View allAll Photos Tagged ADHD
Visit The Carbone Studio
Milena Carbone's art studio
Unreal novels - digital art - virtual dance performance
Web : The Carbone Studio News
The ADHD Foundation's Umbrella Project in Church Alley Liverpool
The canopy of umbrellas, is part of an initiative to raise awareness, and to celebrate, ADHD, autism and neurodiversity.
The prescription drug I take for my ADHD.
Widely abused as a recreational drug. They're known on the street as Fatty Addy, A.D., Study Buddies, Ralls, Headlight Through Fog, Smart Pills, Beenies, Amps, A-Bombs, Addies, Poopy, Blue Buddies, Blue Betties, Orange Tic-Tacs (name used for the higher-dosage orange versions), Blue Dutchman, Candy, A Candy, Blue Boy, Jollies, Smurfs, Rinky Dink, Diet Coke, Davies (for their founder, Dave Herrington), Team Blue, Derallo, The A Train, A+ (in reference to its stimulant effect -- Ambien is often referred to as "A-", the reverse effect of Adderall). In some regions of the U.S. they are known as Railguns and "That'da Boy(s)" (from noted increase in productivity).
On some college campuses taking Adderall is known as Taking the A-Train, most likely inspired by the song "Take The A Train" by Duke Ellington. The 5 and 10 mg doses are also known in the northwest as "BBs", which is short for "Blueberries", named for their blue color. Heavier users tend to use the term "GBs", short for "goof balls". Some Adderall abusers crush and insufflate the 5 and 10 mg. pills, to experience a stronger "rush" and a more rapid onset of the drug's effects. This has led to the term "Smurf Snot," used to describe how the pills color one's mucus blue.
ADHD - Jazzit & the City Salzburg - vom 26.10.2017 - Jazzit Musik Club - weitere Fotos unter:
www.jazzfoto.at/konzertfotos17/_jazz_and_the_city/adhd/In...
Besetzung:
Ómar Guðjónsson: guitars, bass
Óskar Guðjónsson: saxophones
Davíð Þór Jónsson: Hammond orgel, Moogs, Rhodes, piano, bass
Magnús Trygvason Eliassen: drums
As I sit in front of my Mac and edit photos from our recent adventures in Costa Rica, I personally find it hard to believe that we returned a week ago today and I have yet to post an animal photo. (Note: I am mentally excluding the baby gecko on our breakfast table since it was taken with my cell phone!) Normally photos are downloaded and the edit process started before the the suitcases are fully unpacked!
My post trip edit workflow is to start editing with photo captured number one, day one and edit my way back through the trip. I really enjoy using Google maps to find the exact location taken while I edit as it helps me remember the details, add names that often send my mind and search bar down rabbit holes all across the internet.
This trip was very different than any other taken. Normally, I choose when I go out and take photos based on the weather forecast. Too much rain, too hot…the much-dreaded heavy fog usually pushes me to another day. However, on this trip most every excursion into the rain/cloud/forest had a guide attached, and a timeline. I was shooting most days in conditions totally unfamiliar. The natural low light of the rainforest coupled with being high enough to have clouds roll in and out and the sometimes-frustrating heavy sideways rain that never failed to fill my ears with refreshing pure rainwater.
All that said, I am finding it impossible to provide any structure to my workflow as I keep skipping around the lot of 1500+ photos and remembering a particular frog, bird or landscape shot and wondering how that shot came out. There are simply too many squirrels (and yes, I have Costa Rican squirrel shots) for this kid to focus on any type of self-imposed system.
So here is my first critter photo from our trip…a 12+ foot Crocodile taken from a bridge over the river Tempisque in Guanacaste province near Liberia. It is up for debate on whether or not this is my first crock shot as I may have photographed one in the Everglades a few years ago, but the distance was great and it was hard to tell. Park rangers said it was so maybe…
This shot frustrated me a bit based on the limited mobility that I was offered. I would have loved to be able to get on the other side of him (or her) in better light on the beach and shake one of my genetically gifted from my momma thighs at him and see if he would come closer.
But sometimes not getting what I want leads to other attempts, and makes my bride travel to more places that has crocodiles!
Adventure before dementia!
The silhouette of the Liverbird on the gates of Bluecoat Chambers, (the oldest suriving building in central Liverpool) pictured in front of dozens of colourful floating umbrellas.
To view & purchase my best images please visit my website at www.jasonwells.co.uk.
This week's Macro Mondays theme of "Remedy" made me think of Dominic's medication called Quillivant. After five years of trying different ADHD medications, we finally found one that worked well for him without any negative side effects. Seeing your child struggle with impulse control is difficult, especially when you've tried years and years of other non-medication related interventions. Hearing positive reports from his teachers, his peers, and his behavioral specialist a week after starting this medication, I truly believe Quillivant is the remedy for his impulsivity. It has been out of stock off and on all year and he didn't use it much this summer. Our insurance wasn't covering it for a while and our out of pocket was over $250/month. Now that our deductible and out of pocket expenses have been met, it was $25 this month and only a 45-minute drive to find a pharmacy that had it in stock. What a blessing.
Today it is World Autism acceptance and awareness day. Yes I have it, also ADHD. My biggest special interest are lampposts. So I combined two of my hobbies, lampposts and Lego.
.
Un enfant qui présente des caractéristiques de trouble de l'humeur oppositionnel peut avoir des difficultés relationnelles avec ses parents, ses enseignants et ses pairs, ainsi qu'un comportement provocant, agressif ou désobéissant.
Ce trouble peut être associé à d'autres troubles de l'humeur tels que la dépression ou l'anxiété, ou à des troubles neurodéveloppementaux tels que le TDAH ou l'autisme.
Pour faire face à un enfant qui a ce trouble, il est important de demander l'aide professionnelle d'un psychiatre ou d'un psychologue, qui peut évaluer le cas et indiquer le meilleur traitement, qui peut impliquer des médicaments, une psychothérapie ou des interventions familiales et scolaires.
De plus, les parents doivent faire preuve de patience, de compréhension et d'affection pour l'enfant, en évitant les punitions excessives ou les critiques négatives.
Il est également important d'établir des limites claires et cohérentes, de renforcer les comportements positifs et d'encourager la coopération et la communication.
Et toujours avoir et garder beaucoup de patience.
N'oubliez pas que la perception de la réalité de votre enfant peut lui sembler floue, déformée ou effrayante. Et il y réagira très fortement.
N'oubliez pas d'être très calme et très patient.
N'oubliez pas qu'à ce moment-là, si vous vous sentez également très stressé, si cela se produit, il suffit que cela se produise uniquement dans l'espirit de votre enfant. Pas dans votre espirit. Percevez clairement la réalité.
Une telle attitude et une telle clarté sont absolument nécessaires. Avoir la sagesse.
Il est ton(a) fils(fille), ne l'oublie pas, mon ami(e).
Il a vraiment besoin de votre précieuse aide.
Ivan
-----------------------------------------------------
A child who exhibits characteristics of oppositional mood disorder may have relationship difficulties with parents, teachers, and peers, as well as defiant, aggressive, or disobedient behavior.
This disorder may be associated with other mood disorders such as depression or anxiety, or with neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD or autism.
To deal with a child who has this disorder, it is important to seek professional help from a psychiatrist or psychologist, who can assess the case and advise the best treatment, which may involve medication, psychotherapy or family and school interventions.
In addition, parents must show patience, understanding and affection for the child, avoiding excessive punishment or negative criticism.
It's also important to set clear and consistent boundaries, reinforce positive behaviors, and encourage cooperation and communication.
And always have and keep a lot of patience.
Remember that your child's perception of reality may seem blurry, distorted, or frightening. And he will react very strongly to it.
Remember to be very calm and very patient.
Remember that at this time, if you also feel very stressed, if it happens, it just has to happen only in your child's mind. Not in your mind. See reality clearly.
Such an attitude and such clarity are absolutely necessary. Have wisdom.
He(she)'s your son(daughter), don't forget this, my friend.
He(she) really needs your precious help.
Ivan
.
Isn't Fi so cute as a little tree hugger??? She's not looking at me directly as much anymore so this type of shot is hard to get. Most of the time she looks at me out of the corners of her eyes or immediately looks away from me. She says it's too hard to look at eyes. I have read that too, and I knew it was coming again( because she didn't have eye contact for a very long time). I am just hoping that there are no more serious regressions in the near future. She has already been diagnosed with ADHD in the past year and just yesterday the doctor confirmed eczema, more allergies to add to her list, and he believes she has an anxiety disorder now. I just want my baby to be happy. Even if she never gets any better, as long as she's happy, I'm happy.
Here's my new kitchen timer. Hyperfocus is a bit of a challenge so I use kitchen timers all the time. Well, almost. I wear them out often and this is just starting day 2.
Hyperfocus is often associated with autism and ADHD but can be managed with the right tools and support.
It just rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin!
Half the time my head is in the clouds, while the other half I'm running around with my head cut off.
The rainbow brolly installation was launched on Church Alley, next to Primark near the Bluecoat, to raise awareness of ADHD.
Jakob has gotten his medical cannabis to keep a lid on his ADHD and to keep his phantom pain down.
To get his medication he got help by a friend, Nanna W. Gotfredsen, as the pharmacy has four steps, so not very handy for a man missing a leg.
...of little Miss Olav, who sadly got run over by a car late December. Will be remembered as the ADHD kitty. She was way hyper active!! R.I.P. little one.
The rainbow brolly installation was launched on Church Alley, next to Primark near the Bluecoat, to raise awareness of ADHD.
Suretta Lisker
INTJ, 63, Professional Extrovert, ASD, ADHD MentorAuthor has 14.9K answers and 28M answer views9y
Originally Answered: Do you agree with the statement that "what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself"? Why and why not?
I was brought up with that adage, but it was not correctly explained to me.
I was told that, "What you see wrong with others, is wrong about yourself." That's not entirely true, and it created a great deal of distress, because I wondered how bad I was since I saw other people as bad.
What the statement really means, is that there is a reason you see or feel things in others. For instance, if you see someone as unsafe, it means you know the difference between safety and danger. <-- that's the reflection.
If you see someone as insincere, it means the reflection is that you can sense insincerity because you are, in fact, sincere.
Had I understood this growing up, I would not have developed the paranoia I have now. I thought that the reason I didn't trust people was because I was untrustworthy, not because I knew the difference between the truth and a lie.
Research indicates a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others
Diana Yates, University of Illinois News Bureau
August 9, 2023
What is selfish behavior? Selfishness is defined as the tendency to act in one's own interests without regard for the impact on others. New research shows that a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions.
Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual’s own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.
The findings are reported in the journal Cognitive Science.
Previous research into this arena of human behavior suggested that social norms are the primary factor guiding a person’s decision-making in competitive scenarios, said Paul Bogdan, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos.
“The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical. If everyone around me is selfish, then I’m going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly,” Bogdan said. “But we show that your judgments of other people’s behavior really depend on how you behave yourself.”
To test the factors that guide expectations and drive behavior, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving the Ultimatum Game, which captures how an individual responds to offers from another player proposing to split a pot of money with them. The game requires the proposer to suggest how much each person receives of a $10 pot. The receiver must decide whether to agree to that split or reject it. If the offer is rejected, neither participant receives any money. Rejection can be seen as a form of punishment, even though it costs both players, the researchers said.
Some people tend to be generous – or at least fair – when offering another person a portion of a $10 reward. Others try to take as much of the money as they can, offering lopsided splits that benefit themselves at the expense of their competitors.
When on the receiving end of an offer, generous people tend to accept only generous offers, while selfish people are happy with selfish offers – even though the other player’s selfishness hurts them financially, the researchers found. Having the players switch between receiving and proposing offers allowed the team to explore the relationship between a player’s selfish or generous behavior and their evaluation of other players’ offers.
Further experiments showed that generous and selfish individuals tend to trust others who behave as they themselves do, regardless of the economic outcome.
Sanda Dolcos, Florin Dolcos, Paul Bodgan
In a new study, psychology professors Sanda Dolcos, left, and Florin Dolcos and PhD candidate Paul Bogdan, right, tracked how a person’s own behavior guides their expectations of others’ generosity or selfishness. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
“Participants will gain more money with a generous person. But a selfish person will prefer to play with someone who behaves as they do,” Bogdan said. “People really like others who are similar to themselves – to a shocking degree.”
The team also evaluated data from a previous cross-cultural study that found that individuals sometimes punish others for their selfishness or for their generosity in a collaborative game involving resource sharing. They found that, when deciding whether and how much to punish others, participants were guided primarily by their own behavior and less by the pressure to conform. People who behaved generously tended to punish selfishness and people who put their own welfare first were much more likely to punish generosity – even in situations where one approach was more common than the other.
Cultural norms toward self-interest or generosity do influence people, as other studies have found, Florin Dolcos said. “But we are not only observers. This study is showing that we filter information about the world through our own view.”
Those individuals whose behavior switched from generous to selfish over time were more likely to punish generosity and reward selfishness – but only after their own behavior changed, the team found.
This helps explain the phenomenon of social alignment, for better and for worse, Florin Dolcos said.
“You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people, and in order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior,” he said.
Ultimately, the study finds that a person’s own generous or selfish nature drives their behavior in many arenas of life, Sanda Dolcos said.
“This is not just about decision-making,” she said. “It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations.”
The paper “Social expectations are primarily rooted in reciprocity: An investigation of fairness, cooperation and trustworthiness” is available online. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13326
las.illinois.edu/news/2023-08-09/study-finds-people-expec...
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others begins by introducing three characters. There’s Allison, one of the stars of the MTV reality show My Super Sweet 16. (For her birthday parade, she had an entire block of Atlanta shut down, right in front of a hospital: “They can just go around,” she said.) Next is Tucker Max, the celebrity whose books and blog posts about “getting wasted and sportfucking” made him a hero among pickup artists and men’s rights activists. And then there’s Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo, Norway. After that he proceeded to a summer camp, where he shot and killed 69 more. He would later claim that the massacres were a publicity stunt to promote his 1,500-page manifesto deriding women and Muslims, and featuring pictures of him smiling in Knights Templar costumes.
If Breivik seems like an outlier—if the comparison with two relatively harmless figures strikes you as inappropriate—this is intentional. The millennial girl, the bad boyfriend and the murderer: these examples show the range of our obsession with narcissism, a condition we hear more and more about these days. As I write this, half the country is still reeling from the election of a self-absorbed millionaire (or billionaire, if you believe his boasts) whom numerous psychologists have publicly diagnosed as a narcissist, while an online petition calling for the Republican Party to #DiagnoseTrump has been signed by more than thirty-four thousand people.
●
Dombek begins her own discussion on more personal ground, in the depths of what she calls the “narcisphere.” This is her name for the metastasizing cluster of blogs, vlogs, quizzes and support communities where self-described victims gather to vent and to discuss the behaviors of their personal “narcs.” One website, the Web of Narcissism, quotes Dracula and employs gothic castle imagery; its members, who call themselves “keyboard faeries,” trade recommendations for media about sociopaths and vampires, enacting narc victimhood as a kind of underground subculture. There are many gurus and experts to choose from in the narcisphere, but their advice converges on one remedy. If you find yourself in a relationship with a narcissist—and you’ll know because they withhold care and attention, or do not seem to love you with the exclusivity you deserve—then the only solution is to cut your losses and get out. The narcissist can’t love you, and trying to change them is hopeless.
More good mail days.
Join our newsletter.
Enter your email
What’s tempting about this “narciscript,” as Dombek calls it, is that it reduces a complicated situation (e.g. the average relationship) to a heavily weighted binary: Do I continue to extend an imprudent empathy, or do I go cold, the way the other person already has, in the interest of self-preservation? Clearly the latter course is the more “reasonable” one, but the moment I take it—go cold, withdraw, run—is the moment I can no longer safely distinguish my own behavior from the narcissist’s. “The script confirms itself,” Dombek writes, “and the diagnosis and the treatment confound the evidence, until it gets harder and harder” to tell whether the word “narcissism” describes anything at all. This is why, although The Selfishness of Others seems to promise an investigation of whether the “narcissism epidemic” (as it’s been called) is real, the book’s main interest derives from Dombek’s posing of another question, which may shed new light on our urge to #DiagnoseTrump: What’s at stake for us in believing it’s real?
Dombek spent the first part of her life in Philadelphia, where she was homeschooled by her parents, affable-sounding Jesus freaks she has described as “long-haired, corduroy-bell-bottom-wearing, antiauthoritarian biblical literalists.” When she was nine her father became sick with a host of terminal illnesses and the family relocated to a farm in Indiana, where they lived with a lot of animals: according to one (maybe exaggerated) list there were “not only about twenty cats and a dog but a half-dozen roving demented geese and two ornery pebble-shit-spewing goats and a couple dozen hysterical hens and a tyrannical rooster named Sam.” After high school Dombek attended Calvin College, a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She struggled to fit in with her classmates, who had all grown up in suburban neighborhoods.
As a freshman, Dombek became politically active in the fight against abortion—a practice she firmly believed, along with her parents and many of her friends, was not only murder but “a first step toward state-run infanticide and euthanasia.” At church, she and her friends watched films of months-old fetuses writhing in pain as machines snapped them apart piece by piece. Dombek would describe the anguish of those images in “The Two Cultures of Life,” her first article for n+1. The essay, which questions the left-right polarization of the abortion issue, contains many of the hallmarks of Dombek’s later work, including her attempt to bypass either-or distinctions by staging an argument on the page, and her insistence on directing empathy toward those viewed as incapable of returning it: the fetus, the animal, the murderer.
The year after she participated in an anti-abortion march in Washington, Dombek picked up smoking, started wearing flannel shirts and declared herself a Marxist. But her belief in the importance of empathizing across ideological and (sometimes) ontological boundaries seems to have persisted, along with her certainty that, as she writes in “Two Cultures,” “if it looks like violence, it is.” Studying literature at NYU after college, she emphasized persuading secular people to be “more empathetic toward fundamentalists, even those who conduct or support great atrocities.”
Her dissertation, “Shopping for the End of the World,” drew on the ideas of the French philosopher and literary theorist René Girard, who was interested in the ways that violence emerged within social groups. We tend to believe that violence happens when people don’t understand or empathize with one another, but Girard argued, first in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) and later in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), that violence springs just as much from our similarities. We think we desire things and people for their particular qualities but, according to Girard, this is an illusion; all desire is in fact an anticipatory mirroring of the desires of those closest to us. When two people reach for the same thing at once, as they inevitably will, not only are they hurled into conflict over that thing; they are also each confronted with disturbing evidence that their deepest self is little more than a bundle of imitations. Desperate to destroy the bearer of such news, they lash out. And because violence, too, is mimetic, it spreads through the community in a destructive, destabilizing feedback loop.
According to Girard, archaic societies developed a stopgap solution to these epidemics of violence: ritual sacrifice. (All archaic societies, apparently: Girard, who based his theory of sacrifice on readings of ancient myth rather than direct anthropological research, had a tendency to overgeneralize.) The group would select a scapegoat, and the selection itself was a significant decision. Ideally, this being—whether human or some other animal—would be enough like the sacrificers themselves that destroying or exiling it would satisfy the sacrificer’s need to banish what they hated. At the same time, the scapegoat needed to seem, or be made to seem, inhuman enough that everyone could safely assume its suffering didn’t count. This is how Dombek’s interest in empathy led her to the narcissist—the being our society often claims is too inhuman to truly suffer.
●
The first people labeled as narcissists, writes Dombek, were almost exclusively homosexuals and women—and for Freud, who popularized the label, almost all homosexuals and women were narcissists. Beautiful women, whom Freud compared to children and “certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us,” seemed to him particularly resistant to therapeutic practice. To his mind, the abnormal resistance of these women to transference—love, basically—appeared to be a form of regression. Normal, healthy people start their lives in a similar state of selfish inaccessibility, he reasoned, but eventually they develop the capacity for empathy and love. The narcissist, for Freud, was the person who maintained or returned to this self-sufficiency.
Dombek’s criticism of the Freudian interpretation of narcissism draws from another work by Girard. In “Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demystified by Proust,” Girard compared famous passages from Proust about desire with Freud’s vaguely moralistic theorizing about his desirable patients. The similarities he found were remarkable. Both writers ascribed to their subjects an inhuman autonomy, compared them with children and animals (specifically birds: large birds of prey in Freud’s case, seagulls in Proust’s) and marveled at their indifference to those around them. The difference was that Proust didn’t present his descriptions as true. “There is no such thing as a ‘real,’ objective narcissism for Proust,” Girard writes. It’s just less painful, when someone doesn’t feel about us like we feel about them, to believe that they’re incapable of feeling. What looks to us like someone else’s arrogance, according to this line of thinking, is actually our own inverted neediness.
Are these insights about scapegoating and the “narcissistic illusion” (as Girard called it) helpful for understanding today’s “narcissism epidemic”? The claims that narcissism is becoming pathological on the level of the whole culture go back to at least the late Seventies, when Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade” (1976) made the cover of New York and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) became a national best seller. Despite Lasch’s scattershot approach—sections of The Culture of Narcissism are devoted to confessional writing, radical feminism and the use of AstroTurf in sports stadiums—his account of “the new narcissist” remained firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory: specifically, Dombek notes, that of the analyst Otto Kernberg, who modified Freud’s theory by positing that the narcissist’s performance of self-sufficiency was part of a compensatory attempt to fill a vacuum of self-esteem.
Just as Lasch’s book was published, however, scientists began laying the tracks for the more clinical conception of the condition that prevails today. In 1979, two social psychologists developed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a diagnostic tool that reduced Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) (enshrined in the DSM as a mental illness the next year) to a set of eight traits. The NPI is a forced-choice questionnaire, which means it tests NPD by asking subjects to select from a pair of statements—for example, “Sometimes I tell good stories” or “Everybody likes to hear my stories”—which it then correlates with clinical traits. The resulting numerical score tells you next to nothing about the individual test-taker, not even whether that person is a narcissist (as the test’s creators readily admitted). But it makes it much easier to generalize across large sample sizes.
In The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), for instance, social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell reported that because millennials scored 30 percent higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than ever before, they were likely the most self-involved generation in history. But according to Dombek, the study the book was based on actually only revealed that a “slight majority of students in 2006 answered, on average, one or two more questions in the narcissistic direction than did those in 1986.” Another caveat is that the people surveyed in Twenge and Campbell’s study were not just American college students, but specifically freshman psychology students, participating for course credit—an extremely common form of institutional bias which leads Dombek to wonder how much of popularly reported psychology research “would actually be more accurately framed as an understanding of what young psychology students think about themselves.”
The problem is not just that studies using this paradigm mask an absence of real knowledge, although this is a problem. More importantly, by presenting narcissism as a diagnosis with a firm empirical basis, journalists quoting social psychologists often make it seem like a condition someone—or a whole group of someones—just has. For researchers, this sort of shorthand isn’t unusual—it’s more or less how most sciences operate. But such research isn’t usually being cited to support sweeping claims about entire generations, nor to explain the behavior of our bad boyfriends, murderers and politicians.
The fact that, with narcissism in particular, such labeling has become so common, speaks in favor of Dombek’s suggestion that the narcissist occupies a special place in our social imagination. For Twenge and Campbell, millennials play the role of arch-villains in a story about our culture’s refusal to grow up. More recently, many of us have focused our attention on a villain who looks very different from a millennial, though we call him the same name we call them. Which makes one wonder what, in this case, is the underlying sameness that we’re hoping to purge.
●
It’s likely no coincidence that one of the terms commentators often used to describe the political divides of the 2016 presidential campaign—“echo chamber”—brings us back to the Narcissus myth. In the classic version told by Ovid, Echo is a girl who, cursed by Hera, can only speak by repeating what others say. In the forest she falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus, but when she tries to embrace him he reacts fearfully, with angry words that she can only whisper back to him; then he abandons her in favor of his own reflection in a dark pool. In our modern rendition, the term “chamber” is supposed to suggest a technological component to the problem, but the basic story is the same. In it, the other side of whatever divide—political, ideological, demographic—is imagined as being trapped in the echo chamber of “fake news” and bias-confirming feeds, while “we” play the role of Echo. We want to communicate, but the only way our voices can carry across the divide is if we repeat exactly what the other side already believes.
Although the echo chamber presents itself as a tragic picture, Dombek can help us recognize its flattering features. We, the ones who bemoan being stuck in our chamber, desire earnestly to reach out to the other side. They, the narcissistic ones, refuse to leave their chamber and meet us halfway. Scapegoating has always been an effective political tactic, and it is one Trump used ably, if offensively, during his campaign. But if Dombek and Girard are right that narcissism functions today largely as a scapegoating technique—a way of justifying coldness, maybe even violence, toward the one we label the narcissist—then it is Trump himself who emerges as the ultimate scapegoat, precisely because of his refusal to even pretend to care what his adversaries think.
Other presidents, after they win, at least make a show of reaching out; our narcissist-in-chief just keeps insulting us. Apparently he’s seeing other people, or maybe he really does just look into his reflection on TV all day. In any case, a better pretext for our own unapologetic anger and hatred could hardly be imagined. Which is a relief, in a way: all that empathizing can be exhausting.
The problem is only that, as Girard believed, scapegoating could never truly end violence or hatred, because, in misidentifying its source, it leads us to think we’re outside the dynamics responsible for it. “The moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy—when you find him inhuman,” Dombek writes, “is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.” We say, this is how things are, fair or not. Either they burn, or we do.
"ADHD"
Here is the 2nd piece from the collaboration between David Bray ( @davidbray_art )and myself. You can get your hands on these very limited edition prints by clicking the link on my bio or the link below:
This initiative was created to raise awareness and understanding, encouraging discussion around Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and autism. It is curated by Liverpool-based ADHD Foundation, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary as a charity, the Umbrella Project can be seen in Church Alley (leading up to the Bluecoat) in Liverp[ool and is there until the end of August. The individual umbrellas have also been personally signed by children from St Oswald’s primary school in Old Swan and across Merseyside, many of whom have ADHD, autism and other neurodevelopment conditions.
ADHD - Jazzit & the City Salzburg - vom 26.10.2017 - Jazzit Musik Club - weitere Fotos unter:
www.jazzfoto.at/konzertfotos17/_jazz_and_the_city/adhd/In...
Besetzung:
Ómar Guðjónsson: guitars, bass
Óskar Guðjónsson: saxophones
Davíð Þór Jónsson: Hammond orgel, Moogs, Rhodes, piano, bass
Magnús Trygvason Eliassen: drums