A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica

You can sustain a lot, when you know you will have respite. I&#x27;ve got a weekend off in April, I can make it until then!<p>As folks remark something like a Mars mission may be a life sentence. It will be a different ballgame. It almost seems inevitable that folks will break.<p>A common occurrence on the early pioneer prairies in America was mental health problems. My Dad was 3rd generation in Iowa, and he knew several older folks who&#x27;d lost the plot. They talked exclusively of their past; they didn&#x27;t follow conversations; they only functioned within their small world of the farmstead. They were largely treated normally as far as could be managed. But they had a relatively congenial ecosystem to live within. Won&#x27;t be that way on a Mars colony.

People who had poor mental health outcomes during COVID were mostly extroverted. Introverts actually did better, including myself.<p>Losing your mind comes from the machinery of the brain failing, which is almost always caused by stress in these kinds of scenarios. Emotional stress is the most acute kind of stress. Isolation and unrelenting physical danger are very emotionally stressful. It doesn’t intrinsically create psychosis, it creates stress which might cause psychosis. The human race is filled with stories just as harrowing as a well funded and planned Mars colonization where people made it through. If you disagree you simply haven’t read your history. Life 2000 years ago was unimaginably cruel, let alone one million years ago.<p>Just because people in 2020 mash together stress, depression, psychosis and other things doesn’t mean anything. These mental illnesses have biochemical underpinnings and they aren’t intrinsic aspects of the human experience or doing certain things, like going to Mars.<p>People fetishize the impossibility of things. They also fetishize doom. Global warming has become political not only because of the people who deny it but also because of the people who fetishize the doom and gloom of it. You can recognize these people by talking to them about potential solutions or how to fix it. Invariably they don’t want to think about solutions, think it’s impossible to escape the end of the world and tend to want to turn to some kind of spiritual&#x2F;naturalistic repentance even though it wouldn’t fix anything when you run the numbers. Same thing with Mars. People fetishize the impossibility of it. You can’t possibly go there without going insane. The radiation will be impossible to deal with. The gravity can’t possibly sustain human life.<p>It’s all hyperbole. There’s valid counterpoints to all of it. But it goes in one ear... and out the other.

Future of space explorations for sure. Similar situation portrayed in Ad Astra (2019) where the main hero&#x27;s father have gotten stranded on a space station on the edge of the solar system for many years and went insane.<p>Humans are delicate machines. Gotta know how to keep the monkey happy.

On that topic, I recommend the first season of The Terror.<p>Plot from Wikipedia:<p>&quot;The Terror is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin&#x27;s lost expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. The series&#x27; first season begins with the Royal Navy&#x27;s polar explorer ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror having recently left Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, heading south toward King William Island into uncharted territory, seeking to find and confirm the existence and navigability of the fabled Northwest Passage. The ships are soon frozen and trapped in the ice, and those aboard must survive the harsh weather conditions and each other, while being stalked by an elusive menace.&quot;

In 1893, Fridtjof Nansen took a ship with a 12 men crew to North of East Siberia, purposefully sailed the ship to get stuck in sea ice, and hoped that the ice movement with ocean currents would take them to the North Pole. The ship spent 3 years stuck in ice, but didn&#x27;t quite flow over the North Pole. These people didn&#x27;t go mad.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition</a>

It is funny and slightly dissonant that Roald Amundsen, the greatest polar explorer of all (forgive me Fridtjof) is mentioned in a subordinate clause as &quot;The Belgica’s first mate, a fellow Norwegian named Roald Amundsen&quot;.

I see that H.P. Lovecraft is mentioned but not his work on the topic: &quot;At the Mountains of Madness&quot;. I recently discovered a great adaptation of his book by the Japanese Artist Gou Tanabe. If you are into B&amp;W ink drawings you should really check out Tanabe&#x27;s books.

&gt; Among the first things he said when he rediscovered his voice was that he was going to murder his superior, chief engineer Henri Somers, as soon as he had the chance.<p>One has to wonder what where his thoughts for two weeks ..., probably, for whatever reason thoughts where around time when engineer told him something that he did not like, and it was so minor, he would forget about next day in normal times, without giving any thought what so ever.

A modern version of this is people losing their minds on Twitter. Consumed by anger, paranoia, hysteria, all day, every day.

First<p>&gt;A current theory among social scientists suggests that pibloktoq [a temporary madness found in Inuhuit peoples] was not a congenital malady peculiar to the Inuhuit but rather a severe stress reaction arising from early contact with Western outsiders.<p>Could someone explain this theory to me?<p>secondly, I sincerely doubt that the early expeditions had anything remotely resembling adequate nutrition, besides enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy.<p>I would imagine a very restricted diet combined with not seeing the sun for 6 months would fuck up a lot of people

They merely ventured too close to the forbidden plateau of Leh.

Future of expeditions to Mars?

I wintered over in Antarctica in 2016. Drinking <i>definitely</i> increased during the dark months.

I love these old stories of people who really had a pair of balls.<p>Real women and men show real guts by taking huge chances with their mental state and life in general.<p>Today we sacrifice the same two things but for so much less. It&#x27;s sad.

Some of the people profiled in Werner Herzog&#x27;s Encounters at the End of the World look like they might be suffering at least a little isolation sickness or cabin fever.

A confluence of factors are present in the described episodes of people &#x27;losing their minds&#x27;. The highlighted two were the harsh physical environment and relative social isolation&#x2F;vacuum.<p>The harsh physical environment is, to my understanding, intractable. However, the social environment is less so. How are those headed to Antarctica trained with respect to mental health and &#x27;working with a team&#x27; (e.g. communication) skills?

It doesn&#x27;t have to be Antartica, although that&#x27;s a bit of an extreme example. Plenty of people I know have &quot;lost it&quot;, albeit to a less extreme degree, after just a few years of culture shock, after moving to a different country.<p>Life is hard, and few people have what it takes to survive without the social safety net of everything that is familiar to them.

The symptoms remind me a bit of nitrogen narcosis, which affects scuba divers at deep depths. I have heard it makes people paranoid. One dive master told me about a diver who tore out her regulator and swam frantically towards him, signaling she was out of air. She had a nearly full tank.

I found the Wikipedia article for the first mentioned story quite interesting as well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Belgian_Antarctic_Expedition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Belgian_Antarctic_Expedition</a>

I wonder if digital entertainment (e.g. thousands of 1080p movies in a 10TB HDD) could make being there &quot;bearable&quot;. You don&#x27;t have to enjoy it alone, you have shipmates. Maybe even internet (satellite connection)?

Related video by Joe Scott: Murder at the South Pole<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KtYhEaWi4lk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KtYhEaWi4lk</a>

Obviously it&#x27;s a cubit error from a cosmic ray from which their brain cannot recover. &#x2F;jk

severe corona lockdown risks bringing antartical environment to our neighborhoods. these articles (the one about kuru disease due to misbehaving protein think spike protein) seem to covertly suggest that possibility.

I have thought for awhile that the best space voyagers, or guys whom are going to be isolated, are individuals who already had minor breakdowns when they were younger.<p>That includes so many of us? Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass.<p>I&#x27;m not talking about individuals with serious mental illness like Schizophrenia, or have a genetic lineage of mental illness.<p>I&#x27;m talking people that have survived mild mental illnesses, like dysthymia, and anxiety.<p>People who know the craziness in their heads will go away, and realize the world is imperfect. Realize they are far from perfect. Realize their way might not be the best way.<p>I&#x27;m usually leary of the &quot;perfect&quot; candidates that get these coveted positions.<p>Yes--I&#x27;m leary of the Ph.D types whom sailed through school. The ones with a big egos that feel they feel like they are the best, and claim they were never sick at sea. I think we have all met the type?<p>Put a few of those people in real isolation, and danger, with peers just like themselfs-- seems like a horrid recipe for disaster?<p>(At one time I felt like I controlled my surroundings. A few blown mental gaskets made me a more tolerant person. It did mess with my resume though. I felt the same way right after 911. i felt the FBI should be recruiting intelligent convicts at San Quentin, or wherever, rather than the guy with the 4 year degree who took a good head shot. I changed my tune when I realized the enemy of 911 was nuanced, and not so straight foreward, but I still felt you hire guys whom break societal laws in order to find the bad guys.)

If explorers had shrooms, weed and some way to play music, I think they&#x27;d be good. Unfortunately there is still a &quot;no fun&quot; camp at the head of decision making.