The frontier psychiatrists is a Substack written by Owen Scott Muir, M.D.—a child and adult psychiatrist. This podcast is shared from the vaults…here is the story.
I live in Brooklyn, New York. For those who remember 2020, we had a pandemic! I know, right? Ancient history! This is audio archeology. I did what I like to do to calm down to cope, which is I started recording stuff. That stuff became a short-ish run podcast, which I called “Remotely Possible: Uncertainty, Anxiety, and Existential Despair.” Was it content marketing for the end of the world? Regardless, it is, in retrospect, a strange time capsule about how I was thinking about the pandemic at the time, and I think it holds up pretty well. The uncertainty of that time was defining.
In retrospect, listening to these podcasts, given everything we know and all the things we don't…
My bottom line? Uncertainty is hard for us as humans. We're deeply unsettled by the uncertainty. We’d rather things be sh*tty than unclear. We strive to make things bad when we have uncertainty because it's easier than sitting with it. And, frankly, this makes some sense to me. We are not completely irrational — it's avoidance behavior. People avoid things that hurt. People avoid things that suck. One of the things that hurts and sucks is uncertainty. Thus, there's some degree of predictable behavior from humans when things are uncertain. They're going to take the path of most certainty. Even if that path sucks. My issue with the pandemic response ended up being around creating a primrose path straight to hell, which may have been a trap we didn't need to leave for ourselves.
We wanted the certainty of what to do—even if it was sometimes dumb. We wanted a vaccine that would be perfectly efficacious—which doesn’t exist. And perfectly safe. Which doesn’t exist.
We are predictable. We will avoid “not knowing”— if we don’t build trust first. The pandemic was a giant trust fall that went south cause we forgot about the trust building, in retrospect.
With that musing…I hope you enjoy episode two of my pandemic retrospective.
Plug 1: I work at a practice in NYC for those interested in neuromodulation-first approaches to mental health problems. That means not drugs. It’s called Fermata. We are even enrolling for the SAINT OLO Study!
Plug 2: Tickets are available for the Frontier Psychiatrists live event: Rapid Acting Mental Health Treatment 2024, Jan 7th, in San Fransisco!