Answer Addiction

Tag: coping

  • Man's Emotional Support Alligator Raises Eyebrows

    Man's Emotional Support Alligator Raises Eyebrows

    The man said that staying close with the alligator has helped him stay off of prescriptions for his depression. 

    For most people, being in close company with a five-foot-long alligator would be the opposite of comforting. But when Joie Henney feels symptoms of depression coming on, he snuggles up with Wally, his emotional support alligator.

    “I had Wally, and when I came home and was around him, it was all OK,” Henney told Philly.com. “My doctor knew about Wally and figured it works, so why not?”

    The doctor certified Wally as an emotional support alligator, likely the first of his kind. 

    Henney, who hosted a wildlife show on ESPN from 1989 to 2000, says he is familiar with dealing with wild animals and is aware that the alligator could hurt him. He rescued Wally when the alligator was 14 months old, and the alligator now spends time in an indoor pool, snacking on chicken wings and comforting Henney when he’s feeling down.

    Henney said that staying close with Wally has helped him stay off of prescriptions for his depression. “He comforted me,” Henney said. “I got over my depression.”

    Henney first realized that Wally could help him feel better when he went through a series of sudden losses of friends and family. “I lost three in a week, two in less than 24 hours. I was laying down one day, he literally crawled up on the cot with me and laid his head on top of my face.”

    At just four years old, Wally is still growing. He’s could be 16-feet long one day, but Henney insists their relationship will endure. 

    “He likes to give hugs,” by resting his snout on Henney’s face, the owner explained. 

    Wally makes public appearances with Henney, and Henney insists that he’s not that unusual from more traditional pets. “He’s just like a dog,” Henney said at one event. “He wants to be loved and petted.”

    Henney said he isn’t the only one who has benefitted from Wally’s attention. “He is registered as my emotional support animal, but he has done a lot for others.”

    Henney has even used Wally to help raise money for a child with autism.

    But despite the feel-good aspects of Henney and Wally’s connection, many people question whether the use of emotional support animals has gone overboard.

    Getting an animal certified as an emotional support animals can allow the animal to come into public places, but some people say that the proliferation of emotional support animals is undermining the role of guide dogs and others trained to help people with medical conditions.  

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Eighth Grade" Star Elsie Fisher Discusses Social Anxiety

    "Eighth Grade" Star Elsie Fisher Discusses Social Anxiety

    The 15-year-old actress said the script for her new movie helped her better understand her own social anxiety.

    Eighth Grade is an acclaimed new film directed by comedian Bo Burnham, starring Elsie Fisher as an introverted girl trying to make her way through her last year of junior high.

    As it turns out, Fisher was able to bring a lot to the role considering her own adolescence was an anxious and awkward time.

    Fisher grew up in a well-to-do suburb, Thousand Oaks, California, and had a tough time navigating middle school. As she told Mic, she was dealing with social anxiety, and thought her experience “was very, very unique, but not in a good way. I’m like, ‘I’m the only person who feels weird and quiet and bleh.’”

    Then once she read the script for Eighth Grade, she realized, “Oh, everyone feels weird and quiet and bleh.” Like her character in Eighth Grade, Fisher also had to learn how to navigate the digital world, like every other teen in today’s day and age.

    “I think the biggest thing the movie did for me in terms of social media and the internet as a whole is just make me think about it more. I feel like a lot of people don’t think about the internet. It’s just part of the air they breathe. It’s very addictive, and you don’t often think about your addictions.”

    Once she read the script, Fisher felt that Burnham captured an awkward teen with social anxiety well.

    “I truly saw it as him writing a person who felt the same things as him, just in different circumstances,” she said. “He’s one of the few people I’ve met who really understands my level of anxiety, because he shares that.”

    The trailer for Eighth Grade shows a lot of young people escaping into their own iPhone worlds. Growing up in the age of the internet “makes everyone more self-aware,” Fisher says. “And it’s affecting young children’s brain chemistry. Because our brains are still developing, we’re the most susceptible to things that mess with them. And that includes things like drugs and alcohol and the internet. You shorten your attention span and increase your need for information and approval.”

    As Burnham told The Crimson, in today’s digital pre-teen and teen worlds, “We’re hyperconnected and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated and we’re numb.”

    Fisher also feels that in today’s world, “There’s just a lot of disconnect from adults to teens. And I just think both sides need to be more empathetic towards each other. On the adult side, understand there’s a context for why the teen is on their phone. It’s because they don’t want to live in this weird world, [this] eighth-grade phase that America is going through. Teens aren’t self-obsessed because they want to be or because they’re narcissistic. It’s because that’s how we’re being raised, and that’s how you’re judged, based on your appearance online.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Simon Pegg On Past Drinking Struggles: "I Was Profoundly Unhappy"

    Simon Pegg On Past Drinking Struggles: "I Was Profoundly Unhappy"

    The actor recently revealed that a past battle with depression led him to self-medicate with alcohol.

    English actor and comedian Simon Pegg has had a busy year, appearing in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi adventure Ready Player One, among others, and gearing up for the release of Mission: Impossible—Fallout.

    The prolific actor, screenwriter and producer is generally private about his personal life, but shared in a recent interview that he, like many others, struggled with depression and a drinking problem.

    “I was depressed. I had always been susceptible to it. But at the same time as I started to ascend into what would conventionally be regarded as a success, I was going down,” he told Empire magazine.

    The success of his TV and film career did not translate to happiness. “The more material success presented itself to me, the less I could understand why it wasn’t fulfilling me in any way. It wasn’t that it wasn’t [fulfilling] me, it was because I was depressed. It’s not a mood. It’s a condition,” he said.

    Drinking became a crutch, but that didn’t last. “I just drank more heavily… Eventually I crashed out. At Comic-Con in 2010—I’ve never told anyone this—we were promoting (the 2011 sci-fi film) Paul and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere.”

    That eventually led to the decision to put the bottle down. “I got well in 2010. I stopped drinking,” said the Shaun of the Dead actor. “I got a little bit of help. If you look at (the 2010 comedy) Burke and Hare, I’m bloated and fucking dead-eyed… I look at it now and think, ‘Fuck me, I was in a dark place then.’ I was drunk a lot of the time and I was profoundly unhappy.”

    Pegg credits the crew working on the Mission Impossible series, in which he has played the recurring role of Benji Dunn since 2006, with helping pull him out of his depression. “They took care of me and it helped me to get out of this dark place and realize that life was enjoyable,” he said. “By the time I finished Ghost Protocol (the 2011 Mission: Impossible film), I was better.”

    The next Mission: Impossible—Fallout is due for release on July 28.

    Pegg discussed the meaning of happiness in 2014 with the Los Angeles Times, while promoting his latest film at the time Hector and the Search for Happiness.

    “It’s taken a while for me to get there; it’s taken me a while to understand what it is, how to be it. My own route to it has been an interesting one, and I think the one thing the movie says very clearly is that you can’t be happy unless you’ve experienced every facet of emotion that there is,” he said. “To know what happiness is you have to be able to pick it out from the forest of emotions. So you have to be scared and upset and miserable. You have to get all that stuff in order to truly be happy. And at 44, I think I’m there.”

    View the original article at thefix.com