Depression and atheism - a link? (I think not)

(If you don't feel like staring at your screen long enough to read this whole entry, at least read the end, just for me).

Hm, things have been a little hectic lately. I had to mark a lot of labs and then major projects, 21 of them, spelling and grammar mistakes and all. I'm sure they annoy me more since I started the writing class, and the amount of students that spelt colour without the U... This is Canada people, not the USA. On top of that, the three days I spent on the electron microprobe a couple of weeks ago was revealed as wasted, and needed a resit to be crammed into this week too (not to mention some serious money woes I did not see coming).

Normally, I might be able to take this all with with a certain amount of grace considering it's nearly Christmas and all. The problem is, I finally decided to change my medication. After a long discussion with my doctor, who was much more attentive than other recent doctors, she decided to change it to a medication that is basically the shiny new version of my old one. It was reasoned then that I would get no effects of withdrawal and be able to switch directly from one to the other (despite being on a relatively high dose). However, this doesn't seem to have been the case. My sleep has gotten more erratic and my mood his spiralled out of control. It's terrifying. I thought I was doing well with my life, but being essentially 'off' the medication at the moment (it takes 2-6 weeks for any antidepressant to start working) has given me a glimpse of the monster that lies beneath. I've had terrible stress and anxiety and today it took a literal toll on me. I was wide awake at 2am last night so I decided to take a sleeping pill. Then I slept 11 hours straight and woke up with the room spinning. And I have been dizzy all day... so going in to uni and doing the pile of work, or any work, was off the table today. I was a little scared to feel this way and be on my own, so my good friend Jess came round and sat with me to make sure I didn't pass out and hit my head or something. I feel almost better now, a little woozy in the head maybe, but better. But really it was just refreshing not to do anything of use. I think the dizziness was a result of a combination of the withdrawal, the new medication and the sleeping pill, but a large chunk was also probably my body saying "Hey, take it easy, I can't do all this yet."

Anyway, in happier news I have been involving myself fully in the Humanist/Atheist world, meeting up with the CFI Exec, discussing ideas and attending events. One of the most fascinating was a broadcast debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, on the topic "be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world". There was a lot of talking, but there were several main points repeated in various forms (more so by Blair, it must be said). He didn't argue that religion provides morality, but more that religion is the inspiration for so many to do good things (citing the large amount of charity work). While I can see his point to some extent, I don't believe charitable work would disappear with religion. I think that it is a common misconception that only churches provide community and a group feeling of goodwill. I certainly get that and more from the CFI. It's just that it's not that common, and many don't know there is that other 'option'... yet... Hitchens also raised the important issue that a lot of religious 'charitable' work has done more harm than good, although this is true with more of the traditional missionary-type charity work that involved oppressing women's roles in societies (which many agree is the single best way to empower impoverished countries).

Blair's other main point was that getting rid of religion does not get rid of fanaticism. He cited Stalin here, referring earlier to both Hitler and Pol Pot, which unfortunately serves only to turn people off of his arguments, since these are often misused examples of 'atheists doing bad'. The difference between this and say, the Crusades, is that these people did not commit evil because of their atheism. Anyway, this point of Blair's had several branches, one of which I thought was his best thinking point. Hitchens conceded that religion is unlikely to be wiped off the face off the Earth any time soon, and Blair said that well, in that case, isn't it logical to try and work with religion, and to get major religions to work with each other, instead of focusing on 'getting rid' of them? This is a very sensible conclusion in my view. However, getting major religions to work together is, in my mind, pretty much a pipe dream considering how small areas of the world (like Northern Ireland and Gaza) have been fighting for generations over religion. So, again following logic, decreasing the power and spread of religion seems the only logical answer...

Other than just practical discussions, Hitchens tried to take the debate to the realms of philosophy too, and argued that religion is essentially servitude, and that religion is not good for a global community when religions are always trying to 'recruit'. Blair argued in response that religion gives a purpose and a deeper meaning to the mission of life. I've known I am an atheist for a long time, and yet I have never felt devoid of purpose or an awe of what life is and what I can do with it.

Hence why I've never been the self-harming-suicidal kind of depressive. I still think life is incredibly 'sacred' (Is there a better word for it without the religious connotation?). I describe myself more as a 'depressed optimist'.

In an effort to expand my journalism experiences beyond sci and tech news I also attended a very interesting talk at the University by George Galloway, an ex-MP from Britain who never seems to be described without the prefix "controversial". He is pro-Palestine, and I went to the talk to really test myself. I know nothing about politics. See, this is why I don't always feel contempt and outrage when people "don't care" about global warming, if their reasons are lack of interest in knowing the facts. Basically, I am guilty of this about politics (and economics, but that has more to do with despising maths). Both are important, but why should I come down hard on people that care more about politics than global warming when I am so single-track too? But, I am trying to change.

Galloway's talk, of course, was going to be very biased, and I went in knowing that I was getting one side of the (Israel-Palestine) story. But it was still a fascinating experience. I wondered how much I was hearing was real 'fact' and how much was slanted spin - certainly some of the things his said raised my left eyebrow. The crowd however was extremely enthusiastic, and it was like nothing I had attended before, spontaneous applause, boos, and shouts of "for shame!" when something deplorable the opposition had done was spoken of. I'm not how sure the article turned out, really, but I just reported what happened, and the main points of the talk. You can read it here.

Finally, yesterday marked the last day of classes and the last of my writing class for the year when I handed in my latest essay (luckily, the class is a full-year one, so there is more to come in 2011). For the latest essay (themed 'The Event') I took a different tack than my previous ones. To explain it, I think I'll just post up my 'Author's Statement' which we have to make to accompany each essay.

For all my writing so far I’ve stayed in my comfort zone as Hayley “The Storyteller”, but for this piece I wanted to express more of Hayley “The Scientist” and Hayley “The Journalist”. I decided to play a bit with the idea of “the event” by exploring the contrast between the scientific world, where nothing is an instantaneous event, and the journalistic world, which imagines everything as a sensational discovery. How can these disciplines meet in the middle?

I set up the piece from the viewpoint of “The Scientist,” but it is an internal battle too, so I am also “The Journalist.” Although the whimsical naivety of “The Journalist” is somewhat exaggerated, it’s a way to poke a little fun at myself for sometimes seeing the world through extremely rosy spectacles. Plus, I love squirrels.

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The Scientific Process

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I never really understood that metaphor until I met the journalist. But I could almost see her squirrel tail making a fuzzy frame for her sparkly eyes. She must have been close to me in age, but still had that wistful bubbliness that makes most cynical adults harbour violent intentions. She whipped out a notebook, a voice recorder and her giddiest smile, ready to be informed about the wonders of my research.

“Wow, so you’re a volcanologist? That’s awesome! You study volcanic ash, right? What did you find out?”

“I found two samples of volcanic ash located a few hundred miles apart with the same chemical signature. Within error. With current technology. Which means they’re probably from the same eruption. Which means they were likely deposited at the same time. Which means the sediments they lie in are assumedly the same age. Which means the climate those sediments point to could have an assigned age. Once we date the volcanic ash.”

The circular reasoning and otherwise uncertainty of my “discovery” didn’t seem to faze her. She nodded, scribbled and looked back up at me like a squirrel at a nut. She asked me where I found the ash, and when I told her I went to Alaska to dig it up her tail bustled so much it nearly pushed her off the edge of her chair.

“I had to go to Alaska to find the ash,” I said, “but I spent a lot of time digging trenches. Fieldwork is 98% searching and digging in the rain and 2% finding what you want and sampling it.”

Once again my lack of enthusiasm failed to dull her animal spark. I explained to her how important that area of Alaska is; how it is thought to be the route the first humans took into North America at the end of the last ice age. How the eruption I’m studying could have been around that very same time. The static created by her bristling fur crackled around the room and it must have given me a jolt. I was starting to get into it, remembering what great questions my research could solve. But that’s the kind of stuff you put on funding proposals. It’s not what you actually do.

“The path to this result has been paved with road kill. So many lines of inquiry have been dead ends. The machines in the lab often break down. I once dropped one ceramic dish on another, which smashed them both. The other day a sample even slipped down the drain,” I told her. “We had to take the plumbing apart to get it back.”

“That’s not all,” I said. “Polishing samples for hours on end on the grinding wheel I often rub the skin off my thumbs, and the chemicals we use to separate our samples are carcinogenic over time.”

The journalist now looked as if she couldn’t understand why I do science, her tail drooping, so I decided to cheer her up by exploring the research’s tenuous link to climate change. Journalists love that. I told her that by knowing the age and timing of past climate changes, it helps us work out what might happen with our own rapid global shift. Once again, this was the sort of thing that just goes on funding proposals, and that gave me an idea to challenge a viewpoint I’d always found irritating. Some people seem to think that climate change research is a money-making conspiracy; that we cooked up the whole thing to get grant money.

“Alberta Ingenuity didn’t think my research was ingenious enough, so I had to become a teaching assistant at the university to pay for my living. Teaching doesn’t take up too much time, but marking every lab and every exam each undergraduate turns in does. And even then most of them put no effort into their answers and complain about their grades, after I have become cross-eyed and cack-handed from marking.”

The journalist shifted uncomfortably on her deflated tail, clearly wanting to move on to talk about what impact my research would have, but I had to take one more opportunity to explain that this was not some headline discovery that I stumbled upon as one test-tube of blue liquid turned red.

“I spend days on end working on the electron microprobe. It’s a several thousand dollar machine. I look at hundreds of shards of volcanic ash, painstakingly picking a point on every one for the machine to analyse for the chemistry. I sometimes see ash in my sleep; the shards make such beautiful and terrifying shapes. In the future, someone will work out a way to make the whole process automated. They will be amazed I ever had the patience.”

Satisfied I’d gotten across to her the monotony of scientific experimentation, I let her go back to the climate change issue.

“Yellowstone is actually a massive volcano, right? So, and, I’ve heard that, if that erupts it would wreck the climate, right?”

Ah, she’d misinterpreted the way my research connects volcanic ash and climate. She’d gone for the obvious. Lucky for her, I knew something about Yellowstone anyway; although by now I had the feeling she would believe anything I told her.

“A Yellowstone eruption would be devastating and a quick analysis shows it erupts every 600,000 years, with the last eruption over 640,000 years ago. But the 600,000 cycle is only an average of three eruptions in the past 2.1 million years. Saying Yellowstone is overdue is like saying a baby is overdue because it’s one minute past the expected time.”

“But if it did erupt though, wouldn’t it be terrible? I mean that Icelandic volcano Ayyafya-Eyjafk-”

“Eyjafjallajökull.”

“Yeah, that one,” she giggled. “It basically shut down Europe, right?”

Fine, I thought, rolling my eyes, I’ll give her what she wants.

“It would be 1000 times more powerful than the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Ash would circle the Earth, blotting out the sun and drastically lowering the global temperature. Crops would fail. Animals would die. And that’s without mentioning the thousands of people that would be killed in the immediate area of the eruption.”

Her mouth was open, her pen was scribing a rut in the page and I let the silence run. Once she’d stopped writing, the silence continued. She looked at her page. Away at a tree outside the window. Back at her book, flipping pages trying to find something else to ask me. On the path below the window a squirrel froze in its tracks, as a student trailed her feet and yawned in front of it, unaware of the little creature’s peril. I grinned.

“If Yellowstone did erupt though, it would make a pretty good ash marker layer. Just as the ash I found in Alaska may mark the arrival of humans to North America, an ash layer from Yellowstone may very well mark their departure.”

I could almost see her little rodent heart skipping in her chest. Don’t let anyone tell you scientists aren’t eloquent! We give speeches to each other all the time and we don’t like old men sleeping in the back of our halls either. The journalist looked at her voice recorder and noted down the time. That quote was going to be in the article.

I felt concerned for the journalist then, and decided to stop playing with her. It was obvious she was interested in what I was doing and she had told me she wanted to be a science journalist, but she was following all those classic journalist school rules. Amazing discovery. Sensationalism. Over-simplifying the science, presuming the public to be idiots.

“Don’t imagine my research ends there. There are many volcanic ash layers in Alaska, in Canada, and in the world. Each one is an instantaneous event. Each one marks a time when certain conditions existed on the Earth, when different creatures lived, when other peoples ruled. All this work will take many more researchers many more years, collecting samples, separating them, polishing them, probing them and pondering them. In all that time what I’ve concluded will likely be overturned by someone with better, faster and more accurate methods. Science is not an event: it is the gradual accretion and refining of knowledge.”

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NOTE!! I am thinking of submitting this piece alongside some Gateway pieces for my Journalism School application. A good idea???