S7E3 - Smokey on Mental Health First Aid (re-air)

Episode Notes

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, we have another re-run episode. Margaret and Smokey talk about ways to go about mental first aid, how to alter responses to trauma for you self and as a community, different paths to resiliency, and why friendship and community are truly the best medicine.

Host Info

Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy (twitter.com/magpiekilljoy) or instagram at @margaretkilljoy (instagram.com/margaretkilljoy).

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @twitter.com/TangledWild?s=20\&t=lrZT1dq3F7… and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness (instagram.com/tangled_wilderness). You can support the show on Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

LLWD:Smokey on Mental First Aid

Margaret 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast are what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And, this week or month...or let's just go with 'episode'. This episode is going to be all about mental health and mental health first aid and ways to take care of your mental health and ways to help your community and your friends take care of their mental health, and I think you'll like it. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

Margaret 01:52 Okay, with me today is Smokey. Smokey, could you introduce yourself with your your name, your pronouns, and I guess a little bit about your background about mental health stuff?

Smokey 02:04 Sure, I'm Smokey. I live and work in New York City. My pronouns are 'he' and 'him.' For 23 years, I've been working with people managing serious mental illness in an intentional community, I have a degree in psychology, I have taught psychology at the University level, I have been doing social work for a long time, but I've been an anarchist longer.

Margaret 02:43 So so the reason I want to have you on is I want to talk about mental health first aid, or I don't know if that's the way it normally gets expressed, but that's the way I see it in my head. Like how are...I guess it's a big question, but I'm interested in exploring ways that we can, as bad things happen that we experience, like some of the best practices we can do in order to not have that cause lasting mental harm to us. Which is a big question. But maybe that's my first question anyway.

Smokey 03:12 I mean, the, the truth is bad things will happen to us. It's part of living in the world, and if you are a person that is heavily engaged in the world, meaning, you know, you're involved in politics, or activism, or even just curious about the world, you will probably be exposed on a more regular basis to things that are bad, that can traumatize us. But even if you're not involved in any of those things, you're going to go through life and have really difficult things happen to you. Now, the good news is, that's always been the case for people. We've always done this. And the good news is, we actually know a lot about what goes into resilience. So, how do you bounce back quickly and hopefully thrive after these experiences? I think that is an area that's only now being really examined in depth. But, we have lots of stories and some research to show that actually when bad things happen to us, there is an approach that actually can help catalyst really impressive strength and move...change our life in a really positive direction. We also know that for most people, they have enough reserve of resiliency that....and they can draw upon other resiliency that they're not chronically affected by it, however, and I would argue how our society is kind of structured, we're seeing more and more people that are suffering from very serious chronic effects of, what you said, bad things happening, or what is often traumatic things but it's not just traumatic things that cause chronic problems for us. But, that is the most kind of common understanding so, so while most people with most events will not have a chronic problem, and you can actually really use those problems, those I'm sorry, those events, let's call them traumatic events, those traumatic events they'll really actually improve your thriving, improve your life and your relationship to others in the world. The fact is, currently, it's an ever growing number of people that are having chronic problems. And that's because of the system.

Margaret 06:19 Yeah, there's this like, there was an essay a while ago about it, I don't remember it very well, but it's called "We Are Also Very Anxious," and it it was claiming that anxiety is one of the general affects of society today, because of kind of what you're talking about, about systems that set us up to be anxious all the time and handle things in...

Smokey 06:42 I think what most people don't understand is, it is consciously, in the sense that it's not that necessarily it's the desire to have the end goal of people being anxious, and people being traumatized, but it is conscious in that we know this will be the collateral outcome of how we set up the systems. That I think is fairly unique and and really kind of pernicious.

Margaret 07:17 What are some of the systems that are setting us up to be anxious or traumatized?

Smokey 07:23 Well, I'm gonna reverse it a little bit, Margaret. I'm going to talk about what are the things we need to bounce back or have what has been called 'resilience,' and then you and I can explore how our different systems actually make us being able to access that much more difficult.

Margaret 07:47 Okay. Oh, that makes sense.

Smokey 07:49 The hallmark of resiliency, ironically, is that it's not individual.

Margaret 07:57 Okay.

Smokey 07:57 In fact, if you look at the research, there are very few, there's going to be a couple, there's gonna be three of them, but very few qualities of an individual psychology or makeup that is a high predictor of resiliency.

Margaret 08:20 Okay.

Smokey 08:21 And these three are kind of, kind of vague in the sense they're not, they're not terribly dramatic, in a sense. One is, people that tend to score higher on appreciation of humor, tends to be a moderate predictor of resiliency.

Margaret 08:46 I like that one.

Smokey 08:47 You don't have to be funny yourself. But you can appreciate humor. Seems to be a....and this is tends to be a cross cultural thing. It's pretty low. There are plenty of people that that score very low on that, that also have resiliency. That's the other thing, I'll say that these three personality traits are actually low predictors of resiliency.

Margaret 09:13 Compared to the immunity ones that you're gonna talk about?

Smokey 09:16 So one is appreciation of humor seems to be one. So, these are intrinsic things that, you know, maybe we got from our family, but but we hold them in ourselves, right? The second one is usually kind of put down as 'education.' And there tends to be a reverse bell curve. If you've had very, very low education, you tend to be more resilient. If you've had extreme professionalization, you know, being a doctor, being a lawyer, well, not even being a lawyer, because that's the only...but many, many years of schooling, PhD things like that, it's not what you study. There's something about...

Smokey 10:10 Yeah, or that you didn't. They're almost equal predictors of who gets traumatized. And then the the last one is kind of a 'sense of self' in that it's not an ego strength as we kind of understand it, but it is an understanding of yourself. The people that take the surveys, that they score fairly high....So I give you a survey and say, "What do you think about Smokey on these different attributes?" You give me a survey and say, "Smokey, how would you rate yourself on these different attributes?" …