Text Me

Text Me

   It's a common phrase, one that is almost replacing the phrase "call me."  And if you're even close to agreeing with that, then you're showing your age.  In an article by Alice Gregory in The New Yorker, she writes that "the average adolescent sends almost two thousand text messages a month.  They contact their friends more by text than by phone or e-mail or instant messaging or even face-to-face conversations."

   People who spent their high-school years chatting with friends on landlines are often dismissive of texting, as if it might be a phase one outgrows, but the form is unparalleled in its ability to relay information concisely.  The act of writing, even if the product consists of only a hundred and forty characters composed with one’s thumbs, forces a kind of real-time distillation of emotional chaos.  A substantial body of research confirms the efficacy of writing as a therapeutic intervention, and although tapping out a text message isn’t the same as keeping a diary, it can act as a behavioral  buffer, providing distance between a person and intense, immediate, and often impulsive feelings. Communication by text message is halting and asynchronous, which can be frustrating when you’re waiting for a reply but liberating when you don’t want to respond.  And from this, the true article emerges, that there exists a high suicide rate among teens and their need to reach out to someone, perhaps anonymously, perhaps to a stranger, but a need that is real, and it seems that (at least at this point) texting serves that purpose.  Here's how her article more or less begins:  Then, in August, after six months on the job, Shih received a message that left her close to tears for the rest of the day.  “He won’t stop raping me,” it said.  “He told me not to tell anyone.”  A few hours later, another message came:  “R u there?”  Shih wrote back, asking who was doing this.  The next day, a response came in: “It’s my dad.”

   Stephanie Shih began changing her DoSomething.org from a nonprofit group organizing volunteer activities to a group that became (and still is, among others) the Crisis Text Line, "the first and only national 24/7 crisis-intervention hotline to conduct its conversations (the majority of which are with teen-agers) exclusively by text message...suicide is the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four."

   As an older person (me), both statistics blew me away, one, that I was indeed out of touch with how popular texting was (yes, I was one of those constantly saying, even as I texted, "why don't they just call?"), and two, just how prevalent the suicide rate was among teens (and certainly NOT thinking this happened to those only 10-12 years old).  One additional sad note in the article was an offer by a hedge-fund manager seeking to pay founder Stephanie Shih for access to the trends her company's data was building (it was refused and all her company's data is kept anonymous).  But what the company is finding and sharing) is that our brains are wired in a somewhat generalized fashion...depression appears to peak at 8 PM and anxiety three hours later (substance abuse doesn't peak until much later in the early morning hours).

   The following article in the magazine dealt with psychedelic drugs, drugs such as LSD and psilocybin, the main chemical in "magic mushrooms."  What was surprising about that article (written by, of all people, food writer Michael Pollan and titled, The Trip Treatment) was the seeming success rate the drugs were showing in breaking long-term accepted societal addicts from their demons, primarily heavy smokers and drinkers (studies are now, once again, underway at NYU, UCLA, and John Hopkins, as well as at universities in both London and Zurich).  And the after effects (of keeping them off of their addiction) appear to be long-lasting, as if a "mystical" experience had indeed occurred, but an experience that mattered to them personally.

   For a few months, my wife and I attended weekly sessions of the Near Death Studies (held locally throughout the world) and were fascinated at the variety of people who stood up to talk at the casual gatherings.  Speakers ranged from those who had had a near-death experience, to doctors who witnessed near-death in their patients, to professors studying the experiences of both sets of people.  And surprisingly, their stories varied as much as their personalities...what they saw, what they felt, what they heard.  We heard theories and stories of what happens to the brain chemically, what happens when we appear to let go, what happens when we give up hope or the will to live.

   And as varied as the stories were and are, there seems to be one common thread, even as displayed by the two articles (both are well worth reading)...we have much to learn, even as we age.  Discoveries await, perhaps even after this life.  But we are here now, at this moment, and what we may view as a simple excess or something realatively unimportant (texting) might be something that is actually proving life-saving.  We should not close our eyes to what may await, or what may already be out there...the young, the old, the alive, the dead, they may all have much to teach us.