaging."
She said it was important to explore what people mean by a happy and healthy relationship, because nobody's life or relationship can be in a permanent state of happiness - there will always be more difficult times.
She said couples need to build strengths, such as understanding, in their relationships to help them cope in these hard times and appreciate the good times.
Mrs Nadine Field, a consultant psychologist, said it was a "fantasy" that any relationship could be perfect and that striving for such an impossible state could lead to bitter disappointment.
She said this disappointment could then cause people to focus on the negative aspects of a relationship, and lead to more disappointment and resentment.
She said: "People need to try to understand their partners through communication, rather than demanding perfection of them."
Meditation
The authors recommend using mindfulness, a Buddhist meditation technique, to help cope with family suffering.
The technique requires individuals to focus on their present thoughts and actions, and is already used by some psychiatrists in the UK.
The authors say family therapists can integrate the principles into their work to help patients change the way they relate to the forms of suffering that can occur in intimate relationships, such as abuse, divorce, rejection, and loss.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6711071.stm
Published: 2007/06/01 10:51:19 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Misery: the secret to happiness
The key to a happy relationship could be accepting that some miserable times are unavoidable, experts say.
Therapists from California State University, Northridge and Virginia Tech say accepting these problems is better than striving for perfection.
And they blame cultural fairytales and modern love stories for perpetuating the myth that enjoying a perfect relationship is possible.
The report was published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.
The pursuit of relationship nirvana can be potentially damaging
Jan Parker
The authors, Dr Diane Gehart and Dr Eric McCollum say it is a "myth that, with enough effort we can achieve a state without suffering."
And they say healthcare professionals may not be helping the situation.
"The field of mental health perpetuates this myth with the very concept of "mental health," which implies a state without suffering," they say.
Potentially damaging
But this belief can eventually cause people to believe that with enough effort they can eliminate suffering.
And experts say this is an unrealistic aim in relationships, and striving to achieve it can lead people to feel they have failed.
Jan Parker of the Association of Family Therapy said: "The authors are right to point out that the pursuit of relationship nirvana can be potentially damaging."
She said it was important to explore what people mean by a happy and healthy relationship, because nobody's life or relationship can be in a permanent state of happiness - there will always be more difficult times.
She said couples need to build strengths, such as understanding, in their relationships to help them cope in these hard times and appreciate the good times.
Mrs Nadine Field, a consultant psychologist, said it was a "fantasy" that any relationship could be perfect and that striving for such an impossible state could lead to bitter disappointment.
She said this disappointment could then cause people to focus on the negative aspects of a relationship, and lead to more disappointment and resentment.
She said: "People need to try to understand their partners through communication, rather than demanding perfection of them."
Meditation
The authors recommend using mindfulness, a Buddhist meditation technique, to help cope with family suffering.
The technique requires individuals to focus on their present thoughts and actions, and is already used by some psychiatrists in the UK.
The authors say family therapists can integrate the principles into their work to help patients change the way they relate to the forms of suffering that can occur in intimate relationships, such as abuse, divorce, rejection, and loss.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6711071.stm
Published: 2007/06/01 10:51:19 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Video game addiction a mental illness?
Posted: 26 June 2007 1028 hrs
Excessive gaming has been linked to increased aggressive and violent behaviour.
CHICAGO: It may seem an obvious diagnosis for parents, but video games might not actually be addictive, the American Medical Association says.
A report recommending that internet and video gaming addiction be considered a mental disorder was watered down after a heated debate broke out among delegates at the association's annual convention in Chicago.
Some questioned whether there was enough scientific evidence to support claims that excessive game playing is similar to pathological gambling.
Others insisted on more study before advising that parents include video games in a recommended one- to two-hour limit on "screen time."
The report, prepared for the nation's largest doctors group, cited a wealth of studies showing the harm caused by excessive gaming.
It has been linked to increased aggressive and violent behavior.
It can provoke epileptic seizures - one study put the risk at 1.5 per 100,000 children - and is associated with increased metabolic rates and repetitive strain injuries.
And - as any parent can tell you - it can distract children from their homework and make them withdraw from their families.
Researchers in Britain found that 12 percent of gamers were "addicted" according to World Health Organization criteria, and researchers in the United States have found that as many as 10 to 15 percent of gamers are affected by "overuse" the report noted.
"However, as with findings on long-term aggression, there is currently insufficient research to conclude that video game overuse is an addiction," the report concluded.
The issue will go before the full association later this week.
The revised recommendation is to warn parents and health care professionals about the potential dangers of gaming and to pass the edited report along to the American Psychiatric Association, which is in the process of updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
"Addiction is a complex disease," the committee declared, "formal recognition of problem gaming via online/video sources as representing true addictive illness is premature."
Classifying video game addiction as a mental disorder could affect whether insurance companies would pay for treatment and give doctors guidelines on treatment and prescribing medication. - AFP/fa
Posted: 26 June 2007 1028 hrs
Excessive gaming has been linked to increased aggressive and violent behaviour.
CHICAGO: It may seem an obvious diagnosis for parents, but video games might not actually be addictive, the American Medical Association says.
A report recommending that internet and video gaming addiction be considered a mental disorder was watered down after a heated debate broke out among delegates at the association's annual convention in Chicago.
Some questioned whether there was enough scientific evidence to support claims that excessive game playing is similar to pathological gambling.
Others insisted on more study before advising that parents include video games in a recommended one- to two-hour limit on "screen time."
The report, prepared for the nation's largest doctors group, cited a wealth of studies showing the harm caused by excessive gaming.
It has been linked to increased aggressive and violent behavior.
It can provoke epileptic seizures - one study put the risk at 1.5 per 100,000 children - and is associated with increased metabolic rates and repetitive strain injuries.
And - as any parent can tell you - it can distract children from their homework and make them withdraw from their families.
Researchers in Britain found that 12 percent of gamers were "addicted" according to World Health Organization criteria, and researchers in the United States have found that as many as 10 to 15 percent of gamers are affected by "overuse" the report noted.
"However, as with findings on long-term aggression, there is currently insufficient research to conclude that video game overuse is an addiction," the report concluded.
The issue will go before the full association later this week.
The revised recommendation is to warn parents and health care professionals about the potential dangers of gaming and to pass the edited report along to the American Psychiatric Association, which is in the process of updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
"Addiction is a complex disease," the committee declared, "formal recognition of problem gaming via online/video sources as representing true addictive illness is premature."
Classifying video game addiction as a mental disorder could affect whether insurance companies would pay for treatment and give doctors guidelines on treatment and prescribing medication. - AFP/fa
The New York Times
June 26, 2007
Basics
In Parasite Survival, Ploys to Get Help From a Host
By NATALIE ANGIER
Not long ago, my daughter proposed a way she could earn some extra cash beyond her weekly allowance. Would I give her a quarter, she wanted to know, every time she cleaned the cat box?
Twenty-five cents to clean the cat box? I squealed with unconcealed joy. Truly we’d hit commensal pay dirt here. She had fiscal motivation, and I could use the olfactory vacation.
But then I read a few items about Toxoplasma gondii, the parasitic protozoa that can be lurking in cat scat, and I changed my mind. I told my daughter that she should skip the litter patrol and try cleaning the refrigerator instead.
I’m not normally a fluttering, overprotective mother, and I know that the risk of contracting the toxoplasma pathogen or any serious infectious illness from the cat box is tiny. Still, we’re talking parasites here, and parasitism is an evolutionary force to be reckoned with, a source of nearly bottomless cunning and breathtaking bio-inventiveness.
Predators want to kill you and eat you right there on the veldt. Parasites, by contrast, want to keep you alive, the better to serve as a parasite paradise, a cozy haven where they can grow at their own pace, suckle on your moist, nourishing tissues, multiply their numbers and finally, one way or another, pass those numbers along. Toxoplasma, it seems, is a member of a particularly insidious genus of parasite, which seek perpetuity by controlling their hapless hosts’ minds. So maybe I’m hyperventilating here, but if any mind in my house is to be monkeyed with, I would really prefer it be mine.
Driving toxoplasma’s specific virulence is its two-stage life cycle and its shifting definition of a suitable host. The amoebalike protozoa begins its days as an asexual opportunist, its eggs able to hatch and grow in the body of any warm-blooded host — cat, rat, bat, buffalo, crow, human: practically any homeotherm unfortunate enough to harbor or have incidentally ingested the little eggs will do.
Come the parasite’s second, sexual stage, though, and it gets fussy. To mingle with others of its kind and produce the next generation of eggs, toxoplasma must find its way to the gastrointestinal tract of a cat. Wild or domestic, tabby or puma, no matter — just as long as it is feline. And this demand for a particular end-stage host, this stipulation that the protozoa migrate to the perfect sexual staging ground no matter what its natal home may have been, serves as the sort of evolutionary pressure known to give rise to chilling parasite ploys.
Consider the case of the thorny-headed worm, which Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, describes in her fascinating new book, “Riddled With Life.” The parasitic worm spends its childhood growing in the belly of a pill bug, a small terrestrial crustacean that feeds on detritus and dry leaves and, occasionally, worm eggs scattered therein. But on reaching parasitic puberty, the worm requires a very different environment: an avian digestive tract. The worm wants the pill bug to be eaten by a bird. Fine: many birds will eat pill bugs if given the chance. But the worm has a tight schedule to keep, and it can’t afford to wait around and hope some industrious starling discovers its tasty crustacean housing. After all, a pill bug normally spends the sunlit hours when diurnal birds are about coiled away like a petite armadillo, often beneath some unpeckable tree stump or stone.
Through mechanisms that remain mysterious, then, the impatient parasite induces a precise sort of madness in its host. It prompts the poor creature to defy all known pill bug precautions, to venture forth in broad daylight and crawl onto a light-colored surface, where the dark pill bug stands out so starkly it might as well flash a sign saying, Snack Time! As a result, infected pill bugs end up being eaten by birds at a far higher rate than are their unparasitized peers, and the thorn-headed worm lives on.
A similar story applies to the horsehair worm, which thrives as a larval youth inside a cricket or grasshopper, but must be delivered to a stream or lake to breed. Healthy crickets and grasshoppers are devoutly terrestrial and do not go swimming. A parasitized insect, however, finds itself with the odd compulsion to head for the nearest body of water and jump in, at which point the ripened, writhing worm bursts its host apart like a comic book villain rupturing from a mild-mannered disguise, and starts seeking another freshly born-again worm.
The tiny brains of invertebrates may seem easier takeover targets than the complex counterpart organs in mammals, but parasites have both opportunity and motive to succeed. Their generation times are quite short compared with a mammal’s, allowing them to evolve new tricks faster than mammals can combat them, and their finicky needs can often be fulfilled only by manipulating host behavior. In the case of Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite appears to have hit on the perfect method for puppeteering a common primary host — the rat.
More than most mammals, rats habitually dig around in garbage and animal waste, where traces of cat fecal matter laced with Toxoplasma eggs may reside. But how to journey reliably at maturity from rat to cat, when eons of evolution have hammered into rats a keen aversion to the sight and smell of live cats? The parasite deftly knocks that antipathy out. Studies show that while parasitized rats behave much like their healthy peers in aggressiveness and other measures, they differ from ordinary rats in one outstanding trait: they will recklessly frolic in a cat-scented room, and should a cat enter, the rattled rat is as apt to run toward its old foe as away.
We humans are not at risk of being predated on by house cats, and Toxoplasma probably has scant incentive for specifically modulating our behavior. Yet because our brains are wired much like a rat’s, infection with Toxoplasma could well exert a behavioral or temperamental effect indirectly.
As Dr. Zuk recounts, when Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered personality tests to two groups of people, one showing immunological signs of a prior Toxoplasma infection and the other not, infected men scored comparatively higher than uninfected men in traits like suspicion of authority and a propensity to break rules, while infected women ranked relatively higher than noninfected women in measures of warmth, self-assurance and chattiness. This last finding has prompted speculation that there may be a biological basis for the Cat Lady stereotype, the loopy, friendly neighbor who keeps dozens of cats. She loves them, they’re her children, and she’s clearly inured to their smell.
June 26, 2007
Basics
In Parasite Survival, Ploys to Get Help From a Host
By NATALIE ANGIER
Not long ago, my daughter proposed a way she could earn some extra cash beyond her weekly allowance. Would I give her a quarter, she wanted to know, every time she cleaned the cat box?
Twenty-five cents to clean the cat box? I squealed with unconcealed joy. Truly we’d hit commensal pay dirt here. She had fiscal motivation, and I could use the olfactory vacation.
But then I read a few items about Toxoplasma gondii, the parasitic protozoa that can be lurking in cat scat, and I changed my mind. I told my daughter that she should skip the litter patrol and try cleaning the refrigerator instead.
I’m not normally a fluttering, overprotective mother, and I know that the risk of contracting the toxoplasma pathogen or any serious infectious illness from the cat box is tiny. Still, we’re talking parasites here, and parasitism is an evolutionary force to be reckoned with, a source of nearly bottomless cunning and breathtaking bio-inventiveness.
Predators want to kill you and eat you right there on the veldt. Parasites, by contrast, want to keep you alive, the better to serve as a parasite paradise, a cozy haven where they can grow at their own pace, suckle on your moist, nourishing tissues, multiply their numbers and finally, one way or another, pass those numbers along. Toxoplasma, it seems, is a member of a particularly insidious genus of parasite, which seek perpetuity by controlling their hapless hosts’ minds. So maybe I’m hyperventilating here, but if any mind in my house is to be monkeyed with, I would really prefer it be mine.
Driving toxoplasma’s specific virulence is its two-stage life cycle and its shifting definition of a suitable host. The amoebalike protozoa begins its days as an asexual opportunist, its eggs able to hatch and grow in the body of any warm-blooded host — cat, rat, bat, buffalo, crow, human: practically any homeotherm unfortunate enough to harbor or have incidentally ingested the little eggs will do.
Come the parasite’s second, sexual stage, though, and it gets fussy. To mingle with others of its kind and produce the next generation of eggs, toxoplasma must find its way to the gastrointestinal tract of a cat. Wild or domestic, tabby or puma, no matter — just as long as it is feline. And this demand for a particular end-stage host, this stipulation that the protozoa migrate to the perfect sexual staging ground no matter what its natal home may have been, serves as the sort of evolutionary pressure known to give rise to chilling parasite ploys.
Consider the case of the thorny-headed worm, which Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, describes in her fascinating new book, “Riddled With Life.” The parasitic worm spends its childhood growing in the belly of a pill bug, a small terrestrial crustacean that feeds on detritus and dry leaves and, occasionally, worm eggs scattered therein. But on reaching parasitic puberty, the worm requires a very different environment: an avian digestive tract. The worm wants the pill bug to be eaten by a bird. Fine: many birds will eat pill bugs if given the chance. But the worm has a tight schedule to keep, and it can’t afford to wait around and hope some industrious starling discovers its tasty crustacean housing. After all, a pill bug normally spends the sunlit hours when diurnal birds are about coiled away like a petite armadillo, often beneath some unpeckable tree stump or stone.
Through mechanisms that remain mysterious, then, the impatient parasite induces a precise sort of madness in its host. It prompts the poor creature to defy all known pill bug precautions, to venture forth in broad daylight and crawl onto a light-colored surface, where the dark pill bug stands out so starkly it might as well flash a sign saying, Snack Time! As a result, infected pill bugs end up being eaten by birds at a far higher rate than are their unparasitized peers, and the thorn-headed worm lives on.
A similar story applies to the horsehair worm, which thrives as a larval youth inside a cricket or grasshopper, but must be delivered to a stream or lake to breed. Healthy crickets and grasshoppers are devoutly terrestrial and do not go swimming. A parasitized insect, however, finds itself with the odd compulsion to head for the nearest body of water and jump in, at which point the ripened, writhing worm bursts its host apart like a comic book villain rupturing from a mild-mannered disguise, and starts seeking another freshly born-again worm.
The tiny brains of invertebrates may seem easier takeover targets than the complex counterpart organs in mammals, but parasites have both opportunity and motive to succeed. Their generation times are quite short compared with a mammal’s, allowing them to evolve new tricks faster than mammals can combat them, and their finicky needs can often be fulfilled only by manipulating host behavior. In the case of Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite appears to have hit on the perfect method for puppeteering a common primary host — the rat.
More than most mammals, rats habitually dig around in garbage and animal waste, where traces of cat fecal matter laced with Toxoplasma eggs may reside. But how to journey reliably at maturity from rat to cat, when eons of evolution have hammered into rats a keen aversion to the sight and smell of live cats? The parasite deftly knocks that antipathy out. Studies show that while parasitized rats behave much like their healthy peers in aggressiveness and other measures, they differ from ordinary rats in one outstanding trait: they will recklessly frolic in a cat-scented room, and should a cat enter, the rattled rat is as apt to run toward its old foe as away.
We humans are not at risk of being predated on by house cats, and Toxoplasma probably has scant incentive for specifically modulating our behavior. Yet because our brains are wired much like a rat’s, infection with Toxoplasma could well exert a behavioral or temperamental effect indirectly.
As Dr. Zuk recounts, when Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered personality tests to two groups of people, one showing immunological signs of a prior Toxoplasma infection and the other not, infected men scored comparatively higher than uninfected men in traits like suspicion of authority and a propensity to break rules, while infected women ranked relatively higher than noninfected women in measures of warmth, self-assurance and chattiness. This last finding has prompted speculation that there may be a biological basis for the Cat Lady stereotype, the loopy, friendly neighbor who keeps dozens of cats. She loves them, they’re her children, and she’s clearly inured to their smell.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
The New York Times
June 21, 2007
Not Buying It
By STEVEN KURUTZ
ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.
New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.
Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another member of the crowd.
Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.
Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin examining a plastic toiletries holder.
A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.
The site, which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.
Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.com, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.
Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.
According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.
Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.
“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.
There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .
In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”
But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)
Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk politics.
In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.
The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s Sanitation Department.
“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” (Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. “Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”
At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.
Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. (Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.
As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event (Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover Shop-Vac.
“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.
Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”
There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”
Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?
“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.
These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.
Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”
It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.
Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”
After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.
She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.
“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.
An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.
The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.
She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is waiting for one to come up on freecycle.com. There are no new titles on the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers share used books, or goes to the public library.
But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”
Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not working for money.”
She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. “More trash will be there tomorrow.”
By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she said.
ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a Korean television crew.
Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through the store’s clear garbage bags.
The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat it rather than see it go to waste.)
As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather electronic entertainment.
Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers in the near future.
Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of life.
As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”
June 21, 2007
Not Buying It
By STEVEN KURUTZ
ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.
New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.
Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another member of the crowd.
Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.
Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin examining a plastic toiletries holder.
A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.
The site, which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.
Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.com, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.
Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.
According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.
Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.
“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.
There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .
In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”
But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)
Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk politics.
In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.
The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s Sanitation Department.
“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” (Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. “Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”
At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.
Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. (Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.
As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event (Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover Shop-Vac.
“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.
Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”
There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”
Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?
“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.
These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.
Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”
It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.
Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”
After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.
She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.
“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.
An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.
The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.
She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is waiting for one to come up on freecycle.com. There are no new titles on the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers share used books, or goes to the public library.
But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”
Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not working for money.”
She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. “More trash will be there tomorrow.”
By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she said.
ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a Korean television crew.
Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through the store’s clear garbage bags.
The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat it rather than see it go to waste.)
As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather electronic entertainment.
Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers in the near future.
Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of life.
As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”
Sunday, June 17, 2007
The New York Times
June 16, 2007
Basic Instincts
It Might Pay to Follow Your Bliss
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY
REMEMBER the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The ant works hard all summer, socking away provisions for the winter; the grasshopper frolics away each day. The ant warns the grasshopper that he’s being hedonistic and short-sighted. The grasshopper ignores the ant, and continues on his merry way — only to perish when winter sets in.
It’s a rather stern lesson about financial prudence, but there is a reason this tale has survived through the ages — and still preoccupies many researchers who study the eccentricities of human economic behavior. Why do the grasshoppers of the world have such a hard time emulating the ants?
The rewards of the ant’s strategy are obvious: by working hard, planning ahead and saving your resources, you end up healthy, wealthy and warm. The pleasures of the grasshopper’s life are short-lived — and ultimately lead to great stress and suffering (if not a dire end).
Yet economic research has demonstrated that most people find it hard to resist the siren song of “seize the day and spend what you have now” — even though a lifestyle based on constant consumption doesn’t enhance anyone’s long-term store of happiness and often puts people on shaky financial ground.
This conundrum also bedevils those who work in the field of personal finance. Why do millions of Americans resist saving for their retirements? Why do so many carry thousands of dollars in credit card debt?
The standard advice for those caught on the treadmill of “getting and spending” could come straight from the mouth of the ant: material kicks don’t pay off in the end, so mend your ways, plan ahead and financial prudence eventually will be its own reward. But this sort of finger-wagging makes few converts in the grasshopper world.
A more compelling approach may be to focus more on what makes you happier — because investing in your own well-being and quality of life may turn out to be more prudent and more profitable than you thought.
Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., studied 200 people who embraced Voluntary Simplicity, a movement focused “less on materialistic values — like wanting money and possessions and status — and more on what we called intrinsic values or goals,” Professor Kasser said. The three main intrinsic values were being connected to family and friends, exploring one’s interests or skills and “making the world a better place,” he said.
He conducted the study in 2005 with Kirk Brown, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The researchers compared the attitudes and behaviors of this group with a matched sample of 200 mainstream Americans.
Although the mainstream group’s income was much higher, an average of about $41,000 a year compared with $26,000 for those aiming to live more simply, “we found the people in the Voluntary Simplicity group were much happier and more satisfied with life,” Professor Kasser said.
THAT doesn’t mean frugal people are happier, said Professor Kasser, adding that research findings on this topic are mixed. But the study found that when people invested more in intrinsic values, like relationships and quality of life, and less in consumption, it seemed to increase their happiness. And, the study suggested, there may be a financial gain to doing so. Those in the simplicity group were far more likely than the control group to say that they were careful about their spending, Professor Kasser said.
Christopher K. Hsee, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has observed a similar pattern. He points out that when people use their purchases as a semaphore of status, there is “no natural stopping point;” there will always be a bigger house, a fancier car, a more expensive watch to go after.
When it comes to more basic needs, like food or sleep or friendship, most people naturally reach a point of satisfaction. “Consequently, people who value these types of goods may be financially better off,” Professor Hsee said.
As someone who struggles against her own grasshopper nature, wishing she had the foresight and impulse control of the ant, I like the idea that there’s another path to fiscal prudence. Working hard and being practical are ideal skills to have in life, but if those aren’t your bag, investing in a happier way of life may offer the same financial dividend. Too bad the ant didn’t know about that.
M. P. Dunleavey is the author of “Money Can Buy Happiness” (Broadway Books, 2007).
June 16, 2007
Basic Instincts
It Might Pay to Follow Your Bliss
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY
REMEMBER the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The ant works hard all summer, socking away provisions for the winter; the grasshopper frolics away each day. The ant warns the grasshopper that he’s being hedonistic and short-sighted. The grasshopper ignores the ant, and continues on his merry way — only to perish when winter sets in.
It’s a rather stern lesson about financial prudence, but there is a reason this tale has survived through the ages — and still preoccupies many researchers who study the eccentricities of human economic behavior. Why do the grasshoppers of the world have such a hard time emulating the ants?
The rewards of the ant’s strategy are obvious: by working hard, planning ahead and saving your resources, you end up healthy, wealthy and warm. The pleasures of the grasshopper’s life are short-lived — and ultimately lead to great stress and suffering (if not a dire end).
Yet economic research has demonstrated that most people find it hard to resist the siren song of “seize the day and spend what you have now” — even though a lifestyle based on constant consumption doesn’t enhance anyone’s long-term store of happiness and often puts people on shaky financial ground.
This conundrum also bedevils those who work in the field of personal finance. Why do millions of Americans resist saving for their retirements? Why do so many carry thousands of dollars in credit card debt?
The standard advice for those caught on the treadmill of “getting and spending” could come straight from the mouth of the ant: material kicks don’t pay off in the end, so mend your ways, plan ahead and financial prudence eventually will be its own reward. But this sort of finger-wagging makes few converts in the grasshopper world.
A more compelling approach may be to focus more on what makes you happier — because investing in your own well-being and quality of life may turn out to be more prudent and more profitable than you thought.
Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., studied 200 people who embraced Voluntary Simplicity, a movement focused “less on materialistic values — like wanting money and possessions and status — and more on what we called intrinsic values or goals,” Professor Kasser said. The three main intrinsic values were being connected to family and friends, exploring one’s interests or skills and “making the world a better place,” he said.
He conducted the study in 2005 with Kirk Brown, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The researchers compared the attitudes and behaviors of this group with a matched sample of 200 mainstream Americans.
Although the mainstream group’s income was much higher, an average of about $41,000 a year compared with $26,000 for those aiming to live more simply, “we found the people in the Voluntary Simplicity group were much happier and more satisfied with life,” Professor Kasser said.
THAT doesn’t mean frugal people are happier, said Professor Kasser, adding that research findings on this topic are mixed. But the study found that when people invested more in intrinsic values, like relationships and quality of life, and less in consumption, it seemed to increase their happiness. And, the study suggested, there may be a financial gain to doing so. Those in the simplicity group were far more likely than the control group to say that they were careful about their spending, Professor Kasser said.
Christopher K. Hsee, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has observed a similar pattern. He points out that when people use their purchases as a semaphore of status, there is “no natural stopping point;” there will always be a bigger house, a fancier car, a more expensive watch to go after.
When it comes to more basic needs, like food or sleep or friendship, most people naturally reach a point of satisfaction. “Consequently, people who value these types of goods may be financially better off,” Professor Hsee said.
As someone who struggles against her own grasshopper nature, wishing she had the foresight and impulse control of the ant, I like the idea that there’s another path to fiscal prudence. Working hard and being practical are ideal skills to have in life, but if those aren’t your bag, investing in a happier way of life may offer the same financial dividend. Too bad the ant didn’t know about that.
M. P. Dunleavey is the author of “Money Can Buy Happiness” (Broadway Books, 2007).
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The New York Times
June 12, 2007
Essay
‘Been There?’ Sometimes That Isn’t the Point
By SALLY SATEL, M.D.
During our first year as psychiatric residents at a veterans’ hospital, any patient could reliably stump my colleagues and me by asking one simple question: “If you weren’t in Vietnam, how can you possibly help me?”
We hadn’t been to Vietnam. We were in high school during the worst years of the war. And no, we had never been ambushed, cradled a dying buddy in our arms or dodged land mines. It was a mocking question, really — “Were you in Vietnam?” — and it left us tongue-tied and apologetic.
What were the patients really saying to us? Nancy’s patient, we determined, was testing her perseverance: would she really try to know him? The veteran John was seeing, it soon became clear, was keeping him at arm’s length to conceal a heroin habit. Matt’s patient — the one who told him haughtily at the start of every session, “Really, now, college boy, this will be pointless” — was so ashamed of his tattered life that he had to demean his therapist.
My patient, Rich B., was a former tunnel rat, a wiry soldier who could navigate the Vietcong underground networks. His diagnosis was “anxiety.” Mr. B. was in the habit of quizzing me disdainfully. What were the dates of the Tet offensive? What happened at My Lai? Do you have any idea what it’s like to go down in a tunnel?
At first I was defensive. But then I said: “Of course I don’t know these things, Mr. B. You do. Tell me everything.” That seemed to break the ice. Our therapy became a bit like a tutorial, and the patient realized I valued his knowledge.
In passing, he would mention trouble with his 16-year-old daughter and how their pitched arguments agitated the whole family. Yet when I tried to discuss his home life, he brushed it aside, saying, “So, let me tell you about the time ... .”
After two months, Mr. B. was feeling less anxious and missed fewer days of work, but dealings with his daughter remained volatile. I told him it was my turn to help. “I was never in a tunnel, Mr. B., but I was a 16-year-old girl once.” He assented; finally, there was enough trust between us.
Vietnam had little to do with his distress. Indeed, he spoke of his tour of duty as a tale of adventure, not horror. Yet the invitation to talk about the most dramatic chapter in his life proved a pathway to practical engagement.
I now hear the question “Have you been there, done that?” for the proxy it often is. In his practice, the psychotherapist Saul Raw finds it a common query. “I find it can reflect more profound difficulties in forming collaborative relationships based on trust,” he told me, “and, at the same time, recognizing that all empathy has imperfections.”
For other patients, though, the “Have you ever ...” question is less a therapeutic riddle to be solved — as it was in the case of Mr. B — than an expression of genuine skepticism that they can indeed be helped.
It is the kind of question asked by a person who believes his very soul has been warped by calamity. “Sometimes a patient expresses frustration that I can’t possibly help him because I never experienced the trauma that he did,” said Dr. Walter Reich, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University and a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose patients have included Holocaust survivors.
“Please tell me what happened, how you reacted to it then and how it lives in you now,” he will ask. He gently prods his patient to step out of his private world, “a chamber often filled with circular and self-devouring ruminations.” In the act of making his experience clear and complete to the therapist, the patient has to make it clear and complete to himself, Dr. Reich explains, adding that “in the process, he accepts into his being something that was once consuming it.”
Addiction, too, can be an intense and defining experience. “I have heard patients say that if you haven’t been there you can’t help me,” said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychologist. “So I tell them, ‘I can help you live a sober life because it’s all I have ever lived.’ ”
It’s true that having “been there” can endow a drug-abuse clinician with valuable authority and authenticity. There is just so much bluster a patient can get past a counselor who is a streetwise former junkie (which is why I, the forever-abstinent psychiatrist at a methadone clinic, often seek a second opinion from our counselors). Moreover, that recovered counselor inspires hope that addiction can be conquered.
But most of the time, therapist and patient do not share a history. And even if they do, there is no guarantee it will help. A mutual bond can paradoxically reinforce the patient’s sense of isolation from others. Also, commonality can lead the therapist to identify too closely with the patient, thus compromising objectivity.
In truth, the most relevant knowledge a clinician can possess is the experience of having known and treated many patients already. This is how he learns to become a skilled interpreter of the protean query “Have you ever...?”
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
June 12, 2007
Essay
‘Been There?’ Sometimes That Isn’t the Point
By SALLY SATEL, M.D.
During our first year as psychiatric residents at a veterans’ hospital, any patient could reliably stump my colleagues and me by asking one simple question: “If you weren’t in Vietnam, how can you possibly help me?”
We hadn’t been to Vietnam. We were in high school during the worst years of the war. And no, we had never been ambushed, cradled a dying buddy in our arms or dodged land mines. It was a mocking question, really — “Were you in Vietnam?” — and it left us tongue-tied and apologetic.
What were the patients really saying to us? Nancy’s patient, we determined, was testing her perseverance: would she really try to know him? The veteran John was seeing, it soon became clear, was keeping him at arm’s length to conceal a heroin habit. Matt’s patient — the one who told him haughtily at the start of every session, “Really, now, college boy, this will be pointless” — was so ashamed of his tattered life that he had to demean his therapist.
My patient, Rich B., was a former tunnel rat, a wiry soldier who could navigate the Vietcong underground networks. His diagnosis was “anxiety.” Mr. B. was in the habit of quizzing me disdainfully. What were the dates of the Tet offensive? What happened at My Lai? Do you have any idea what it’s like to go down in a tunnel?
At first I was defensive. But then I said: “Of course I don’t know these things, Mr. B. You do. Tell me everything.” That seemed to break the ice. Our therapy became a bit like a tutorial, and the patient realized I valued his knowledge.
In passing, he would mention trouble with his 16-year-old daughter and how their pitched arguments agitated the whole family. Yet when I tried to discuss his home life, he brushed it aside, saying, “So, let me tell you about the time ... .”
After two months, Mr. B. was feeling less anxious and missed fewer days of work, but dealings with his daughter remained volatile. I told him it was my turn to help. “I was never in a tunnel, Mr. B., but I was a 16-year-old girl once.” He assented; finally, there was enough trust between us.
Vietnam had little to do with his distress. Indeed, he spoke of his tour of duty as a tale of adventure, not horror. Yet the invitation to talk about the most dramatic chapter in his life proved a pathway to practical engagement.
I now hear the question “Have you been there, done that?” for the proxy it often is. In his practice, the psychotherapist Saul Raw finds it a common query. “I find it can reflect more profound difficulties in forming collaborative relationships based on trust,” he told me, “and, at the same time, recognizing that all empathy has imperfections.”
For other patients, though, the “Have you ever ...” question is less a therapeutic riddle to be solved — as it was in the case of Mr. B — than an expression of genuine skepticism that they can indeed be helped.
It is the kind of question asked by a person who believes his very soul has been warped by calamity. “Sometimes a patient expresses frustration that I can’t possibly help him because I never experienced the trauma that he did,” said Dr. Walter Reich, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University and a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose patients have included Holocaust survivors.
“Please tell me what happened, how you reacted to it then and how it lives in you now,” he will ask. He gently prods his patient to step out of his private world, “a chamber often filled with circular and self-devouring ruminations.” In the act of making his experience clear and complete to the therapist, the patient has to make it clear and complete to himself, Dr. Reich explains, adding that “in the process, he accepts into his being something that was once consuming it.”
Addiction, too, can be an intense and defining experience. “I have heard patients say that if you haven’t been there you can’t help me,” said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychologist. “So I tell them, ‘I can help you live a sober life because it’s all I have ever lived.’ ”
It’s true that having “been there” can endow a drug-abuse clinician with valuable authority and authenticity. There is just so much bluster a patient can get past a counselor who is a streetwise former junkie (which is why I, the forever-abstinent psychiatrist at a methadone clinic, often seek a second opinion from our counselors). Moreover, that recovered counselor inspires hope that addiction can be conquered.
But most of the time, therapist and patient do not share a history. And even if they do, there is no guarantee it will help. A mutual bond can paradoxically reinforce the patient’s sense of isolation from others. Also, commonality can lead the therapist to identify too closely with the patient, thus compromising objectivity.
In truth, the most relevant knowledge a clinician can possess is the experience of having known and treated many patients already. This is how he learns to become a skilled interpreter of the protean query “Have you ever...?”
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
