Graduation Day

What a lovely day. Our four graduates, whose self-cultivation required great bravery and persistence, have stepped past our little world into a greater one. For those who are interested, I am posting, with very little adaptation, my comments from the ceremony.

Recently a few date palm seeds were found near the Dead Sea (by the site of the Masada fortress). They were carbon dated to about 2000 years ago...one of them is now sprouting. In Buddhism teaching is said to be like planting seeds. A seed waits for the proper conditions. Sometimes it takes a long, long time.

Does anyone here use the internet? Do you ever have the sensation that you are done watching, reading, searching, whatever we do, and yet are not quite ready to let it go...

For my part I get an empty, restless feeling, a diversity of will- one part of me moving away from another part of me. Sometimes I examine this tension. I find it unpleasant. I was putting my youngest son to bed- it was hot that evening, yet he turned off the fan near his bed. He related to me with admirable clarity the reason why:

"Sometimes when it is on, my mind wants one thing and my heart wants something else and I find my fingers creeping towards the fan, so I turn it off".

This is an awareness of a divided self; the divided self being an everyday experience that is utterly universal and yet, for the most part, considered "abnormal", or undesirable, or problematic. It is as perfectly normal and adaptive as having five fingers on each hand.

Adaptive, in that it keeps many possibilities in play- choices, options. We often express these possibilities in words, as alternative plans and explanations. In some ways, this experience of a divided will is a precursor to abstract reasoning. We can imagine alternatives.

But we do not habitually use that imagination to examine ourselves. We assume- in spite of our direct experience- that our self is a more or less fixed entity. It is very difficult for me to convince myself (and here is a language problem already-convince "myself") that that very self is not a real and solid thing. This is where mindfulness comes in.

What is mindfulness? It is becoming a very popular term- and a very influential concept in psychology- because it has great utility and everyone experiences it. It is, simply put, a clear focus on the immediate present. When I am brushing my teeth, I try to keep my mind on only brushing my teeth. When I am eating, I try to keep my mind on only eating. Why?

For one thing, it immediately throws a light on how jumpy the mind is. Sometimes it seems as if we want to do everything but what we are doing in the present moment. It is a bit like looking through infrared binoculars and sitting quietly in the woods.We learn best through direct experience Knowing that this is the nature of ones minds is rather reassuring.. I am not going crazy. We are all crazy. It is perfectly normal to be crazy. But we don't have to be restless, irritated, overwhelmed, unhappy.

A rock bottom assumption of Tinicum Art and Science is that a person who is aware of the restless nature of their own mind is much more forgiving towards their own shortcomings, and that of others as well. If we can get a glimpse of how changable and restless our minds are, we can assume that if I am miserable now, I will less so in a little while. Of course, being happy now will change as well. So perhaps we should just flow along with it a little, accept it, and trust that it will change. This way we don't get stuck.

But getting stuck in a certain mode, or mood, or self conception is really easy. By sitting in silence we get a direct experience of the constantly changing nature of that "self". This is difficult for everyone. Some people are too young for it. Or too obsessive. Or too flakey. There are other types of focusing exercises to help a person move toward this awareness. But sitting in silence is very, very important.

When I was in my 20's, riding the subways in Boston, I was always, always reading. Walkmen- portable tape decks and CD players were becoming common but were not ubiquitous. I didn't like being cut off from the sounds of the city. It seemed dangerous, anyways. But my distraction was reading. And I was always perplexed at the old ladies who seemed perfectly content to sit quietly and watch the world go by. Back then, I thought they were kind of on the dull side, unintellectual. Now, with everyone fussing with ipods and cell phones every waking moment, those old ladies seem like Zen Masters to me.

I love youtube and wikipedia as much as anyone. I blog, check the baseball scores, and devour political news. But that restless, empty feeling is always there, an uneasy reminder of my divided self. Or rather, that there is no "self" really there at all.

Each of us is of multiple minds. It requires great skill to negotiate all the twists and turns and constant flow of our inner lives. Similarly, as teenagers, when our social worlds multiply and become very involved and changable, great skill is required to negotiate all of that complexity. The inner and the outer develop in parallel. And can get pretty mixed up. But neurologically speaking, the same part of the brain- a small portion of the pre-frontal cortex- is involved in the development of social awareness and inner awareness.

This is why mindfulness training makes for a happier person. We use the same neurological map to figure out both ourselves and other people. And if we practice mindfulness, an understanding of others develops. Wisdom develops. Insight develops. Fear drops away.

(to the graduates) We've planted a few seeds for you. This mindfulness and meditation training. You may not use it now, but you will realize, someday, that it works. It will help you realize that everything you need is here in the present moment. You can't breathe in the past, or the future. You can only breathe now. So go back to your breathing. And trust that if things are not so good, they will change, they will get better.

That is why we do what we do here.

The Last Day of School

That relentless rhythm of the school year has finally wound itself round to summer...tomorrow is the last day of school. The students decided to largely forgo their classes to catch up on work, to fool around, swim in the creek, and plan for the next day's party.
It has been a long year filled with marvels. A transition year, really. Over the next few weeks I will lay out some of what we accomplished and some of what we plan for next year.

One of the odder things about the education biz is the question of how you evaluate what you are doing. Can we fairly judge a school on how a bunch of 18 year olds conduct themselves? I think not. For me, the test of our school will be these kids as they approach the age of 30...are they happy, learning new things, are they pushing themselves and taking chances?

What about the handful of kids who don't graduate or moved on to other schools? Many of them keep coming back to visit. Why?

We plant seeds, and seeds take time. Maybe what a student learns at TAS just isn't relevant to the conditions of her life until much later, then suddenly, here it is.

Sometimes a seed is dormant for a long, long time. Like this one. 2000 years old, and now it is sprouting. And I thought I was a late bloomer.

Evidence Based Practice

"Evidence-Based Medicine" is a popular term these days. But it has a dark side, doesn't it? If this is a new idea, what on earth were doctors basing their decisions on before? It reminds me of a Chris Rock routine (which I have only had related to me, I have never seen it) where a father responds to criticism about his drug use and petty crimes with "Well, I take care of my children!". To which Rock says: "Aren't you supposed to take care of your children?"

Finally, it seems the evidence-based approach is wending its way through psychological circles. Not to be too snarky about it, but why now and not 10 years ago?

I hope the answer is that the high water mark of "the chemical hypothesis" has passed. The idea that behavior and emotion is determined by linear chemical processes is silly. Yet a lot of people went to the bank on that one. I think that soon it will be quite clear that a straight line from flawed gene to screwy neurochemical to maladjusted thought to an unwanted behavior does not exist. It was at best simple-minded and at worst profoundly cynical and self-serving.

But people suffer, and suffer greatly. And there is a role for medication. But psychological problems are primarily social problems and require social solutions.

Here is very interesting, modest, and clear step in that direction: a manual for evidence-based practices in children's psychology.

Page nine has the criteria. Page 11 begins with "anxious and avoidant behaviors". Take a few minutes to read through it. It is a good place to start. This has some seeds of thought for adult treatment as well.

No longer any reason to wonder...

First, some data on the medicating of children:

Foster children are medicated at rates far higher than non-foster children. Much of this drug use is not justified by standard medical practice (scroll through this brief abstract, to the conclusion).

Pre-schoolers are now frequently being diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder.

Newer anti-depressants do not work better than the older ones (though they are far more profitable); the older ones don't work very well either. (See the second article for a good review of illegal and quasi-illegal practices Eli Lilly engaged in order to replace the profits Prozac generated for them).

Now this: Dan Carlat admits that his take on the growing scandal at Harvard Medical School was, to use a word, ingenuous. The three doctors at HMS apparently hid millions of dollars in payments from various drug companies and failed to report them as potential conflicts of interest. Carlat calls the CME (continuing medical education credits) system a huge money laundering scheme, a way of directing cash to doctors and researchers:

Rather than paying doctors directly to give accredited CME courses (which is illegal), drug companies pay third party companies to create the courses. The checks are actually written by the education company, but the ultimate source is clearly the sponsoring pharmaceutical company. The drug industry has gravitated to this form of marketing because they realize that doctors are more likely to believe information in CME courses than information from drug reps.

The Harvard scandal represents the perfect storm of this money laundering operation. It appears that the vast majority of the money eventually reported by the Harvard Trio, a combined $4.2 million over 7 years, was drug company money that was laundered and processed to seem like it wasn't drug company money. And this, I suspect, is why it was so easy for the doctors to rationalize not disclosing it.

This is a major public health issue. Does it go to far to say that, for parents at the very least, this calls into question the legitimacy of the entire system of psychopharmacological research?

In summary we have a huge boom in medicating children, a huge boom in drug company profits, a vast and invisible payment system for biasing doctors and gaming the research, and all the major medical journals absolutely dependent on advertising from drug companies. And now, the most famous medical school in the world has been found to be caught up in the whole racket.