Loneliness

I read the “The Lethality of loneliness” by Judith Shulevitz. I thought it was a really interesting article because I know that loneliness is really bad for you. However, it was interesting to see how loneliness could cause not only mental problems but also physical problems. This is due to humans being pack animals, as the article mentioned. Caciappo a scientist tested this by sorting 3 groups of college freshman based on loneliness he found that:

              As expected, he found the students with bodily symptoms of distress (poor sleep, high cortisol) were not the ones with too few acquaintances, but the ones who were unhappy about not having made close friends. These students also had higher than normal vascular resistance, which is caused by the arteries narrowing as their tissue becomes inflamed. High vascular resistance contributes to high blood pressure; it makes the heart work harder to pump blood and wears out the blood vessels. If it goes on for a long time, it can morph into heart disease. (Shulevitz)

It’s just really cool to see something that has been suspected for a long time, that loneliness is detrimental to health, and to see through science how deadly it can prove for a person to feel lonely.

            I also found it interesting that rejection lights up the same receptors that physical pain does. So emotional pain can be just as bad as physical pain. It’s just really interesting how much, it turns out that humans crave to be close to other humans and crave acceptance. It was really interesting to learn about the effect of loneliness, because it seems that it would be so unlikely that something like loneliness can have such a big effect on the human body.  It was even more intriguing to find out that loneliness can have a genetic factor. I had always assumed that it was just a social factor, like your home life that effected how lonely a person felt.

Citation

Shulevitz, Judith. "The Lethality of Loneliness." New Republic. New Republic, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.

Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

In, “It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males” by Arthur Chu it is mentioned how often we throw on the word mental illness every time a white man does a mass shooting.  As he writes, “ The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health” (Chu).

            I agree , this excuse is just over used, we are not calling what these “ mentally ill” white men what they are terrorists. We are so quick to call any person of color who kills a lot of people a terrorist, as Chu him self points out:

              But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer (Chu).

                        I also like the fact that he mentions that calling these terrorists mentally ill does disservice to the mentally ill community, painting them as dangerous bulbs ready to blow, as he points out it’s not considered ok to have the government have a national registry of all weapons because it impedes rights and gives to government tyrannical power, but having a national registry of mentally ill people isn’t a violation of those same rights.

                              I really like that this article pointed out how much the word mentally ill thrown around because we are just reluctant to call these mass shootings what they are, which is that they are acts of terrorism, because it means we have to deal with the fact, that terrorists aren’t just foreign men of color and the “other, but also exist in our normal society. 

                             

 works cited

Chu, Arthur. "It’s Not about Mental Illness: The Big Lie That Always Follows Mass Shootings by White Males." Salon com RSS. Nylon, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.