suicide

07 Sep 2011 No Comments

The Quest For Personal Significance

Another topic I was interested to learn more about is what drives terrorism? At the 119th American Psychology Convention there were several lectures on terrorism and I attended one of them, here are my notes:

In most cases, terrorism is not a psychological disease; it’s not conditioned by economic factors or political oppression. Personality and situational factors are related to terrorism. Key words are dogmatism, rigidity and dependency.

Behavior is goal driven, and it could be explained by:

1.Psychological state – the tipping point (black widows of Chechnya)

2.Theologies (sacred values)

3.Social networks

Slippery slope, love, risk and status, unfreezing, group grievance, personal grievance…

Some need to do more about emotions. Humiliation is significance suffering.

So is it all about emotions or meaning or beliefs?

Action and opinion pyramid:

- At the top of the opinion pyramid – people who feel they have to act,

- In the middle – those who have opinion (they justify),

- And in the bottom – those, who have no opinion.

At the top of the action pyramid are the most violent, then activists, then supporters, then in the bottom those who do nothing, and it is all conditioned by beliefs and attitudes.

The quest for personal significance:

- Loss of significance (loss of honor, exclusion, humiliation,)

- Threat of significance (loss, kamikaze)

- Significance gain (quest for immortality)

You feel part of the group and regain significance due to collective shift:

- Personal failure and collectivism

- Less fear of death if collective

- If failure then identify aim interdependence

Insignificance issue is when you feel sinful compared to your values/beliefs.

Right after that lecture I went to the Crime and Punishment museum, I liked the exhibits, but what I thought the museum needs is deep analysis on why people commit crime, especially murder. The majority of killers are not psychologically sick, more often they have experienced some trauma in the past and were not able to recover, as they lack resilience, so they suffer and try to get revenge, or in their words to gain significance. That would also explain instances of teenagers killing their classmates – lack of personal significance according to their values.

Let’s now go back to suicide. From Martin Seligman lecture, we remember that suicide is linked to the lack of meaning in person’s life. What about depression? It is the same. When you have nothing that drives you and fulfills you, nothing that makes your day worth living for, you lose interest in life, and everything turns in black and white movie that you have no control over, you are just a by-stander hoping it all passes soon.

So there are four main components people may struggle with and need help:

  1. Values/Beliefs – should be achieved through education
  2. Resilience – need to teach resilience at schools, as we all in our lives encounter some problems, even traumas, but we need to know how to overcome them
  3. Personal Significance/Meaning – need to teach how to recognize and engage in meaningful activities in our lives
  4. Social Support – need to create and teach social support groups

So the moral of the story: don’t commit suicide or kill others, just discover your life’s meaning, and believe me, it is not that difficult to do, you just need to start searching.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , ,

01 Sep 2011 No Comments

119th American Psychology Convention Highlight

I didn’t make it to the Second World Congress on Positive Psychology this summer, but I decided to attend the 119th American Psychology Convention in Washington, DC on Aug 4-7, 2011. It was overwhelming to say the least to choose right workshops and talks among hundreds of them every day.

One of the highlights of the Convention to me was the talk by the founder of Positive Psychology Martin Seligman. Here are some of my notes from his talk:

Human goal is not to be miserable and national goal is wellbeing of all citizens. Seligman’s new book Flourish presents up-to-date view of positive psychology which is different from the original called Authentic Happiness. Instead of three, there are five components – positive emotions, engagement, relationship, meaning and accomplishment (PERMA).

Accomplishment (progress, competency and responsibility) and positive relationships are new to this view of positive psychology which is focused on well-being rather than happiness.  Each of the components is measurable, teachable, gameable and buildable, either online or via mobile. All should be built into therapy and educational curriculum  at schools.

GDP is inversely related to happiness (that was new to me). Positive emotions include optimism and positive health, including mental health  and physical health (lack of disease).

The US Army asked him to help develop training on building resilience, positive attitude, and create ways to identify the strongest candidates to invest more time in their training and promotion!

So Penn Resilience Training (PRP) was created. It was decided to change negative literature to positive literature. Interesting finding based on the results of the test is people who were in the bottom 1% of life meaning satisfaction were the ones who would commit suicide in the next year or two.

Another research finding – self-discipline/resilience is higher on strength list than intelligence. The army management wants to know who has grit and who never gives up. Consequently, those will have the most accomplishments and will most likely be promoted to generals.  There is correlation between resilience and meaning.

Gallop wants to have PERMA dashboard vs. single measure. Seligman also works with Google to see if there are changes in search words for PERMA (media and data mining).  There are also ways to have subjective vs. objective measures of your wellbeing (others evaluate it for you). There will be development of the right lexicon for Perma games.

Seligman launched Flourish 51 program, but unfortunately he will not be around to see the results of it in 51 years, but he hopes that others will carry the torch of positive psychology after him.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

25 Aug 2011 1 Comment

Have an Average Day!

I found this Blog post by accident… or not! Check this out:

“This article neatly summarizes my feeling, but with a little bit of research to back it up; taken from the Utne reader, link following: “I once was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, “Have an average day!” Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn’t the idea to have great days, even exceptional ones? He told me a story about one of his mentors, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide.

After receiving doctorates from two universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers. Duke came to believe that the enemy of happiness is “the curse of exceptionality.” When everyone is trying to be exceptional, nearly everyone fails because the exceptional becomes commonplace, and those few who do succeed feel isolated and estranged from their peers. We’re left with a world in which a few people feel envied, misunderstood, and alone, while thousands of others feel like failures for not being good, special, rich, or happy enough. 

When I was in the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts, I was at university and I remember wishing that I could run away from my scholarship, change my name to Bob, and take a job pumping gas at a full-service station somewhere in the Midwest. Only in my fantasy, people would start to notice something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have “Bob the service guy” fill up their cars and to exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose. 

I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed. Delusions of grandeur? Quite possibly. Depressed and miserable? Absolutely. One of Duke’s breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard a neighbor singing while he was mowing his lawn. Duke realized what was missing from his life: the simple pleasures of an average day. 

The very next weekend, he went to visit his son, who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. “I expect you to be a straight C student, young man,” Duke said. “I want you to complete your unremarkable academic career, meet an ordinary young woman, and, if you choose to, get married and live a completely average life!” His son, of course, thought Dad had finally flipped, but it did take the pressure off him to be quite so exceptional. 

A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten A’s on his exams, despite having done only an average amount of studying. This is the paradoxical promise of an average-day philosophy: The cumulative effect of a series of average days is actually quite extraordinary. If we put this together with another one of Duke’s discoveries—that the meaning of our lives comes from the differences we make with them, though these differences need not be huge to have a profound impact—we may well have the ultimate prescription for a happy, productive life:

Be an average, happy person making a small positive difference (and having a happy, average day).

In doing this, you create the kind of “exceptionality” that can be shared by everyone. ” Original artricle from Have an average day.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , ,

26 Jul 2011 1 Comment

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I was lucky to get tickets to The hedgehog movie during French movie festival in Boston’s MFA this summer. The movie is very new and was not shown in the States before. I wanted to see it because the movie is based on the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I read the book and I loved it. It is so special to me that I even participated in defending the book against harsh critics back in Oct 2010. I simply felt I had to do something after I read complete book’s review here http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popfr/barbery.htm#ours. So I wrote:

“Hello,

I just read your review of the Elegance of the Hedgehog book by Muriel Barbery. I’m stunned - whoever wrote the review overlooked two important things that happened at the end of the book and kind of gave it the whole meaning. They are:

1. Paloma realized why she wanted to commit suicide: she didn’t want to be like her parents in their social class who are miserable and the most important that she couldn’t help them to be happy (her feeling of not being useful),

2. At the same time the death of Renee taught her and us, readers, that we do not have to die to find true value and beauty of our lives and the world around us, because Rene was doing it every day: appreciating little things and whatever we never thought was enough. We don’t have to die to learn to love life and people around us, even better - we can improve it by being kind to others.

I just want to mention that your review and rating (B. Had some appeal but annoyingly simplistic and reductive) seems simplistic to me.

Sincerely, Marina.”

“Dear Marina:

Thank you for your interest in the Complete Review, and for your comments.

I don’t know that Barbery conveyed those lessons very well: killing off Rene seems like far too easy a solution, and the character of Paloma was weakly written (of course her suicide-ambitions were all teenage melodrama — surely no one ever expected her to really kill herself). And Barbery’s obnoxious class-consciousness confuses the issue too: good and bad are painted far too black and white throughout the book, without any surprises (and finding ‘purity’ and nobleness in the exotic (the Japanese) also seems a terrible over-simplification).

Sincerely yours,

Michael Orthofer

Managing Editor, at the Complete Review and its Literary Saloon”

To find out if you agree with Michael or not, read the book and watch the movie, but the lessons I learned from both of them are:

  1. Try to appreciate life’s beauty in simple things
  2. Make sure you are useful and help others feel useful too
  3. We all are hiding, but want to be discovered and appreciated for what we are, start your discovery! :)

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

16 Jun 2011 No Comments

The Ups and Downs of Life

Recently I saw a Russian movie based on the book Eternal Call by Anatoliy Ivanov. My mother asked me if I knew biography of the actor Peter Velyaminov in that movie. I didn’t, so found his life story on Russian Wikipedia  and to say the least, I was shocked, but couldn’t help admire his attitude to life and happiness.

Peter Velyaminov was born on December 7, 1926, in Moscow, the son of a hereditary military from an ancient noble family. Among his ancestors listed as gentry many famous personalities. Most titled of them was the founder of the beginning of XI century who became at the head of three thousand militia to serve for Yaroslav the Wise. He was a nephew of King Norway – King Hakon II. Velyaminovs were among the contenders for the Zemsky Sobor in 1613 to the Russian throne, along with the Romanovs.

Peter’s father – Sergei Velyaminov was hereditary military. Before the revolution he graduated from Pavlovsk Military School in St. Petersburg in 1918, he joined the Red Army, was a member of the High Command of the Red Army. Was arrested in 1930 and held in camps for 17 years, mother lived in exile.

In March 1943, 16-year-old Peter was arrested on charges of “participating in anti-Soviet organization” Revival of Russia “, was sentenced to 10 years hard labor and sent to a transit camp in Kotlas. According to one source, who was under investigation in the Lubyanka prison, Peter was arrested in one case with his father – former tsarist officer.

In the camp Peter received the news of the arrest of his mother. He was so shocked by the news that cut his veins, but they saved him. In 1952 he was released (in the camp spent 9 years and 9 days). After the liberation of the camps Velyaminov three years he worked in Abakan Rafting.

He began playing in amateur theater, where he sang, recited poems and played his first role – Maxim Koshkin of “Spring Love.” From 1952 – Actor Drama Theatre inAbakan, 1955 – Tyumen Oblast Drama Theatre. He has also worked in theaters Dzerzhinsk, Novocherkassk, Cheboksary, Ivanovo, Perm and Sverdlovsk. It is in Sverdlovsk Theater Peter saw Valery Uskov and Vladimir Krasnopolsky and was invited to appear in multi-part film “Shadows at Noon”  in the role of the collective farmer Zahar Bolshakov.

In 1972, after the success of the film “Shadows at Noon”, Peter Velyaminov became famous nationwide and  moved to Moscow, where he joined the troupe of the Contemporary Theater. In the Contemporary Velyaminov played in the first directorial performance Galina Volchek “Climbing Mount Fuji”, and many other productions. In 1974 he joined the studio theater.

Despite the national recognition through the movie, the authorities did not forget about his past. So, in 1979, he was not allowed into France with the delegation, which carried the film “Shadows at Noon”. In 1983, actor was rehabilitated. In 1990, he became a full member of the Russian Nobility Assembly, receiving a diploma number 20. In 1994-1997 he was Vice-marshal of the St. Petersburg Assembly of the Noble, and in May 1995 led a delegation of St. Petersburg of the Noble Assembly of the IV All-Russian Congress of the nobility.

His own words:

“I am a happy man, because a difficult situation did not break me. Up to the 50s in the camps, there was no division on the criminals, deserters and political. But it so happened that next to me was always someone who helped me. When I got in the Urals for the construction of Hydrolyzed plant in juveniles, criminals, gang, I have finally exhausted – weighed 47 kilograms (103 lbs). With Dystrophy I was placed in the infirmary. Hospital boss, too, was a Muscovite, and as it turned out, her daughter was studying with me at the same school. Thanks to this woman I did and survived. I have worked on Rafting, foreman of carpenters, setter. Norm setter Karmazin, who “held” in the camp the entire mechanical plant, told me: “Well, then you go to this jazz? Songs to sing “Goodbye, Mama, Do not Cry”? Engaged in this profession, and thou shalt be fed and drunk. “But I went to the orchestra, which accompanied the prisoners to work, to play drums. Music education there – four years of musical school in violin.”

Since 1995 Velyaminov lived and worked in St. Petersburg, he died at the age of 82 a happy man.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,