The article is from this Thursday, but it reports on a study published last April, & we've known that "venting," or "catharsis," does not reduce anger since at least 1983, when my mom's BFF & frequent co-author published the landmark book...

1/4

sciencealert.com/venting-doesnt… 2/ Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion.

Anger feeds Anger. Catharsis is a crock. If you want to feel *better,* do activities that reduce arousal, not those that keep you irate - or even just keep physiological arousal high, like running. Rage rooms are no good; mindfulness...

🧵 There has been a lot of talk this week about RFK eliminating water fluoridation, but most of it (like this piece) fails to mention a few important things:

First, as with many PH issues, elimination of interventions hits vulnerable communities

1/11

fortune.com/well/article/r… 2/ hardest. Kids from low-income families are more likely than others to have dental caries (cavities) & are far less likely to have access to dental care - or to the medical care then needed to treat the infections that can result from tooth decay.

🧵 Here is some *wonderful* news that will make your covid-conscious day 🎉:

Per CT state senator Matt Lesser (democrat) 8th grader Eniola Shokunbi has secured $11.5 million in funding for school CR boxes.

Below is a photo of Ms. Shokunbi & Sen Lesser, from his F** page.

1/8 2/ On his F* page, Lesser notes that "all kids deserve clean air," but that in CT, "many of our schools are old and have limited ventilation. Studies show that poor ventilation results in absenteeism - kids get sick and can't go to school - but also directly leads to worse...

Folks, the clock is running down on telehealth: we're set to lose access in < 3 months!

It's all hands on deck: call your 3 Members of Congress & say you feel *extremely strongly* about telehealth, & they need to pass legislation *now* to maintain access past Dec. 31.

1/6

https://twitter.com/Ikat0/status/1846556090558722518

2/ Tell them "time is of the essence."

The article in the repost is about a new proposed DEA rule that would eliminate a lot of medication prescribing via telehealth. This could harm millions - esp. folks w/ chronic conditions, mental health medication management needs, & ppl in

🧵❗️I am seeing some anger about this, so I'd like to explain some very
important things folks *really* need to know.

Yes, this clip talks about H. working to get LC recognized as a disability under the ADA & working to prevent medical debt from affecting your credit score...

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1844564967183319137

2/ (which can then affect your ability to sign a lease, & to get hired if you can work).

1st, just btw, the latter issue is a *way* bigger one for disabled folks who want to return to work or get housed out of shelters than most folks know. As a conservator, I saw it plenty; so

🧵 @DrJudyStone asked me today why I think bills to extend telehealth past Dec./make access permanent haven't progressed.

Some reasons are innocuous: ppl don't know it's expiring, so aren't pushing for it; Congress is focused on the election. But a far more malevolent

1/10 2/ reason is that insurance companies don't like telehealth.

Many folks in the US have huge issues accessing healthcare, despite having insurance. They may lack transportation; there may be no local providers available; & esp. in rural areas, there may be huge waits for nearby

Mini🧵: The CDC site is unintuitive & v. hard to navigate.

Under resp. illnesses, there are 7 tabs you can click. These are:

About respiratory illnesses
Risk Factors
Prevention
Treatment
Data & Trends
Resources to prep for flu, covid, RSV
Respiratory Virus Guidance

1/6 2/ (Here are the tabs, in the photo below.)

There is info. on masking, but it's not where a lot of people would expect.

If you click on the "prevention" tab, it takes you to a page labeled "preventing respiratory viruses" w/ clickable links. The OP person expected to see masks

🧵Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem so clear about solutions.

Excerpts:

"In March 2021, a quarter of adult respondents to a Gallup poll said they felt lonely for 'a lot' of the day," & for young people, loneliness was experienced "on a regular...
nytimes.com/2024/08/27/mag… 2/ basis" by close to 40%. "The Gallup numbers have since dropped somewhat, but not everyone has reaped the same benefits: The American Psychiatric Association says that 25 percent of U.S. residents are lonelier today than they were before the pandemic."

🧵Another thread about covid, politics, & misinformation:

Last night, I started seeing posts here that suggested Biden had been preventing covid information (like, about severity, spread, mitigation, etc.) from getting onto the book-of-faces place. Today, I'm getting DMs about 2/ big accounts sharing this narrative.

"Russian bot" type accounts love this kind of thing. And unfortunately, it seems an awful lot of people here have forgotten what the original facts were, when first reported. So here's a refresher (and a reminder to evaluate news sources &

🧵I try not to be overly political on soc. media, but PH & healthcare access are inherently political.

This race reps. "the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of... nytimes.com/2024/08/26/us/… 2/ ...low income Americans."

"No anti-poverty measure costs more, affects more people or divides the parties as much as health care."

“The parties are further apart than they have ever been, at least in my memory, and I’m pretty old,” said [a sr fellow at the Brookings Inst.]

Ruh-roh.

"Return-to-office policies are getting stricter, upending the lives of those who had gotten used to working from home."

In Philadelphia, the mayor has ordered "all municipal employees back to the office five days a week."

1/4

npr.org/2024/08/09/nx-… But "officials acknowledged the return-to-office decision wasn't driven by concerns about productivity. Rather, it was in pursuit of what they called a leadership philosophy."

Um, really? I'll bet it wasn't that either. Much more likely, forced returns are motivated by...

🧵 I know some folks want to believe that disregard for the safety of athletes (& others) in Paris is something new & specific to covid, but it's really not. In the US, at least, "pushing through the pain" has been considered a virtue for generations, probably for the same

1/6 reasons it is now (which are often economic). The article below describes t-shirts from the 1990s that boasted slogans like "pain is weakness leaving the body." Not new.

Are there really folks among us who haven't been told to suck it up when our bodies
theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

Good op-ed by the Div. of Medical Ethics chair at NYU's Grossman School of Med. But the one thing he neglects to mention is that the lack of appropriate policy & shunting of responsibility onto uninformed individuals mirrors that of governments &...

statnews.com/2024/08/09/noa… institutions throughout the pandemic. These Olympics have been the world in microcosm.

He says: "I can’t believe that...doctors, the [IOC], or any national Olympic organization would invoke the rationale that athletes get to decide whether to compete."

Really? Look around you.

Psych 🧵

This is an interesting (and awful) take, so I'm sharing it as a gift article.

The author writes about her own selfish thoughts; identifies with Noah Lyles; & reveals some wonky thinking that has brought us to this place.

1/19

wapo.st/4dtHvxi First, she informs us that she'd done all the right things, until 2023. (She's a Good Person.) But rather than seeing those mitigations as a lifestyle change, she treated them like a diet that gives you a free pass to eat a whole cheesecake after a week of being "virtuous."

2/

🧵 Psych thoughts re: the Seine:

This was obviously a policy failure that we watched unfold in real time. ("Wait! Stop! Come back!" says Willie Wonka.) But it also demonstrates how people selectively trust authority figures when those leaders are...

1/14 cnn.com/2024/08/04/spo… saying what we want to hear. (This pattern of behavior has also been on clear display during the pandemic: people were suspicious of leaders whom they perceived as restricting freedoms, due to psychological reactance, but once those experts said to unmask & go to the mall,

2/14

🧵 Just because something is published doesn't mean it's good science. Below, I'll talk more about how you can evaluate research articles you may come across on social media or that might be cited in the press.

1/20

https://twitter.com/dontwantadothis/status/1818390979721703447

1st, when reading a media article that cites/links to a research pub., look at what the research piece itself says. Journalists may get things wrong or present a biased/incomplete picture. They may imply there's a causal relationship b/t variables when that's not the case.

2/

🧵This one is an example of the availability heuristic, folks. That's a cognitive shortcut people use to estimate the prevalence of an event (like a health threat) by how easily they can think of examples (either from the media or from personal experience). As I pointed out... to this person, all sorts of factors can affect how easily examples of covid mortality came to his mind. One was that this man's demographics (region, race, age, etc) may have made his own acquaintances less likely to have severe covid outcomes than was the population norm.

2/9

I've been debating about whether to post this, b/c I know people's feelings about sex offenders naturally run very deep.

But I really think Louisiana is on a theocratic, authoritarian-adjacent spree of terrible decisions this summer. Hear me out...

1/16

npr.org/2024/07/01/nx-… Psychologists have known for yrs that even chemical castration has its limits in preventing ongoing sex crimes. Both it & surgical removal of testicles/ovaries have some effect on libido, but they don't necessarily eliminate it. For ex., women who've had hysterectomy with

2/16

🧵 Conspiracy theories & health beliefs:

Today in a fb group about alpha-gal syndrome (a tick borne allergy to meat), a post about cooking/eating worms led to "conspiracy theory" comments that AGS is intentionally spread by Fauci & Gates (who apparently want us to eat worms). 2/ It led me to ponder that age-old question: "why on Earth would people think that?"

I never studied conspiracy theories (or theorists) professionally, but we did deal with a fair amount of conspiratorial thinking in the early years of HIV intervention.

Very interesting article. The last paragraph really spoke to me, as a social psychologist:

Bonnie & Bob Krall have had 3 types of cancer between them in 14 months.

“'Maybe if we didn’t get covid …' she started before trailing off. Bob shrugged and finished for her. ...

1/6

https://twitter.com/ariccio/status/1798822805024493845

...Maybe we would have been better? Maybe we would have been worse.'"

This is an example of a cognitive bias often seen in cognitive dissonance reduction, whereby new info that doesn't fit w/ what one previously thought (or chose to *do*) is ignored or discounted, in favor

2/6

🧵 Since 2020, I've been cutting my partner's hair. I don't know how to cut hair, & the last four years have not made me more knowledgeable or skilled. (Yes, I watched YouTube videos; I'm hopeless.)

My partner had been putting up with it, but I couldn't take it anymore, as.... 2/ he looked really...not good. Very, extremely. So I called the person who had done my hair for many years, pre-pandemic. It was a bit challenging finding her, b/c the salon where she worked had closed, & she'd just opened her own new place.

When I asked her if she might be