On Sunday night Louis and Rosie and Callum and I were washing the dishes (while Grace and Alison went to the stables late in the evening).
I live in this bizarre world where not everything we have goes in the dishwasher for one reason or another so every single night there is 20-30 minutes of dishes to be washed (maybe that’s because we cook a lot of stuff from scratch and use a lot of pans, but it seems to be different from everybody else).
Louis was trying to calculate how much of my life I’d spent washing dishes in the past 20 years but most of the time to me it isn’t a chore.
We still had a full dishwasher though and we’d ran out of dishwasher tablets and we get these from an eco-supplier on subscription just trying to do a little bit of not polluting the water with forever chemicals (we do way too much of that anyway in our house).
But we’d ran out and they’re not coming until tomorrow or the day after and so, what to do?
I wrote a little while ago about convenience and really what we should have done is left the dishwashes as it was, put it on rinse with no tablet. So, wait for the tablets to come and manage until they do but I walked round the corner to the Co-op and spent £5 on a bag of poison to make sure my dishes were clean for Monday morning.
This is a pattern that’s repeated billions, if not trillions of times a year and it’s probably the reason why I’ve been baking inside my house at 35 degrees this week and enjoying riding my bike at 20-22 degrees at 7am.
We’re stupid because we don’t notice, and we continue to carve out convenience.
I was struck though by the news lately in relation to this stuff where there is doubt cast over the efficacy of SSRI’s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).
Prozac is the most common of these, but it was a large-scale study that was suggesting that reduced levels of serotonin are not actually implicated in long-term depression.
(For the avoidance of doubt there is no suggestion here that in some cases SSRI’s do work with depression but there is definitely a lot of work that needs to be done to see how true that is).
And so, I was struck, yet again, by this thing that we have with convenience where we just need to have a dishwasher tablet now or we just need to have an antidepressant tablet now.
What feels like 100 years ago, my friend John gave me one of the most important books of my life.
It was called Healing without Freud or Prozac by David Servan Schreiber.
It’s about helping to navigate sadness and depression without using tablets and without using couch therapy with a therapist.
Sevan-Schreiber was a brilliant psychiatrist who’d worked in the Balkan States with people (particularly women) who had been unimaginably traumatized.
He also set up a psychiatric hospital in a city in America.
Servan-Schreiber’s view was that anti-depressant tablets had at best a 2-year life span of any use and couch therapy was addictive with minimal success.
He investigated all the other ways that you could improve your mental health without taking tablets or paying therapist and it changed my life entirely.
It was not that I never got sad (I did, and I do), it was what I do myself in taking responsibility for making it a little bit better.
My wife (minimally listed in this blog) is one of the most extraordinary individuals you’re ever likely to meet.
She has a completer version to taking medicine in spite of the fact that she is a Macmillan nurse for children and regularly looks after children who are dying of cancer.
We have a laugh in our house when she is in pain and we offer her paracetamol and she says, “it’s not that kind of pain”.
She will take it to the last minute before she has to take any tablets or medication, trying to do as much as she can herself to fix the problem in the first place.
The world is changing so quickly in so many ways and one of those ways is that we will need to cast off this addiction with convenience and understand that some problems we have need to be fixed by taking responsibility for our own actions.
Blog Post Number - 3173
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