Don’t forget that July is Freedom from Fear of Public Speaking Month

Once again it is time to celebrate this obscure occasion, which has been named both with and without including the word public.

Does the mimulus Bach flower essence (or remedy) reduce anxiety?

Some people believe that the best remedy for overcoming fear of public speaking is preparation and practice. Others look for shortcuts in alternative and complementary medicine, such as Bach flower essences (or remedies). Back in January 2010 I blogged about flower remedies and a trial of one combination called Rescue Remedy.

Mimulus is another flower essence prepared from a single type of yellow flower, as is shown above. Sara Radcliffe explained that:  

“Mimulus is for those who have specific fears about things, people or events. This includes anticipatory anxiety such as fear of failing an exam or fear of how things will turn out, or fear of poverty as well as phobias such as fear of public speaking, fear of dogs, fear of robbers and so on.”

There is a three-minute video about mimulus with pretty music and images posted on YouTube. But, is there any evidence that it works? I couldn’t find a double-blind trial for  mimulus alone.

However, back in 2001 Harald Wallach, Christine Rilling, and Ursula Engelke published a an article in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders titled “Efficacy of Bach-flower remedies in test anxiety: A double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial with partial crossover.” You can read an abstract here. They looked at a combination of ten remedies containing mimulus and also impatiens, gentian, chestnut bud, rock rose, larch, cherry plum, white chestnut, scleranthus, and elm. Their study didn’t find a significant effect above that of the placebo. If any of those ten remedies were effective it should have. Nevertheless, in 2008 Nelsons issued a press release titled Flower Power + Brain Power = Exam Success.

The image of mimulus came from Wikimedia Commons.

Comparing apples, oranges, and kiwi fruit

Research can be tricky because different people usually ask different questions - which, of course, may lead to finding different answers.

On June 2nd Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield posted an article titled “Our New Era of Anxiety” at Salon dot com. It was adapted from their new book All We Have to Fear, and subtitled “Anxiety disorder rates have risen twentyfold in 30 years -- largely because psychiatry misunderstands human nature.”

Horwitz and Wakefield say that:

“....Moreover, it might seem as if a startling increase in the number of anxiety disorders has occurred in recent years. Consider that in 1980, the third edition of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association stated: “It has been estimated that from 2 to 4% of the general population has at some time had a disorder that this manual would classify as an Anxiety Disorder.”

Then, the first large community study conducted after the publication of this manual, the Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study, found that about one out of ten people had an anxiety disorder in any given year and that roughly 15% of individuals experienced these conditions at some point in their lives.

Just two decades later, a similar and equally rigorous study, the National Comorbidity Study(sic) Replication (NCS-R), yielded the shocking result that almost one out of five people had had an anxiety disorder over the past year, and more than a quarter of the population (28.8%) had had one at some point in their lives.

Even the NCS-R actually underestimates the frequency of anxiety disorders, as measured by psychiatry’s current criteria for diagnosing mental disorder. Because it asks people to remember years later what anxieties they had earlier in life, many respondents forget past episodes. A recent New Zealand study with substantially improved methodology that involved repeated interviews of participants established that in any given year between ages 18 and 32, nearly a quarter of all young adults (22.8%) experience an anxiety disorder and that virtually half (49.5%) report at least one such disorder during the entire period. Obviously, the study would have yielded even higher estimates if it had included disorders emerging after age 32 or before age 18.

How did rates of anxiety disorders rise by as much as twentyfold over the past 30 years to encompass as much as over half the population?”

Now, I don’t think those different rates really are such a big mystery - if you look carefully at what was being measured, how it was done, and where it was done. I’ve summarized those factors in a handy table (which is worth at least a hundred words):

The first paragraph from that quote just described an estimate, which is a polite word for a guess. The DSM defines a yardstick for measuring anxiety considered serious enough to be called a disorder - a phobia. Perhaps the yardstick was the second edition, DSM-II?

Their second paragraph described results from the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study, which surveyed the “watersheds” around five metropolitan areas in the U.S. It was like an apple - a first bite at surveying what went on, and not a random national survey. The yardstick was DSM-III. I’ve blogged about the ECA study. 

Their third paragraph describes the NCS-R, which was a national survey of the U.S. using another yardstick, the DSM-IV. So, it’s like an orange, and can’t necessarily be compared with an apple. I’ve blogged about the NCS-R.

Their fourth paragraph described a study done in New Zealand, home of the kiwi fruit. That’s halfway around the world from the U.S., so there’s no obvious reason for finding the same rate of anxiety.  

Horwitz and Wakefield also omitted discussing the original National Comorbidity Survey (NCS), which used DSM-III as a yardstick. That survey was repeated a decade later as NCS-2, but those results haven’t been reported yet. I don’t think the survey in New Zealand really had any better methodology than what had been used in the U.S.   

Storytelling - songs of revenge or hope

Feuding families are a familiar theme in literature - Capulets & Montagues, Hatfields  & McCoys, etc. Last month the History Channel did a six-hour mini series on the latter. I avoided watching it, since I didn’t need to see all those pointless cycles of revenge. One reviewer whined: 

“Hatfield vs. McCoy vs. Hatfield vs. McCoy vs. Hatfield vs. McCoy ad nauseam isn’t dramatic. It’s tedious. Somewhere around the three-hour mark, all you want to do is have both families line up opposite each other, pull the trigger and fade to black.”





If you want much the same effect in six minutes instead of six hours, you can listen to the Drive-By Truckers song called Decoration Day. It tells a very similar story about the Hill and Lawson families. (I previously blogged about another less bitter Drive-By Truckers song called 18 Wheels of Love).

About a week ago I started hearing an unfamiliar song on a local alternative FM radio station. It had gorgeous three-part harmony, an unusual mix of instruments, and hopeful, wistful lyrics. A couple lines were:

“That wind is calling my name
I won’t wait, or I’ll never get on”





Eventually I tracked down that it was Half Moon by the Portland, Oregon group called Blind Pilot. (Lyrics are here in the comments on that video).  I didn’t know that in April it had been featured on the finale to the TV show, One Tree Hill. There’s also both another studio version showing the whole group, and a duet. Enjoy!

Fear is based on perception and not reality

A magazine article by the aerobatics pilot Patty Wagstaff in the May issue of Plane & Pilot titled "It’s your perception, not always reality, that causes fear" has excellent advice on handling emergencies that also applies to giving presentations. She said:

“Fear is a reaction based on perception, and fear isn't the reaction we want to have when the you-know-what hits the fan. Perception isn't necessarily truth or reality. We perceive events the way we want to see them, and are conditioned and trained to see them a certain way....

Reacting to emergencies with confidence and not fear is about our perception of the event. Are we prepared? Have we practiced?”

Patty discussed the very first time the propeller of her plane stopped turning while she was doing a tailslide. That’s a maneuver where you first point the nose straight up and begin a vertical  climb. Then you ease back on the throttle, so the plane comes to a stop and begins to fall downward, tail first. At that point you need to turn the plane around so you’re in a dive going forward, not backward.

Although she knew theoretically that the propeller could stop, the real event freaked her out so much that she lost half of her initial 4000 foot altitude before she got the engine restarted and regained full control.

A tailslide in a jet plane looks like this:


The image of her plane came from Wikimedia Commons.

How to be more authentically human

Last month CNN’s Starting Point program interviewed James Lipton (of Bravo's Inside the Actor’s Studio) about a video he had posted on the topic of teaching Mitt Romney how to act authentically human.

Both videos contain useful discussions of body language and being comfortable with yourself. Please ignore the tee shirt commercial at the end of the first one. The second video followed an article that appeared online in New York Magazine on May 15th. 

The joy of science - finding out new things

On May 9th the astronomer Phil Plait blogged about having given a brief speech to a group of local students who had participated in a science fair. That post contains his 460 word text. He began as follows:

“I know a place where the Sun never sets.
 
It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day — well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.

I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid....”

and he closed by saying:

“Those places I talked about before? You can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known.

No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
 
Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here.”

Gavin Aung Than paraphrased that speech as a great zen pencils comic, Welcome to Science. (If you’d like a big dose of Richard Feynman, watch the video on The Pleasure of Finding Things Out).

Phil made some dismissive comments about astrologers, psychics, homeopaths, and creationists that may have been inspired by this Tree Lobsters comic. I’ve previously blogged about Phil’s great TEDx Boulder presentation on How to defend earth from asteroids.