Stanton's Blog

February 8, 2010

Super Bowl and Suicide

My Super Bowl story (and betting pick) was off a notch. I featured the Manning family and Peyton, quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, who were bested by Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints.

Brees' outstanding performance in the Super Bowl speaks for itself - as does his entire season. Especially as his success marked his return from a bad shoulder injury that was thought to be career-ending.

Beyond this, Brees and his wife have engaged themselves in New Orleans in a truly remarkable way. Most athletes - or people who make salaries like Brees - donate to help people in cities. They don't actually move into and become a part of the cities, like Brees and his wife have. A 2010 Sports Illustrated profile called Brees "an athlete as adored and appreciated as any in an American city today."

Brees is also deeply religious. He may have gotten his values from his mother, Mina Brees. A prominent Austin attorney, widely known and well-liked, photos reveal her at 59 to be a beautiful woman. She was visiting another son in Colorado last August, when she committed suicide. A third son, also a Texas lawyer who had (like Drew) been a star quarterback in college, announced her death.

Brees' parents divorced when he was young. Mina Brees went on to become president of the Austin Bar Association, which gave her an award in 2005 for legal ethics and professionalism. But she ran into trouble last year when she sent out notices to prominent restaurants that their names had expired - and that a company she owned would charge them a hefty fee to regain the rights to their names. Just prior to her suicide, the Texas Attorney General had subpoenaed her records.

When his mother ran for a judgeship (she lost narrowly to a Republican incumbent), Drew demanded that she remove his name from her campaign ads and materials. He said their relationship was "nonexistent," dating back to his refusal when he graduated college to hire her to represent him in his professional sports negotiations.

This much was known. What remains beneath the surface is a mystery. Sometimes, parents are estranged from a prominent child. Often, the child achieved success after leaving a family behind - a mother or father who lived completely different lifestyles, a world apart from their child. Perhaps they were even an embarrassment.

But Mina Brees was prominent, successful, popular in her own right.

Where, how did this relationship go wrong? It stands in such stark contrast, not only to Brees' monumental success, but to the family ties that bind losing Super Bowl quarterback Manning to his parents.

Except that Peyton's father, Archie Manning, who was an All-American and pro quarterback and also lives in New Orleans, and who reached out to Brees and his wife when they moved to the city, found his father after he killed himself with a shotgun following Archie's sophomore year in college.

February 7, 2010

Special Super Bowl Post: The Marvels of Football Psychology

Today is Super Bowl Sunday - the supreme day of national communion in the United States.

The two teams confronting one another both have remarkable back-stories. The New Orleans Saints, of course, represent a city that has been assailed by nature and, equally, the failures of local, state, and national governance. The team has never before been to the Super Bowl - indeed, half of the teams' total franchise playoff victories of four have occurred this year. Who can help but root for them?

But the team they face, the Indianapolis Colts, has had its own challenges. The Colts had football's worst running game, and quarterback Peyton Manning has had to throw to new, inexperienced receivers. Yet Manning gained 4,500 yards passing, nearly his all-time best in a great career. This season he had the highest completion rate in his 12 seasons - almost 70 percent.

Both quarterbacks - the Saints' Drew Brees (why do football players have such great names?) and Manning - are remarkable leaders. Brees heads the pre-game players' chant driving his teammates into an emotional fervor. This is not usually the star quarterback's role. Moreover, he is extremely active in the New Orleans community that has been so severely damaged.

Meanwhile, Manning is considered by many the hardest working man in football, showing up before the greenest rookies to work out himself and with his receivers. (Of course, he is paid $14 million annually for his efforts and, at age 33, his contract will expire in 2011. Owner Jim Irsay has promised to give him the biggest contract ever - whatever that is!)

Professional football is the best example in America of successful cooperation among the races, including not only white and African Americans, but a large number of Samoans. If we could all cooperate like these men do on the playing field, we'd be a better society. Quarterbacks in particular have to feel the mood of all the players on their teams and coordinate their efforts.

Among quarterbacks, Peyton Manning stands out. The football defenses he faces are marvels of complexity. The Colts rely largely on a no-huddle offense, so that Manning watches opposing players substitute in and out of the game across the scrimmage line. On the field, players move forward and back as they feint or contemplate charging directly at him (i.e., "blitzing"). And while he is surveying the field, he changes assignments for his linemen, receivers, and running backs - all in a matter of seconds!

How the hell does he do that! How can one human being be that sharply attuned to so many variables? Moreover, how can he communicate so many crucial changes to teammates in so little time with so little motion and effort? He is, after all, chanting countdown numbers and concentrating on taking the ball from between the center's legs. And how can the receivers et al. divine what they're supposed to do from the things he barks towards them between counting down the snap of the ball?

Manning has to know where receivers are headed and in which direction they will break. If he throws assuming the receiver will zig when he in fact zags, the result is - interception - a quarterback's worst nightmare. But, of course, receivers may alter their patterns depending on the defenders' movements - maybe a defensive back overcommits himself in one direction, or there is an opening left undefended on one part of the field that the receiver will head towards.

So Manning must both assume that receivers are running particular patterns, and remain alert to improvisation on the receivers' parts - sometimes while he is running around in the backfield himself. It's like jazz! And this is why Manning is famous for spending so much extra time working with receivers before regular practice begins in perfecting their pas de deux's. I guess he wants to earn his $14 million!

Manning is in the unusual situation of having had a professional quarterback as a father (former Saints quarterback Archie Manning) and a younger brother who quarterbacks a professional football team and who has himself won a Super Bowl (the Giants' Eli Manning - what did I tell you - not a John or a Robert in the bunch). With one year off, either Manning could be winner in three out of the last four Super Bowls (Peyton won the 2007 Super Bowl, Eli the 2008).

And the two are both polite, earnest, hard-working, non-prima-donna young men.

Considering the difficulties many athletes have managing their own lives off of the football field, his sons may make Archie Manning football's father of the decade - no, make that father of the decade with all comers included. And wife Olivia mother of the decade.

One last irony - Archie, who came from a dirt town in Mississippi that he likens to Mayberry - is probably the most popular player in New Orleans Saints history - even though he never came close to playing in a Super Bowl himself with the team.

Picture: Peyton Manning pointing - at either a defensive player who needs to be picked up, a receiver on his own team he wants to change his pattern, or a photographer not getting his best angle - NOT!

February 2, 2010

I Wonder About People Who Attack Bloggers

When you write a blog - or any other public commentary - you invite the unhappy and uncivilized to attack you - they often try to strip you to the bare bones! It is both an occupartional hazard and a comment on our times.

This recent comment I got in response to an old post (last June 10th), "A Psychological Interview with Barack Obama," is far from the worst I've received:

"This is NOT an interview but rather pitiful hem hugging, star struck, dribble totally unworthy of this publication! The author needs to grow up ..."

It is from that popular correspondent, Anonymous (although I have received some real doozies from named assailants).

Any blog or public writer, from Maureen Dowd on down, gets used to this (have you ever looked at the comments printed by the Times following Dowd's articles - scabrous!). After the initial shock at seeing these wears off, you are left to reflect on the nature of your readership and just how sorry a state the world is in.

What motivates people sitting home (I imagine them in their underwear, using a PC in the basement of their mother's home, where they live) to attack people who have a psychology degree or some other credential that provides the modest qualifications needed to write a blog for Psychology Today?

It is common for them to call to the attention of the PT authorities, like Anonymous did, that the blogger is unworthy. Is this an actual attempt to get PT to reconsider listing my blog? If so, then the commenter is probably not well-moored to the real world.

But I suspect it is just a chance for them to offload their frustrations - not with me but their own lives. Oh, I can believe they didn't really like my post - although the worst insulters never identify specific offending ideas or shortcomings in the post. They are not a group given to careful readings.

The Internet affects communications in myriad ways. Of course, there is the universality - that like-minded people can find kindred spirits around the globe. But, then, there is the anonymity. People can say things there they would never dare to utter - that frighten themselves - in the light of day.

The Internet - and blog comments - reveal a sea full of untethered souls, grappling with their own disappointments and limitations, ready to strike out at the first sign of weakness (real or imagined) that they can discern in someone better off, more successful, or at least more visible than they are.

Not a pretty picture.

January 28, 2010

On my integrity and peripatetic career (Posted to the Kettil Bruun Society Listserv)

From: Stanton Peele
Sent: Jan 28, 2010 7:06 AM
To: Kettil Bruun Society
Subject: On my integrity and peripatetic career

[We are all influenced by our funding and career history, but some are more than others. I am always impressed when someone reports findings which go against their deepest beliefs. I would be interested in hearing about an example of where you have done this. RR]

Talk about snotty! Finding me wanting in taking positions contrary to my interests!

Let me mention one position I took which endangered my entire professional standing and personal financial position (a situation in which you were, let's say, a prominent bystander).

This was in the defense of controlled drinking and natural remission data in the 1980s, following Rand et al. For instance, when my review of the Sobell case appeared in Psychology Today, I was relieved of my position as keynote speaker at the University of Texas alcoholism summer school. Although I was reinstated after threatening to sue, my speaking engagements before provider audiences, which were a major source of my income, dried up (as John French described on this list), and I had to find other ways to support my family. True, I was expressing "my deepest beliefs" - at the expense of my economic survival! Would you call that a principled stand, especially since you could have been equally outspoken on the topic, based on your studies at ARG which found natural remission and reduced drinking outcomes commonplace?

Your casting aspersions on my lack of courage or integrity - Stanton Peele, slave to the man - in a career marked by independence and a willingness to speak truth to power strikes me as adding insult to injury. I found government agencies no more sympathetic to harm reduction and anti-disease positions than private providers. For instance, the recent announcement in NIAAA Spectrum, "Alcoholism isn't what it used to be," begins with the sentence: "The realization dawned gradually as researchers analyzed data from NIAAA’s 2001–2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC)."

Yet, I identified more than a decade earlier, based on NLAES, "Not only do most alcoholics improve significantly without treatment, but they typically do so without quitting drinking.” Indeed, writing similar things in my 1985 book The Meaning of Addiction, Margaret Bean-Bayog responded in her review in the New England Journal of Medicine, "this book worried me" and invited people who felt similarly - in a NEJM book review! - to contact her in what my friend Archie Brodsky termed, "Invitation to a Lynching."

I could go on, but your insinuations can really be seen as one more institutional response to my willingness, however unwise, to speak honestly and to bear the brunt of attacks for positions that eventually are widely accepted. I have learned there are no rewards for prematurely announcing npopular truths. And would I be more independent, honest, and praiseworthy if I worked for a Nordic alcohol monopoly, or bade my time in expounding what I knew to be true, or had a university or government position? This speaks to one issue under discussion, about how some people get to consider themselves holier-than-thou based on their own career choices, which may be as safe and venal as any. I don't specifically mean you here, since you are not the worst in this regard, and I am far from the worst victim. Recall Davies, Cameron, and Drucker's description of the use of Addiction editorial positions "as a tool with which to attack individuals who hold new or unfashionable ideas, and in the process to endanger careers and destroy reputations" (an editorial you refused to sign off on).

My my, people can feel warm, moral, and self-justified when they are part of a society that agrees with them, although sometimes their views and self-regard look less good in brighter lighting, as for example in John Tierney's writing in a featured article in the New York Times about those anti-corporationalists who express "a snobbery akin to the old British aristocracy’s disdain for people 'in trade.' Many scientists, journal editors and journalists see themselves as a sort of priestly class untainted by commerce, even when they work at institutions that regularly collect money from corporations in the form of research grants and advertising." And, in my experience, these same people are not especially distinguished by their boldness in speaking unpopular truths, defending people who are unfairly attacked, or breaking from the crowd of like-minded people with whom they travel.

January 26, 2010

The Horror Whose Name Can't Be Spoken - Teen Sex!

Dr. Oz - who has three teenage daughters - interviewed a group of teenage girls (why not boys?) about sex, assisted by a female physician. Dr. Oz is the best of the TV social-medical commentators - which we would expect from a Columbia Medical School faculty member.

Let me say what Dr. Oz did - almost remarkably - was to nonchalantly accept teen sex as a normal occurrence. At one point, he asked how many of the girls were using contraception - not how many were sexually active. Most raised their hands. What an advancement over virtually every other show on teen sex!

Nonetheless, Dr. Oz, the other physician, and the parents couldn't accept the level and type of sexual activity the teens revealed. Anal sex blew their minds, and the female physician ruled it out as being too dangerous. When one kid clued Dr. Oz into "hook-ups" - that often teens have sex first, relationships later - Dr. Oz asked, "That doesn't just mean getting together with someone?"

According to Angelfire, this is the percentage of teens who have had sex by level of high school.

40% of ninth graders
47% of tenth graders
57% of eleventh graders
72% of twelfth graders

Not one parent on the show frankly acknowledged their daughter's sexual activity. Most were asking for ways to prevent them from having sex - seeking magic words that would pull them back from the brink, restore their virginity, if you will. (There is a chance for Sarah Palin to become president, if she can just get all these votes.  If the reality-based vote is instead determinative, then Levi Johnston - who recommends kids be taught birth control - would win.)

But Dr. Oz had insisted the girls speak honestly. So, when he asked what was the biggest misconception among parents, one girl spoke up: "That by imposing more and more restrictions, they can get their kids to do what they want. The more you tell kids not to do, the more they hide, and the less you will know about what they're up to."

Parents don't want to hear that! They tune in to daytime TV to hear kids get lectures about the dangers of sex, how teens are too young for sexual activity, how sex only results in no-good. True to form, Sarah's take-away on the Oprah show (they didn't let Bristol speak for herself) was that she should have placed more restrictions on her daughter.

Parents telling kids how lousy sex is for them has one major drawback - the kids are already having sex and can draw their own conclusions. Respecting their children's decisions, unfortunately, is leading them down different paths from the ones the parents would choose for them. And, so, sex competes with drugs and alcohol for the biggest secret all kids know, but won't tell their parents.

To get out of this no-nothing, no-woman's land, we'd have to accept teens are sexual, and devote time as parents and schools to this reality.  One girl said it was parents who were uncomfortable with the sexual discussion, and Dr. Oz (who is famous for discussing on TV the most disgusting parasites and human minutiae) repeatedly said this was true in his conversations with his daughters.

What are the chances of that changing?

January 25, 2010

Buttheaditis - The Demoralization of the American Male

Let me describe four television ads you might see on any evening - perhaps one following the other - for example during the football playoffs.

A man feverishly scratches a lottery ticket in the hopes of winning an unwinnable prize, while a baby with an adult consciousness sitting next to him mocks the man's expectation that he will win - and his stupidity for this expectation. The man loses and expresses his stupid disappointment as the baby makes a stupid face. (E-trade)

A business executive has hired Kyle to provide geographical information - the boy corrects the executive's reference to Czechoslovakia - informing the man it's the Czech Republic. Then the exec tells another guy that without the kid he would never have learned of the new country -"Buttheadistan." (FedEx)

A white-haired, clueless executive interacts with a lizard who continuously mocks the stupid preferences and decisions of the executive. How does this sell the product (GEICO)? Presumably people imagine the reptile is running GEICO - who knows who really manages the company - which is actually a good PR move.

A woman tells her friend during a kids' party how she got all the party supplies at Walmart - including the clown costume daddy is wearing as he approaches the happy children. The father jumps on a sharp toy and lets out a horrifying wail, scaring the children off. The mother is calm - she knows her husband is an idiot.

What do these ads all have in common? They show white, adult males as imbeciles. They couldn't depict other races this way; they couldn't show stupid, befuddled, self-deluded women. Only stupid white men. Why not? They are so stupid - everyone knows that.

What effect do these ads have? Don't say they have no effect. Ads are made by smart communicators (okay, many of them white men) to get you to think and behave in a certain way. Their impact is to give license to people - including their children - to regard and treat adult males as imbeciles.

What our society needs is to think about the men in its midst - and in most cases, running it - as idiots? Wall Street, sports management, and the government (the Senate is 79 percent white males) are mismanaged? Families are well-served by considering fathers irrelevant - and worse?

Why would a society set out systematically to undercut its leadership and family structure? If your answer is - "because the stupid men deserve it" - well, then, you're happy. And it IS beneficial to broaden our leadership to include women and other races.

But it is not helpful for us to become a rudderless land without role models. It is demoralizing. And it reflects no more creativity or social consciousness for American advertising and media to do this than it would be for them to depict women or black men as stupid, obtuse, and disposable.

January 24, 2010

The Unbearable Heaviness of Truth

If you watch network and cable news, you see the rescue of a few survivors from the rubble in Haiti, the smiling orphans brought to the United States (along with press conferences by the politicians and orphanage executives who brought them here), the resilience of the Haitian people, the generosity of Americans, the devotion of international aid forces.

But that's not the truth - or certainly not the majority of the truth. We know this because the Haitian government now estimates that there have been over 100,000 deaths due to the earthquake - and the dying continues. For the truth, you must watch CNN, most notably Cooper Anderson and medical director Sanjay Gupta (whom the Obama administration wanted to serve as Surgeon General)

It's as though CNN occupies a different reality from NBC, Fox, et al. Their coverage is almost unbearable. Cooper has covered rioting and looting - in one incident, a boy was hit by a rock thrown from a rooftop, and Cooper carried him, bleeding heavily, to safety - otherwise it appears the boy would have died in the street. Cooper describes watching the dead being carried to graveyards, where crypts are broken open and bodies stacked in piles.

Sanjay Gupta describes at first being unable to register the sight of dead bodies everywhere upon entering Port-au-Prince. Both he and Cooper have been shocked at the "stupid deaths" - people dying who could readily be saved by basic medical care. Gupta and his crew watched - unbelievingly - as doctors simply deserted a facility they had set up, leaving the injured and dying patients to their own devices! (Gupta and his crew stepped in to do what they could.)

"My faith in humanity has been completely trashed," Gupta declared. He noted miserably, "There is so much medical aid in the city - but it's stuck at the airport." He and his crew actually went to the airport to fetch and distribute supplies themselves.

Other CNN correspondents have presented no less unflinching reports. One heard shots, and saw two police shooting two young men they had in custody. But one boy, as he lay dying (was his life less valuable than the young man recently rescued from building debris?), denied the accusation that he had looted, and a bystander supported his claim. This reporter showed some of the families (600,000 Haitians have been displaced) with their few possessions, their lives entirely destroyed, wandering like zombies through the streets.

Another CNN reporter described bringing water to a girl whom he watched die from her injuries and resulting infections. "I'll always wonder if there was more that I could have done." Yet another described children crying at the sight of the dead on the street. He also showed sick and dying survivors of a collapsed nursing home, demented elderly people living in the street in soiled diapers.

As we watch celebrities perform at concerts and donate money for supplies to be sent to Haiti, CNN shows that, when food is delivered, strong young men push women and children to the ground and take food from the trucks. A CNN reporter saw a distribution truck abandon starving people to escape the violence - a symbol of the futility of our happy delusion that we are helping Haitians.

What's the matter with CNN - don't they know Americans are sensitive souls who don't like to watch suffering? We want to focus on happy events.  Of course, no one is immune to the charm of the man emerging after 12 days buried in a collapsed building.  Keep in mind that he was only saved because his brother, who heard his voice, persisted for days in seeking help - which finally was made possible when a Greek reporter took up his cause.

Is there a better way to do this?  Gupta's - and CNN's - wrenching honesty is hard for any human being to watch.  But it is a necessary precursor to improving how we deal with this tragedy and future ones - because what we're doing isn't working well.  Thank God he - and CNN - remain to do this thankless, horrifying reporting.

January 22, 2010

The Unimaginable Future Is Here

Futurists, novelists, and filmmakers have imagined worlds where human beings are controlled by media and computers (George Orwell's 1984 and Stanely Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) or live in isolated urban wastelands (Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis).

But the future is now. And it's not exactly like any of these fictional depictions. It's worse

Lately we are being confronted by how our own behavior - writ large as a society - is changing in accelerating and irrevocable ways. I have written about this in terms of how - while we constantly recommend, remonstrate, and exhort kids to avoid sweets and to exercise - instead kids' lives are more insulated, protected, and rarified than ever.

We now learn from a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation , that the average kid spends 2.5 hours each day listening to music, almost five hours watching TV and movies, three hours on the Internet and playing video games, and an hour-and-a-half text messaging - 10:45 of daily media consumption (not counting the texting). That adds up to 75 hours of media every week - nearly two full work weeks.

They are able to do this because they carry increasingly sophisticated electronic gadgets that allow them to do several things simultaneously, instantaneously, and continuously. And who is going to change this by banning or confiscating the gadgets - the Taliban? Certainly not parents, schools, politicians, or gadget manufacturers. It's just the way it is.

And how will this change reality and life for the coming generation? There really is no template to answer that question, but it will change relationships and social health, exertion levels and physical health, mental experience and psychological health - all in ways we can't calculate. Scary, huh?

To see how our world has changed and will only change more, and which we KNOW is creating problems, let's turn to the study by the National Safety Council showing that 28 percent of accidents occur when drivers are talking on cell phones or texting. Everyone knows it isn't good to talk on a cell phone while driving - and Lord knows it can't be good to drive and text.

But who is going to change that and how? How many people are going to wait to answer their cell phone when it rings in their cars? And there are already numerous laws governing cell phone use while driving. The police simply can't enforce everyone's cell phone use inside their automobiles. So perhaps a technological fix - some way of disabling cell phones when cars are operating? That's not going to happen - in fact, car manufactures are now offering automobiles with Internet hook-ups as the new sales come-on.

We have achieved a new level of dependence on electronic hook-ups that divert us from the daily business of living, relating (I often see two people sitting together at a table engrossed in their blackberries or texting), and conveying ourselves from one place to another (we are seeing increasing pedestrian accidents due to people texting).

I just returned form a train trip to Washington DC. I wanted some peace to think, look out the window - all right - and to take notes on my notebook computer. Sure enough, a guy sits down next to me and spends the entire time between Philadelphia and Baltimore whispering loudly into his cell phone. Finally, I excuse myself to go to the café car - where all the polite people have gone to talk on their mobile phones. Trapped for five hours round-trip in the 21st Century!

We cannot imagine how much further these things can progress (unless it is to a point when everyones' entire waking lives are spent in some kind of electronic limbo), how it will effect human experience (until we become the equivalent of a new electonicized species), and how we can possibly reverse this seemingly inexorable electronic crescendo and infinite cacophony.

Picture: Tesla and his electronic force field