We rely on words to define us. If we try to express a specific condition without the right words attached, we become lost and we are unable to clearly understand each other. While teaching one of my Public Health courses, a group discussion about clinical depression led us into an examination of the word “depression” and how the home cultures of some of the students’ parents did not allow, or define, the concept of “depression” in a serious, medical, sense.
Do blogs create democracy and foment The Citizen Journalist?
Or are all bloggers just begging the wind?
Here are some sobering numbers reported on The McLaughlin Group over the weekend:
Is there a point to blogging any longer or will the little people with the small — but important — voices be drowned out by the traditional Big Media sites who will suck all the bandwidth and chew up all the pertinent search returns?
Is the Golden Age of Blogging now dead?
Today we live in perpetual
moments of melancholia that now define our modern lives. We do not live in a state of regret, but we live with an ongoing consciousness of things we have lost. How do we handle the recognition that, over the last four years, so many precious things have been forever stolen from us?
We have lost our sense of sanctuary. There are no safe places. We cannot find protection in schools, mosques, churches, or even with each other. We have lost our right to privacy.
We walk the streets and we are watched. We enter public buildings and we are required to provide ID just to remain in the building.
We surveil our neighbors. People different from us — in color and tone and financial stature — are our silent enemies and are ripe for the reporting. We have lost our joy to depravity.
We have lost our Melancholia and our Black Bile and we’re the worse for the eradication. We now seek happiness through the pit of a pill and the trough of psychotherapy instead of actively working to remove ourselves from despair and founding ourselves in happiness and contentment even though they can never truly be achieved.
It is that struggle to raise our bodies and our thoughts that makes the life worthy of the living. Melancholia has a rich and deadly history in the mark of humankind and no other state of being has been rendered so beautifully in art than that of the Melancholic mind. It’s fascinating how “head on hand” is the rich semiotic used throughout antiquity to indicate this mournfulness of the memory for the living:
Continue reading → The Necessity of Melancholia and Black Bile
by Andrea Puckett
When I stepped out of college, I felt I would conquer the world. However, I quickly learned the best teacher is failure. I completed my undergraduate degree in 2001. After graduation, I remember thinking that it would be no problem to find a professional job because I had the skills and people would want me. Also, I felt that I would be like my father who graduated from college in the 1970s and had the same job for 30 plus years where he was able to rise from the bottom to the top. What I didn’t realize at the time that my father’s generational rules, my role model, after college didn’t apply to my situation.
Continue reading → How 9/11 Changed the Entry-Level Job Market
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