A discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity. A Brain Pickings project edited by Maria Popova in partnership with Noodle. Twitter: @explorer
Where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too great, the effect is not one of encouragement but of disillusionment - especially if their story is told in terms of personal qualities like bravery or persistence.
Knowing a famous person has the same impairment as you can be reassuring, but only in the vague way that hearing of a successful distant relative is reassuring.
Most of us will never scale Everest, compete for our country at sports or have a showbiz career. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed.
For BBC’s Mental Health Awareness Week, Mark Brownquestions the value of glorifying role models who share our own disabilities and pathologies.
A flipside of the same coin to consider is the perilous “tortured genius” myth of creativity, which implies that depression, addiction, and other mental health issues that plagued some successful creators were central to their genius. The human antidotes to this mythology are worthy role models.
50 years ago today, Eunice Kennedy Shriver published an article that sparked a movement of advocacy for people with mental disabilities. Her daughter, Maria Shriver, remembers and celebrates her mother’s legacy of hope.
A visualization of the “insane” in each state as reported in the ninth U.S. census, 1870. The total number is reduced to thousandths, and the number of thousandths in each sex, in each decade of life (lowest horizontal line = under 10 years of age, highest = over 100 years), is represented by the distance measured in the horizontal lines from the perpendicular base line – males on the left, females on the right.
Overall, there are more crazy younger men than younger women, and more crazy older women – but this imbalance later in life could be due to the fact that there are simply more older women alive than men, due to women’s greater average longevity. And, whoa crazy men of the Pacific.
