Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Anger Management in the Metropolis

Life in the city is full of adventure, excitement—and rudeness. Unfortunately, crowding can bring out the worst in people and animals.

In a famous experiment, rats were put in a crowded cage to see what would happen. The rats in this cage were so crowded together that they were literally standing whisker to whisker. After spending a long time in this environment, the rats started going nuts. They were fighting and killing each other. Some practiced cannibalism. Males and females didn’t want to mate and when females did get pregnant they often abandoned or abused their children.

In the modern metropolis, as well as in other places around the world, people have also been known to behave in, well, somewhat impolite ways. All one has to do is read the daily news headlines to know what I’m talking about.

How can you live in a crowded, urban environment and avoid fighting, killing, or like the rats in the experiment, eating other people? Here are some suggestions for how to deal with life in the modern metropolis when things get too stressful.

Pretend you’re on Mars. While gallivanting around town, remain detached. One way of doing this is to imagine yourself looking at everyone as if you were peering down through a telescope from Mars. Pretty soon everybody looks like a bunch of ants. Why get overheated about tiny insects?

Get plenty of hugs. Surround yourself with caring people. Try to get at least one hug per day from your significant other, your Aunt Ethel, or a good friend. The more you feel the love, the less the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune will upset you. Also potentially troublesome people will see that rosy “I’m getting my quota of hugs” aura and will be less likely to target you.

Smile a lot. A psychologist once did an experiment in which he wired subjects up to measure their skin temperature and heart beat. When he asked the subjects to smile, he found that their skin temperature and heartbeat went down; when he directed them to frown, he found that their skin temperature and heartbeat went up. “Smile and the world smiles with you,” is the title of a song from the 1940s. There may be some truth to the song after all. Smiling may become a buffer that keeps negative people away.

Stick out your tongue. Humor can be a wonderful way to deal with the adversity of urban life. Let’s say you have a bully breathing down your neck at work, the kind of person who makes sure to point out your every mistake. “Oh, my God,” the bully says, “Did you hear what you just said? You just said ‘nauseous’ instead of ‘nauseated.’ Don’t you know the rules of grammar?” You stick out our tongue, cross your eyes, and laugh like a chimpanzee.

“You’re an idiot,” the bully says.

You continue to be an idiot until he leaves.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Child abuse is linked with adult ailments

Recent research has demonstrated a relationship between childhood abuse and a number of adult ailments, including arthritis, depression, cancer, and psychosis.

The research, published in journals in America, Australia, Canada and England, notes the following connections:

· Adults who experienced physical abuse as children have 56 per cent higher odds of osteoarthritis compared to those who have not been abused, according to a study by University of Toronto researchers published in Arthritis Care and Research.

· Childhood physical abuse is associated with elevated rates of cancer in adulthood, according to another study by University of Toronto researchers to be published in the journal, Cancer.

· People who were abused and neglected during childhood have a higher risk of major depression when they become young adults, according to a report in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In addition, depressed men who were abused have ten times higher risk of suicide, according to an article in the British Journal of Social Work.

· Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London have published new research in The British Journal of Psychiatry which indicates that women with severe mental illness are more likely to have been abused in childhood that the general population.

· Childhood sexual abuse significantly increases the risk of developing drug and alcohol issues, mental illness and marital strife in men and women, according to a study in American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

This research underscores the long-term devastation caused by childhood abuse and shows links between it and a growing number of adult diseases and disorders. And it calls attention to a problem—be it physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—that has been escalating over the past decade.

For years, families swept childhood under the rug and some researchers believed that it had only limited long-term effect. Indeed, some researchers stated that a child could grow out of it once he became an adult. This new research shatters this mythology once and for all.

Although recent researchers don’t offer an explanation for the link between abuse and a myriad of illnesses, one can conjecture that any kind of child abuse engenders low self-esteem, bad coping method, and a pessimistic outlook on life. These three factors alone would predispose victims of child abuse to a number of illnesses. In addition, bad hygiene and physical posture associated with child abuse victims could explain the many cases of arthritis later on.

This research goes counter to recent trends to seek primarily biological explanations for mental disturbances as well as for physical ailments. It clearly shows that environmental traumas continue to have at least a partial effect on the development of adult problems.

Maybe, just maybe, by focusing on the many long-term effects of childhood abuse, we may at last be able to come up with some preventative measure that will help us to diminish or even eliminate it from our culture. Wouldn’t that be nice?