LINKS - June 22nd, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Emotional Neglect and Emotional Invalidation Aren't the Same
By Jonice Webb, Ph.D, Psychology Today
“In the simplest form, childhood emotional neglect is something you didn’t receive as a child— emotional attention, validation, and education. But emotional neglect does not always show up in its simplest form. Below I will introduce you to two ways emotional neglect can rear its head: passively or actively. They look different, feel different, and leave different marks in adulthood.
“It’s important to note that the realization you grew up with emotional neglect may feel bittersweet. With the sadness that comes from knowing you’ve been emotionally neglected, there may also come great relief and understanding. Some have labeled their discovery of emotional neglect as the missing piece they needed to start living their lives fully.”
Todrick Hall is (still) Actively Harming Queer People and Black Folks [COMMENTARY]
By Ryan Clopton-Zymler, The Buckeye Flame
“So what do we do? How do we, as humans, engage in trends that were designed by someone else? For me, a good rule of thumb is thinking about it like addition and subtraction. If you’re thinking about participating in something related to another culture, consider whether you are adding something to represent a broader swath of people in that community, or are you replacing the very people by whom it was designed. If you want to celebrate Gay Black Excellence or Black Disabled Excellence, then go right ahead, but don’t remove Blackness from it. If declaring a “hot girl summer” doesn’t feel like it describes your experience because of your personal identity, then you don’t get to simply change the gender to something else. I don’t identify as a girl or woman, and I can tell you it’s been a hot girl summer around here since 2019.”
Western wildfires’ health risks extend across the country
“Most large U.S. wildfires occur in the West. But the smoke doesn’t stay there. It travels eastward, affecting communities hundreds to thousands of kilometers away from the fires. In fact, the majority of asthma-related deaths and emergency room visits attributed to fire smoke in the United States occur in eastern cities, according to a study in the September 2021 GeoHealth.”
Living with dementia in southern Africa is a heartbreaking challenge
Photographs By Lee-Ann Olwage, Text By Leonie Joubert, National Geographic
“Nakamhela is one of almost 7,700 Namibians living with dementia in a population of 2.5 million. Across southern Africa, nearly 300,000 people were estimated to suffer from dementia in 2019, according to the The Lancet Public Health journal. As this population grows, and as gains in healthcare enable people to live longer, dementia in the region is expected to rise by 185 percent by mid-century, reaching around 830,000 cases by 2050.
“Care for older people in Africa usually falls to families, with informal kinship networks serving as one of the primary ways to look after the aging population. But these traditional care and support systems are unraveling, even as people live longer and the number of older people with degenerative brain diseases swells. This raises questions about how communities will properly care for their elders if state social services don’t step in.”
Evolving Belief, Evolving Minds: Evolutionary Insights Into the Development and Functioning of Human Society
By Agustín Fuentes, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
“In an evolutionary context, beliefs provide for both novel alterations and continued coherence in the human niche. In this brief essay I outline key elements in human evolutionary history that facilitated the emergence of the capacity for belief and suggest that beliefs act as core niche constructive processes in the development of the human mind.”