Search Results for: Depression

The Snowy Countries Losing Their Identity

Longreads Pick

“Hartig’s research has linked unusually cool summer temperatures in Sweden to increased antidepressant use – an observation he says he would expect to apply to warmer winter temperatures too, which he suggests may exacerbate the already high incidence of depression during the winter. “We are really losing the qualities of the seasons that we value most,” Hartig says.”

Source: BBC
Published: Feb 15, 2021
Length: 6 minutes (1,600 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

WASHINGTON, DC, JANUARY 9: Two National Guards are seen through the fence where roses are left and which now now surrounds the US Capitol building three days after it was stormed, invaded and vandalized by Trump rioters in Washington, D.C., January 9, 2021. (Photo by Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Timothy Snyder, Austin Carr, James Murdock, Myriam Lahouari, and Brian Hiatt

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1. The American Abyss

Timothy Snyder | The New York Times Magazine | January 9, 2021 | 18 minutes (4,500 words)

“A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob, and what comes next.”

2. The Cruise Ship Suicides

Austin Carr | Bloomberg Businessweek | December 30, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,587 words)

Cruise crew members experienced a “more extreme version of the household lockdowns that have sent people tumbling into depression.”

3. Orange is the New Peach

James Murdock | The Bitter Southerner | January 5, 2021 | 15 minutes (3,947 words)

“Southern winters have been getting warmer. Ten years ago, Joe Franklin started growing citrus on his farm in Statesboro, Georgia — a place where no one expected oranges to grow. Now, Franklin’s citrus groves teem with life and might actually help, in a very small way, to combat climate change.”

4. The Catch

Myriam Lahouari | BBC | January 7, 2021 | 9 minutes (2,427 words)

“The men call up to Sofiane, telling him that he and his brother have to jump. Guelord shouts that the younger boy needs to go first. Sofiane should throw him down.”

5. The Spirit of Neil Peart

Brian Hiatt | Rolling Stone | January 7, 2021 | 26 minutes (6,674 words)

“Rush’s virtuoso drum hero lived by his own rules, to the very end. For the first time since Peart’s passing, his bandmates and widow discuss his legacy and his final years.”

What Happened to Cruise Ship Workers Once the Passengers Were Gone?

Photo of the Carnival Breeze by Andy Newman/Carnival Cruise Lines via Getty Images

CW: suicide

Last year’s investigations into the COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships at the start of the pandemic, including Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess and Holland America’s MS Zaandam, revealed horrific vacations gone wrong for passengers from around the world. But what happened to the tens of thousands of crew members who remained trapped on ships even after all the guests had disembarked and found their way home?

At Bloomberg Businessweek, Austin Carr tells the devastating stories of cruise line employees found dead — in apparent suicides — aboard Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships, including Jozsef Szaller, a shore excursion manager from Hungary on the Carnival Breeze, and Mariah Jocson, a waitress from the Philippines on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.

Interviews with affected crew members and their families suggest that despite assurances from cruise operators that crew were well cared for, their mental health was at times an afterthought. An October 2019 study on the mental well-being of crew, commissioned by a group affiliated with the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the big maritime trade union, found that even before the pandemic about a fifth of mariners surveyed said they had suicidal thoughts. High levels of depression stem from the jobs’ long contract lengths and stressful demands.

On April 29, an electrical engineer from Poland on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas disappeared while the ship was anchored in the Saronic Gulf, south of Athens. Ship security cameras captured him leaping into the water that morning, according to Greek authorities. Two weeks later, on May 10, Evgenia Pankrushyna, a waitress from Ukraine, died after jumping overboard from Carnival’s Regal Princess near Rotterdam. Around this time a Chinese contractor was found dead on Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas. A crew member aboard the ship says many believed it was another suicide, though the company said he’d died of natural causes. Next was a Filipino cook, Kennex Bundaon, who was found dead in his cabin on Carnival’s AIDAblu. Four days later, another worker from the Philippines died in an apparent suicide on Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady.

The details of the deaths of Szaller and Jocson are still not clear, even to their families, who are “desperate for closure.” In Szaller’s case, Carnival has refused to discuss the specific circumstances of his death with his parents, while the father of Jocson, the Royal Caribbean employee, says that his daughter had never shown signs of depression and kept telling him that she wanted to go home. He just wants to know the truth about her death.

It wasn’t just the claustrophobic environment that was distressing. Workers say cruise companies constantly changed repatriation schedules, offering only vague guidance on when or how they’d return home. Without customers on board, Carnival moved many contractors off duty, meaning they could sort of enjoy the amenities of the ocean liners. But that also meant their salaries were eventually cut off—a scary situation for those supporting families on land. The weeks dragged on with limited entertainment options. Internet access was complimentary on some boats, but it could be painfully slow or strong enough only for social media and texting.

Vilmos says communications with Carnival broke down soon after. As the Szallers tried to organize the retrieval of their son’s body, including figuring out which jurisdiction would have to declare him legally deceased, they began to see the cruise company as having had a role in their son’s death. Its labyrinthine corporate structure—a web of international entities designed to lower Carnival’s tax liability—compounded their grief.

Even now, the Szallers have been unable to have Jozsef declared legally deceased. Vilmos says the coroner’s report should move things forward, but it’s been frustrating enough coordinating with U.K. authorities on behalf of his son, a Hungarian citizen. And that’s not even half the headache. As Vilmos frames it, how do you officially process a death that occurred in international waters, on a ship registered in Panama, that’s owned by a company operating in the U.S.?

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The Cruise Ship Suicides

Longreads Pick
Published: Dec 30, 2020
Length: 18 minutes (4,587 words)

To Make a Building Healthier, Stop Sanitizing Everything

Longreads Pick

” For years scientists have sounded the alarm that our disconnect from the outdoors is linked to a host of chronic health problems, including allergies, asthma, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and obesity. “

Published: Dec 16, 2020
Length: 16 minutes (4,113 words)

Loving Molly, and Mourning Her: A Husband’s Extraordinary Essay

Chaichan Poradok / EyeEm

What does one say about a piece of writing as beautiful and devastating as Blake Butler‘s essay for The Volta about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak, who committed suicide in early 2020? Perhaps just this: Read it. Or as the writer himself has said, “Please read with care.”

By turns elegiac and funny, angry and warm, expansive and intimate, “Molly” is a feat:

Within the gardens of her darkness, Molly made up her own ways to believe—in art, in poetry, in nature, in creation. She did her best to surround herself with evidence that there might be any reason yet to try. God to her appeared as obvious folly, dressed up in desperate want for mindless relief against what she saw as the cold, dark universe. Even the thought of having children made her ill—how could anybody bring another life into this world where no one cares? Sometimes when I’d try to talk to her about her own childhood, slowly revealing itself, sometimes against her will, as of an irredeemable neglect, the walls in her would rise up, and she’d go blank.

–––

Molly hated long goodbyes. She preferred instead to turn away and not look back, not even waving. As she left my apartment, I would wait and watch to see if this time she would break her rule, as an exception—she never did. “The amount of fear / I am ok with / is insane,” Molly wrote in her poem titled “Molly Brodak.” “I love many people / who don’t love me. / I don’t actually know / if that is true.”

–––

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.

 TW: suicide, self-harm, depression

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Motherhood on the Line

Migrant women and children, like Fania and her infant son Bilfani, seek care at the Mother and Child Hospital and refuge at the Path of Life (Senda de Vida) shelter, both in Reynosa, Mexico. Photo by Jacky Muniello.

Alice Driver | Longreads | December 2020 | 12 minutes (3,442 words)

 
FANIA*

* Fania’s last name is withheld for privacy.

The doctor made a uterine incision on the woman’s body to extract the fetal arms, then grasped the baby’s feet and pulled him from the womb upside down, delivering him into the era of coronavirus. Fania, 33, had traveled 1,726 miles from Haiti to Reynosa, Mexico. She had not planned to become pregnant nor imagined giving birth during a pandemic. “In my life, I did not want to have children. I was very careful, and I managed for four years with my husband. The idea was not to have a child who is suffering,” she explained.

When Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I met Fania on August 3, 2020, in Reynosa, Mexico, her C-section scar was fully healed. Muniello and I had worked together in Reynosa on several projects, and we were familiar with the risks of working in a city controlled by cartels, one whose militarized streets suggested a city at war with itself. This, however, was our first time working in the city during the pandemic, walking its streets in N95 masks. We found citizens wary, on edge, suspicious, anxious, and struggling to process the coronavirus death news cycle alongside the conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire on social media. Read more…

Shades of Grey

Getty Images

Ashley Stimpson | Longreads | October 2020 | 26 minutes (7,001 words)

It’s been nearly a decade since the numbers were tattooed in her ears, but they remain remarkably legible. In the right one, dots of green ink spell out 129B: Vesper was born in the twelfth month of the decade’s ninth year and was the second in her litter. The National Greyhound Association (NGA) gave that litter a unique registration number (52507), which was stamped into her moss-soft left ear. If I type these figures into the online database for retired racing greyhounds, I can learn about her life before she was ours, before she was even Vesper.

Smokin’ Josy was born to a breeder in Texas, trained in West Virginia, and raced in Florida. Over three years, she ran 70 races. She won four of them. In Naples on May 12, 2012, she “resisted late challenge inside,” to clinch victory, according to her stat sheet. In Daytona Beach on April 17, 2013, she “stumbled, fell early.” Five days later, after a fourth-place showing, she was retired.

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Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court

Photo collage: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) / Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | September 2020 | 6,849 words (24 minutes)

 

The Equitable Life Building, at 100 Montgomery Street, sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Named after an insurance company, it was the first skyscraper built in the city after the Depression, a symbol of optimism rising 25 stories high with marble walls that sparkled in the sun. Today, it is home to all sorts of buzzy Bay Area companies, from Spruce Capital Partners (“investors and thought leaders in the Life Sciences industry”) to the OutCast Agency (“strategists and creatives” with “a hyper-growth mindset”). To get away from the hectic pace of investing, strategizing, and creating, tenants can burn off calories inside the building’s private gym or take their lunch break atop a luxurious rooftop deck. 

The Equitable Life Building is also home to the San Francisco Immigration Court, though it’s easy to miss. On my first visit last winter, the only hint that a court lay within was the scores of families in the lobby, clutching summonses and looking confused. The court is above, occupying the fourth, eighth, and ninth floors. Up here, the elevators opened into a slightly off-kilter dimension: A security line snaked into a cramped waiting room, which led to a winding and windowless hallway, from which one entered identical windowless courtrooms. It was deeply disorienting. I often encountered people fumbling around in the hallway, not sure how the hell to get out.    Read more…

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | September 2020 |14 minutes (3,715 words)

 

Hive is a series about women and the music that has influenced them, edited by Danielle A. Jackson. Read more at Longreads and The Believer

 

The voice of Margie Hendrix on “Night Time is The Right Time” comes at you out of nowhere, like an explosive, thunderous crack in the sky after a period of steady rain. Long after the song is over, it’s her words that stay ringing in your ear. You’ll belt out, “Babyyyyyyy!” in the shower, while out for a jog, or when giving your friends a hard time as they share their most trying relationship conundrum. On The Cosby Show, it’s her part that is most memorable when reenacted by adorable, pig-tailed Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam. In the 2004 biopic Ray, it was future Academy Award winner Regina King who played the role of Hendrix. King spoke of the difficulty in channeling the musician, as few references, visual or text, were available to use as inspiration for the role: “There isn’t a lot of information out there on Margie, so I had to rely on her voice to guide me.” The kind to stop you in your tracks, Hendrix’s voice remained unchanging, and from her earliest solo releases to her final years, it was an infallible offering from an artist who was moved to sing.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles. I’ve thought about her regularly for years, wondering how a woman with that voice could disappear from the public eye so easily, after making such an unforgettable appearance. It’s a thought that’s stayed with me, because it carries the sobering reality that someone can be incredibly talented — phenomenal even — and still find themselves omitted by history. It could happen to anybody, but it seems to happen most often to talented Black women who are bold enough to chase their dreams, then fall apart from the sheer pressure of it all. Women who are public but invisible and who are noticed without really being seen. Women like Margie Hendrix.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles.

She didn’t look like the performers most record producers wanted Black women to be. She was too dark, had a gap between her two front teeth and was a Southern girl with none of that Northern polish and glam. The music industry of today is incredibly corrosive and toxic, but it was even more so for Black musicians in the middle of the twentieth century, who dealt with nothing but no-good managers, unfair contracts, and stolen music credits. Anti-black racism and its social realities make it astounding that artists emerged who weathered through even when it seemed like everyone at some point or another crumbled, with many never making it back.  The argument could be made that had Hendrix managed to stay far from the drugs that would ravage her body, and kicked those bad habits, she would have lasted longer and achieved success rivaling that of her still living peers from that “golden” era. Yet the number of Black women uncounted and unnamed in music history makes it clear that this wasn’t only a question of sobriety. It was also about opportunity, and a perverse lack of care for the artists whose mental and physical health were secondary so long as money continued to be made. Hendrix’s death and eventual erasure from the mainstream were not simply tragic turns in a complicated life, but the outcome of a series of events that befell a woman unloved by those she committed herself to, and unprotected by those whose coffers she filled. 

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