Science Friday - Delta Variant in Kids, Myers-Briggs Personality Test, Suicide in Communities of Color. Aug 20, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Why The Delta Variant Will Make More Kids Sick As cases of the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 continue to spike around the U.S., children are one of the hardest-hit groups. As children under 12 remain ineligible for vaccination, they and other unvaccinated groups are facing the highest rates of infection and hospitalization of the entire pandemic.  Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control announced Wednesday that adults in the general population would be eligible for a third booster shot of their mRNA vaccine beginning eight months after their first dose. While the CDC cited concern about rising breakthrough cases in vaccinated adults, some epidemiologists have objected that the data does not support more vaccines for most already-vaccinated adults. MIT Technology Review’s Amy Nordrum walks through these stories, plus a new human trial for mRNA vaccines against HIV, how historic drought in the West will mean the first-ever limits on farmers’ use of water next year, a promising experiment in fusion energy generation, and why the core of Saturn may be more liquid than solid.      Pandemic Unveils Growing Suicide Crisis For Communities Of Color Rafiah Maxie has been a licensed clinical social worker in the Chicago area for a decade. Throughout that time, she’d viewed suicide as a problem most prevalent among middle-aged white men. Until May 27, 2020. That day, Maxie’s 19-year-old son, Jamal Clay—who loved playing the trumpet and participating in theater, who would help her unload groceries from the car and raise funds for the March of the Dimes—killed himself in their garage. “Now I cannot blink without seeing my son hanging,” said Maxie, who is Black. Clay’s death, along with the suicides of more than 100 other Black residents in Illinois last year, has led locals to call for new prevention efforts focused on Black communities. In 2020, during the pandemic’s first year, suicides among white residents decreased compared with previous years, while they increased among Black residents, according to state data. But this is not a local problem. Nor is it limited to the pandemic. Interviews with a dozen suicide researchers, data collected from states across the country and a review of decades of research revealed that suicide is a growing crisis for communities of color—one that plagued them well before the pandemic and has only been exacerbated since. Overall suicide rates in the U.S. decreased in 2019 and 2020. National and local studies attribute the trend to a drop among white Americans, who make up the majority of suicide deaths. Meanwhile, rates for Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans—though lower than their white peers—continued to climb in many states. (Suicide rates have been consistently high for Native Americans.) “COVID created more transparency regarding what we already knew was happening,” said Sonyia Richardson, a licensed clinical social worker who focuses on serving people of color and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where she researches suicide. When you put the suicide rates of all communities in one bucket, “that bucket says it’s getting better and what we’re doing is working,” she said. “But that’s not the case for communities of color.” Read the full story, produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News.     The Minds Behind The Myers-Briggs Personality Test If you’re one of the 2 million people who take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator every year, perhaps you thought Myers and Briggs are the two psychologists who designed the test. In reality, they were a mother-daughter team who were outsiders to the research world: Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.  They may have been outsiders, but Katharine and Isabel did their homework, and approached the test the way a trained psychologist likely would have. And the product they created—the Myers Briggs Type Indicator—would eventually become the world’s most popular personality test. But how did it all begin? Science Diction is releasing a special three-part series on the rise of the Myers-Briggs. In the first episode: A look at the unlikely origins of the test, going all the way back to the late 1800s when Katharine Briggs turned her living room into a “cosmic laboratory of baby training” and set out to raise the perfect child. Science Diction host Johanna Mayer and reporter Chris Egusa join John Dankosky to tell that story. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski in for Ira Flato. The Delta variant of COVID-19 is continuing to sprint through unvaccinated populations across the U.S. And as the cases surge, younger people make up a big chunk of those new cases and the brunt of the hospitalizations. Many schools have already opened and both Florida and Texas have already reported tens of thousands of students now quarantining because of a COVID exposure. And with vaccines still unavailable to, to under 12s and many states trying to forbid schools to require masks, the pandemic is already the worst it's ever been for children under 18. Here to talk more about this toll is Amy Nordrum, an editor for the MIT Technology Review. She's based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Welcome back to the show, Amy. Hi, John. Thanks. It's great to be here. So there is a lot going on with this

ongoing spike of COVID-19 cases, but as I said, kids are especially having a rough time of it. Maybe you can just fill us in how bad is it right now? Yeah, so every state has seen a rise. in new COVID-19 cases due to the Delta variant. And in states with low vaccination rates, places like Louisiana and Mississippi and Florida, they are now having their worst outbreaks yet of the entire pandemic. And so people younger than 50 who are less likely to be vaccinated than older people are now being hospitalized for COVID-19 at higher rates than ever before. And that's also true of kids because, as you said, there's no vaccine approved for kids under 12. So that's millions of unvaccinated people. Although their overall risk of hospitalization or

death for kids and younger people is still relatively low. It's definitely clear that Delta is hitting these groups much harder than the original coronavirus strain. And schools, of course, are either opened across America or they're just about to open. We have governors in several states, including in Texas and Florida, that are trying to prevent schools from requiring masks. Does it seem possible that we can see even more cases in kids coming up later on this fall once school gets back into session? Absolutely. I mean, that's a major concern. Obviously, you know, if the school year is beginning, or has already begun. Places that have opened without requiring masks,

have already seen some big outbreaks among students and teachers. Thousands of students in some cases needing to quarantine. Eight states have banned schools from requiring students to wear masks, which is only going to make this problem worse. Do we have any sense as to when we could see a vaccine for kids under 12? Well, the vaccines are being tested right now in kids and in babies. And Pfizer, which is already authorized for kids 12 and older, is seeking authorization for kids under 12, maybe as soon as next month.

Moderna is not yet authorized for any teens, but it is also planning to seek authorization for everybody under 18 by the end of this year or possibly early next year. So it will still be a while, but hopefully soon. Now, in the meantime, the CDC said Wednesday that adults in the general population might be able to start getting booster vaccines about eight months after their last doses. Now, the data so far has been pretty glowing on the efficacy of these vaccines in preventing severe illness. So tell us more about why these boosters right now. Yeah, the surgeon general said this is because health officials are starting to see some data that shows the vaccine's ability to protect people against mild and moderate disease is decreasing over time. So there were a couple of studies that this was based on, including one in New York,

that suggested the vaccine's effectiveness went from about 92% to 80% in about two and a half months. And other studies have reported different amounts of change in the vaccine's effectiveness over time, but followed that same downward trend. But this was kind of a controversial statement for the administration to make for two reasons. And one is that the plan to provide boosters hasn't yet been approved by the CDC or the FDA and would need to be approved in order for that to actually happen. And the second reason is that some scientists are saying the call is a bit premature, since the vaccines are still protecting people from the most severe forms of the disease. You know, boosters aren't yet needed for most people. We've also heard from the World Health Organization

that rich nations like the U.S. need to really wait for any booster shots until more people around the world have access to vaccine. So what happened to that guidance? Well, it's still out there. I mean, the World Health Organization has discouraged, you know, rich nations from offering booster shots until more people in poorer countries can have their first shot. And there's still dozens of countries where barely anyone has been vaccinated. So that is a major concern. I mean, the Biden administration has pointed to the many, many doses that the U.S. has donated and sent abroad as an answer to that. But, you know, that guidance hasn't changed from the World Health Organization. So maybe we can move on to a vaccine story that everyone's going to feel pretty good about.

It's an M RNA vaccine for HIV that's getting a clinical trial. This seems like really good news. It is. It's really exciting to see. So Moderna, the same company that has developed one of the COVID-19 vaccines that people have been getting, is also developing MRI-based vaccines for other diseases that might be helped by this new technology. And so it is beginning of a phase one trial for one of its HIV vaccines this week. and has also got other things in the pipeline for Zika, the flu, and a variety of other diseases based on MRNA technology. Interesting.

Moving on, we've been following with some of our state of science partners the historic shortage of water in the southwest, specifically in the Colorado River basin. This region's been in a long drought, and now some of the lakes that are fed by the Colorado River, like Mead and Lake Powell, are at historic lows. How bad has it gotten? It's really bad. On Monday, the U.S. government actually declared a water shortage for the first time ever on the Colorado River at Lake Mead, which is one of the country's biggest reservoirs along with Lake Powell. And they're both only about one-third full right now. So as a result of that water shortage declared on Monday, several states in the southwest, including Arizona and Nevada, are going to have to cut back on how much water they can draw from the river beginning next year. And cutting back on drawing water from the river means everything from drinking water to water that goes into agriculture, to grow crops.

Yeah, farmers will definitely be the ones most affected by these cuts, and the cuts are more severe in Arizona than an elsewhere. So the agricultural sector in Arizona is particularly concerned about what this means for the plants and crops they would have otherwise planted. And I've read a bit about the fact that this region of the U.S. is essentially entering into an era in which these low water levels are just the regular part of life. This is sort of where we are for some time. Is there a sense as to how long this drought period could last? It's hard to say. I mean, I think your instinct is probably right there, and it is a concern. I mean, Arizona's agricultural sector provides a lot of leafy greens and lettuce in the winter for the rest of the country.

So, you know, there could be long-term effects that impact sectors such as that that cause agriculture to have to shift or change in different ways to adapt to this new normal. Now, there's some big energy news this week. I mean, in some ways, it's a maybe small little breakthrough. but it is providing some excitement. A lab is getting closer to nuclear fusion reactions that could be used to generate power. Now, we've been hearing Amy about fusion for a very long time. Are we getting closer to actually generating power from it?

This is a step in that direction. So the U.S. National Ignition Facility in California did get closer than they've ever been before to achieving fusion, this special kind of reaction that could essentially produce limitless renewable energy. So earlier this month, researchers, there used a laser to initiate a reaction that reached 70% of ignition, which is the point at which

the reaction itself would produce more energy than it took to create it. And that's a big jump. That's actually eight times higher than what they'd previously been able to achieve. So eight times higher than what they'd previously been able to achieve. But before we start getting excited about this as the next wave in energy production, maybe you can explain just how far that puts us away from fusion being a viable source of renewable energy? I mean, it's a long ways away is the answer. I mean, first of all, they've only done this once. They will need to repeat this experiment and see if they can do it again.

And even if they can do it in their lab, it's a whole different process to figure out how to actually build a commercial reactor that could sustain this reaction over time and use it to generate energy for homes and businesses. And there are some companies in large international projects working on this. But yeah, it's likely still years, probably decades away. Amy, what do we know about this experiment that caused this fusion reaction? This is really cool. Maybe you can explain what they did.

It's a really complex experiment that will take months to replicate, and it involves shining 192 lasers at a tiny capsule containing two different kinds of hydrogen. The goal is for the reaction to actually create more energy than the laser delivers by causing the nuclei of atoms to combine. And with this experiment, they got about 70% of the way there, which is a big deal, because prior to that, they'd been stuck at around 3% and then got to 10%. So this was a big jump than what they'd achieved previously.

That's a huge jump. I mean, it's not to where they need to be, but to 70% from 3% or 10% is actually something that's pretty remarkable. Yeah, and they've been making some tweaks to the experiment. So one is to the capsule that they use to hold the hydrogen. They have a whole team dedicated just to building that thing, and it's actually made out of artificially grown diamonds that are formed into a certain shape that wouldn't actually,

actually occur in nature. But diamonds can have defects, and that can affect the experiments results. So they've been working on eliminating those these last few years. So I guess now I understand exactly why it takes so long to replicate an experiment like this. This is not easy stuff to put together. Exactly. You could not do it in your backyard or your basement for sure. Now, I want to finish up with a fun story. We, of course, love space stories here. And we've got some fun insights this week into the planet Saturn. Specifically, the gas giant may not have a solid core after all. So how do we know this? Yeah, I mean, the prevailing theory about gas giants for a long time was that they had this rocky solid core at their center. But as Neil Patel wrote for us this

week, there's a new study out that suggests that might not be the case. And researchers from Caltech, who published it actually looked at little ripples in the rings around Saturn and used those to figure out what kind of core would actually cause those ripples to occur. So what they came up with was that Saturn's core isn't solid. It's actually a big sloshy mix of ice. And so some rocks and helium and hydrogen. And the whole thing is much bigger than what scientists would have thought of as the core. So now they're thinking that this might also apply to some of the other gas giants in our solar system like Jupiter and Neptune. So the core is much bigger.

It's sloshier. Stuff's moving around in there. So that's really interesting. It's interesting that this could be what other gas giant planets look like. I do have to ask, though, these ripples that they saw, we hadn't noticed these ripples in the rings of Saturn before? Well, they were actually collected by NASA's Cassini probe, which was the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn and spent more than a decade exploring Saturn and actually ended its mission in 2017 by diving into the planet's atmosphere where it was destroyed. So the data for this isn't necessarily new, but it's the analysis and the modeling to actually figure out what this means for the planet's core that was original here. So if we do find out that the core of these gas giants like Saturn is different, what does this tell us?

This actually seems to be a little bit of a breakthrough in the way we understand how these planets work, these giant planets. That's right. I mean, it could speak to the formation of these planets and how that process came together. You know, there's a kind of structure to this core, even though it's not a hard core. There's still denser ices and rocks and liquids toward the center and lighter stuff like hydrogen and helium gas around that. are to the surface. So the order of those materials and the way that they're mixed might might tell us something about the planet's evolution that we wouldn't have otherwise known. Very cool. That's a good way to end our news roundup. Thanks again, Amy. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, John. Great to be here. Amy Nordrum is an editor for the MIT Technology Review. After our break, the COVID-19 pandemic has deepened many disparities between white Americans and communities of color from pay and housing security to racist attacks. We'll also take a look at mental health. That's coming up next. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. A heads up that our next story is about suicide, and it may be distressing to some listeners. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a lot of cracks in American life, things like pay disparities, housing, and job security, racism. A lot of these realities became a lot more dire, though, over the last year and a half. And alongside this,

another crisis has been bubbling up. Suicide rates in communities of color are rising, especially in black, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Experts say it's not a coincidence that the pandemic has exposed this issue, but the suicide rates were increasing before COVID-19. So how does the country tackle this problem? This crisis is covered in a new report by my guest. Anari Patani covers mental health and substance use for Kaiser Health News. She's based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Anari, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Let's talk first about these statistics that we have for this rise in suicides in communities of color. How much of a rise are we talking about

and how long has this been going on? Nationally, there's data from the CDC that shows that there's been a steady increase in suicide deaths among communities of color since the early to mid 2010s. So there's this study by the National Institute of Mental Health that found between 2014 and 2019, the suicide rate increased 30% for black individuals and 16% for Asian or Pacific Islander individuals. And when you drill down into specific age groups, that data goes back further and is more concerning. So for black teens, from 2001 to 2017, the suicide rate increased 60% for boys and 182% for girls. And what's particularly notable is that the rates continue rising for communities of color, even when they fall for white Americans. So in 2019, the national suicide rate dropped for the first time

in more than a decade. And this was a big deal. But when you, drill down into that data, the drop was driven by a decrease in suicides among white Americans while the rates kept going up for communities of color. And it seems like the same might be true during 2020 the first year of the pandemic. And these age demographics hold true as well. These numbers often skew younger than suicides among white people. Yeah. So for communities of color, the age group that's at highest risk for suicide over most of these years has been adolescents and young adults. And in some cases for black Americans, there's even research showing that suicide rates among kids younger than 13 are going up too.

Versus for white Americans, your highest risk group tends to be middle age and older adults. So for many years, as you've said, suicide rates have been highest among white middle-aged men. Is this something that is changing? Not exactly. So here we get into the nuances a little bit of how we look at the data. So if we're talking about in any single year, who has the highest number of suicide, deaths or highest suicide rate per capita, that is still going to be middle-aged white American men. However, if you look at trends over time, you see that suicides are increasing among young people of color faster. And even in the years that the suicide rate drops for white

Americans, they continue increasing for people of color. So when I'm talking to researchers, you know, certainly they say more needs to be done to address the suicide rate among white Americans, but they're also concerned about this initial increasing trend, and they want to draw attention to communities of color and suicide before we wait for that rate to get up to where it is for white Americans. Let's talk a bit about the possible reasons for why this crisis is happening right now in communities of color. In reporting this story, what are some common threads that you found? Let me start off by saying that suicide is a complex issue, and there's not one single factor that causes it, and it's also really hard to study because

the person who could answer the question as to why is not there. Still, there are some trends that researchers mentioned to me. So over the last decade, there's been a lot of economic instability, and there's tons of research that links loss of jobs or lack of job prospects to suicide risk. There's also been a widening in the racial wealth gap. So we're talking about disproportionately affecting communities of color, with poverty, with unsafe housing conditions, all of these risk factors also linked to suicide.

And then there's also been more public attention on police killings of black and brown people. And there have been many studies out there that show that that affects not just the mental health of the people who know the individual who died or was shot, but the community at large. And so these factors coming together can lead to hopelessness and increased suicide risk. So just to clarify, is there a way to determine the reasons for this rise in suicides? or is this just really speculation for now? So there are studies that can be done where researchers would interview the family and friends of people who died by suicide

and try to really pinpoint for each case, you know, what pieces may have come together that led to the death. But those studies are expensive and they're really time-consuming, so they're not done that often. I know some are being done to look at the suicide deaths in 2020 during the pandemic, but obviously we don't have those results yet.

Well, speaking of that, your story does note that this, trend was happening before the pandemic. Maybe we can talk a bit more about that. Are some of the reasons the same pre-pandemic and now? So researchers are still looking into that, but there definitely seems to be some overlap. During the pandemic, researchers saw disparities in suicide by race and thought, you know, what are the factors that could be at play here? There's the fact that communities of color were disproportionately affected by COVID. They lost loved ones, which causes a lot of grief. They lost jobs, lost housing, faced food insecurity, all of which could have

have contributed to that increased suicide rate. But a lot of these factors were also disproportionately affecting communities of color before the pandemic. And so they are thinking, you know, it could have been those same factors that were affecting the rising rate beforehand too. But really, they need a lot more research to figure out if that's the case for sure. So it's really important to point out here that your story is not about the COVID pandemic causing this rise in suicide amongst people of color. Absolutely. So this is something that has been going on. Some studies will look at it since the 90s. Definitive national data shows it from the mid-2010s. So this is another one of those things where this was already happening. And COVID just put a spotlight on the fact that it was existing.

I want to hear the voices of some of the people that you talk to. And one of the threads that you were pulling in your reporting is people saying to you, you know, we just really don't talk about that. We don't talk about suicide. And I have a clip here from Kathy. Williams, a mom from Durham, North Carolina, who you talked to for your story. Her son, Torian, died by suicide in 1996. And she told you that she didn't know what signs to look for. She only learned afterwards when she looked for information about suicide. And that was when, when the presenter was going over, you know, the signs and symptoms of depression and suicide, I started checking them off. I said, oh, my goodness, I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. Oh, I saw that. I saw that.

And I said that was Torian. It seems as though she's talking about not just not talking about suicide, but not talking a lot about the underlying mental health issues. Maybe you can talk a bit more about Kathy and what she's trying to do for her community. So after Kathy lost her son, Torian, she really channeled that pain into a mission, right? So her mission now is to not let any other parents miss those warning signs because they don't know what to look for. So after her son passed, she listened to these presentations, took mental health trainings, went to conferences, did research, and really wanted to bring that learning back to her community. So she started presenting at her son's high school, at her church in Durham, and telling people, you know, what are the signs to look for in the hopes that no one else misses it. And also in the hopes that, you know, at the time she told me, people thought suicide was a white issue. And in her community, you know, black people didn't talk about suicide. And she was hoping she could get that ball rolling so that no one else would be in the situation that she was in. What other resources are available in some of the communities where you were doing your reporting, though, because Kathy and people like her can only do so much. Absolutely. So over time, a lot of groups have actually sprung up to bring awareness and education on this issue. So there's the national organization.

for people of color against suicide. And this was actually started by a woman named Donna Barnes, who's black, and she lost her son to suicide in 1990, so around the same time as Kathy. There's also the Acoma Project, which focuses on researching and preventing suicide and depression specifically in youth of color. And at the college level, there's the Steve Fund, which is dedicated to mental health concerns for university students of color. And of course, there are a ton more in sort of local areas, but those are some of the

ones that I came across in my reporting. I want to turn to talking specifically about the Asian American community right now. Asian American young adults are the only racial group where suicide is the leading cause of death. Do we know why this is? Such an important question and unfortunately the short answer is, no. We don't know why this is. Despite the fact that the suicide rate is rising among this group and it's really high for adolescents, there is shockingly little data and research on Asian Americans, actually less than 1% of federal research funding goes to any health research, including suicide, focused on that group. So the little that we do know suggests that maybe, you know, the model minority myth, this idea that Asian Americans are smart and successful and

don't need help could impede people from seeking care. But in reality, we need to learn a lot more. Actually, one of the researchers I spoke with compared it to, we used to think that, you know, black Americans are not impacted by suicide, she told me. But then we started funding research into that area and we looked at the data broken apart and we saw that actually suicide among black youth is increasing at a really alarming rate. So what might we find if we actually fund that research into Asian American youth? Now, you just said there's not very much data on this group. Is there any information on how Asian American suicide rates have changed at all during the pandemic? So right now, the CDC has not released national data for,

2020 broken down by race. So we don't know at a national level what's happening. What my colleague and I did is we did reach out to individual states and ask for their preliminary data on suicides by race and ethnicity. And again, not all of them have it or we'll share it, but some did. And it suggests that in certain states there is an uptake in suicide deaths among Asian Americans as well as other communities of color. Yeah. And that's a really important note. All states don't keep this data. All states don't keep this data the same way if they do. It's very hard to parse this out at a national level. Yeah, absolutely. My colleague and I reached out to all 50 states and the territories and less than half got back to us with that information. As we talk about the strategies and the different

resources that people could use, did you find the different resources were needed depending on the community or that the same strategies really do work for everybody? So I spoke with maybe a dozen or so suicide researchers for this story, and pretty much all of them agreed across the board that the resources need to be tailored to the community that you're trying to reach. And that doesn't mean they have to be drastically different, but the idea is to take something like cognitive behavioral therapy that you know works in one community and just make some small changes so that it's relevant and appropriate for the people you want to use it with. So actually, one of the people I spoke with was Sonia Richardson. She's a social worker in North Carolina

who works with people of color, and she researches suicide. I think this clip from her explains it pretty well. If I want to culturally adapt an intervention for black youth, then I'm going to meet with black youth in their community, and their family, and perhaps some stakeholders, hear from them, okay, how can we take this model and make it work for you? What do we need to do differently? Who needs to be at the table?

When we say that it's you and your family, who is the family? Is it the aunts? Is it the grandmother? Are those the other people that we need to the table? at the table and not just your parents. And so it's really getting the collective voice of the community and the people that are targeted by the intervention, getting their input in it, and then culturally adapting that intervention to where it works for that population.

That's Sonia Richardson, a social worker in North Carolina. She works with people of color and researches suicide. We're talking with Aneripatani. She's a reporter for Kaiser Health News who's just written a big report about this issue. I'm John Dankoski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. A Nairie, a few years back, we heard a lot about deaths of despair here in the U.S., deaths from suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol, that were really tied to economics. Do you see some similarities between that crisis and this one in communities of color?

Yes, this parallel was actually brought up by a lot of the researchers and the families that I spoke with. I think we're starting to realize that suicide is not just driven by psychiatric or mental illness factors. It has a lot to do with our environments, with economic opportunities, systemic barriers, things that make communities feel hopeless about their future. And that's sort of the conversation we had with deaths of despair a few years ago, which largely focused on white rural Americans. But a lot of those same factors apply in the conversation you and I are currently having about communities of color. I want to play another clip here from a Tierra Alvarez. She's a researcher and psychologist at Mass General Hospital. She studies suicides

among Hispanic and immigrant populations. And she wants to see a shift in how we think of responsibility in suicide. Mental health providers are doing incredible work during COVID. But we can't have the assumption that, you know, increased mental health need just means more reliance on mental health providers. It can't be the only thing that we do. And infusing mental health, you know, support and infusing social support, the economic support, you know, the structural support that families need to thrive is going to be critical to supporting the mental health of entire communities. An area is someone who covers this issue so closely. I'm wondering what you take away from what

she just said. Do you think that some of the systems that she's talking about here will be in place in the future? I don't know if it will happen or those systems will be in place because these are, when we're talking about systemic solutions, that means a lot of moving factors, a lot of people, organizations that have to get on board. But it certainly seems like there's evidence to suggest that we should consider moving that direction. So much research on the rise in suicide rate for communities of color points to these issues like economics, housing, systemic racism, and those just can't be addressed in one-on-one therapy. Of course, mental health services are important, but like Kiera points out, there are a lot of other things that we could do

that could be affecting the suicide rate at a population level. What else are you following closely in terms of mental health in America right now as this COVID pandemic continues? So I'm certainly interested in the national suicide data by race, one that comes out from the CDC later this year to see, you know, on a national level, are we seeing those disparities continue through 2020? I'm also paying attention. I think like a lot of people to children, adolescents, and college students, these groups that were already at high risk in a lot of cases and, you know, have dealt with a lot of upheaval over the past year, how are they doing and what are the long-term consequences there? And I think largely, I'm curious to

see if the pandemic shifts how we talk about some of these mental health issues, suicide. Is it enough to highlight these disparities that existed before the pandemic, but is it enough to get attention on them now to do something? Is it enough to motivate us to think about systemic solutions to suicide and not just mental health services as a silo? I'm not sure if it will be, but I'm really interested to see. Anari-Patani covers mental health and substance use for Kaiser Health News. She's based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the conversation. Kaiser Health News, KHN, and Science Friday have partnered to bring you this story. You can read Aneris full report at Science Friday.com. And if you or someone you know is in

crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Or you can text home, that's H-O-M-E, to the crisis text line at 741-741. When we come back, we're going to be talking about the strange history of the Myers-Briggs personality test, which was, designed not by psychologists, but by a mother-daughter team of outsiders. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. You ever take the Myers-Briggs type indicator? You know, the famous personality test. You answer test questions and then get sorted into one of 16 personality types. Now, I just took the test, and I got the four-letter result, ENFP, which supposedly means that I'm an outgoing, open-hearted, free-es-eastern,

spirit. Now, you might assume that Myers and Briggs were psychologists, but they were actually a mother-daughter team who were complete outsiders to the world of psychology. Our podcast Science Diction is releasing a three-part series on the invention of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Here to tell us more is Johanna Mayer, host of Science Diction, and Chris Agusa, a reporter who co-produced this episode. Hello there, Johanna and Chris. Hi, John. Hey. So before we go any further, I need to ask, what are your Myers-Briggs types? Well, I tend to get a different type every single time that I take the test. But I think most recently I got INFJ, which supposedly means I'm a little private, a little idealistic.

Nice. Very good. How about you, Chris? Yeah, so I'm an INFP, which apparently means I'm a little bit more spontaneous than Johanna and more open to new experiences. It takes all types, I suppose. So the Myers-Briggs is the most popular personality test in the world, but maybe you could remind me of exactly how it works. Yeah, sure. So you start by answering dozens of questions. Questions like, when you go somewhere for the day, would you rather, A, plan on what you will do and when, or B, just go? And when you're finished, you get sorted into one of 16 personality types.

And those types are made up of four different dimensions. introvert versus extrovert, sensing versus intuitive, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving. All right. So I get how this is really fun, and it's irresistible to talk about. But you've already said that it wasn't actually developed by psychologists. So, I mean, who exactly were Myers and Briggs anyway? Yeah.

So it was Catherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs-Myers. And they were too wildly ambitious and totally committed people, but that is right. They were not trained psychologists. They were really outsiders to the research world. I mean, but I do want to say they did do their homework, and they approached this a lot like a psychology researcher really might have. And Isabel, the daughter, eventually teamed up with a publishing firm that just marketed the heck out of this test.

And the personality test that they developed, it is everywhere. I mean, the Myersburgs is used at Fortune 500 companies. People put it in their dating profiles. It's just in all sorts of places. And people have opinions about it. Like we talked with a psychologist who could just not believe how much faith people have in this test. This is Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern. I know a number of people who swear by the Myers-Ber.

Briggs. These are smart people. I almost got into a fist bite with a guy one night when he just insisted that the Myers-Briggs is all truth and goodness. And I said, well, there's no scientific validity. And then on the other hand, we talked to people who say the Myers-Briggs completely transformed their lives for the better, like Peter Geyer, who is a Myers-Briggs practitioner. That was the first time anybody had ever told me it was good to be me. I was 36, by the way. So it's a long time to wait before somebody tells you it's good to be you. So over the next three weeks, in this special series on science diction, we're exploring the stories of Myers and Briggs,

who, for better or worse, have hugely impacted our modern ideas about personality. Chapter one of our series starts in the late 1800s with the woman who laid the foundation for all of this. Catherine Cook went to college when she was just 14, graduated first in her class and married the guy that graduated second. A certain Lyman Briggs. Lyman went on to a PhD program in physics, but this is the late 1800s, and Catherine was stuck. There is never any expectation that she will do anything other than be his wife

and become the mother of his children. Mervais Emery again, whose book The Personality Brokers is all about the Myers-Briggs type indicator. And she has three children, two of whom die in very early infancy, and Isabel is the only one who survives. And she has what she describes at that moment as a crisis of faith. And she thinks, if I only have this one child and if my entire life has to be determined by what I do with her as a mother, then I need to do something extraordinary

and I need to do something that is helpful to other people. So Catherine made a decision. She was going to professionalize motherhood. She would tackle it with the same ambition that her husband applied in his physics lab. And by God, she was going to raise the most well-behaved, curious, exceptional child imaginable. All she needed was a laboratory and a tough subject. So Catherine took over a section of her house and established what she called the Cosmicons. laboratory of baby training, aka the living room.

And her test subject, the baby to be trained, was Isabelle. It's a whimsical name, the cosmic laboratory of baby training. But it was serious business. Isabel was still just a toddler, but Catherine ran daily obedience drills with her and diligently recorded the results in a research diary. There were no-no drills. Where she puts Isabelle's hand close to something that she's not supposed to touch like a, like a candle. And she says, no, no every time her daughter tries to

touch it. And just stay drills. Which is Isabelle is supposed to walk just close enough to something to be able to observe it, but not any closer than that. So when Isabel does well on these drills, she's rewarded with stories. Yeah, Isabelle had a pretty intense childhood. And whether or not it was her mother's training, Isabel did turn out to be an exceptional child. She was one of those kids who was good at everything, from piano to metalworking. She was reading novels at age five. A neighbor once warned Catherine that Isabel would die of brain fever if she didn't cool it. Soon, other mothers noticed how well-behaved Isabel was, so Catherine opened up the cosmic laboratory of baby training to other neighborhood kids, from eight-year-old Jane to six-month-old Louis.

And Catherine didn't just train these kids. She studied them. She wanted to know exactly who they were. So each month, Catherine sent parents a questionnaire about their children, their behavior, and their personality. Her goal wasn't to know each child's soul, like in a modern, we're all beautiful flowers with unique needs and dreams kind of way. Catherine believed that each person had a duty to fulfill, a service to society. whether it was entertaining people on the stage, building homes, healing the sick, everyone had a role to play. And if we knew what type of person they were, we'd raise them right. Slot them into the right box.

Catherine started writing a popular column on parenting, kind of like a precursor to celebrity mommy bloggers. Except, her methods would not go over so well today. She once told another mother that spanking is medicine. And her articles had some very questionable titles. Like, she knew a woman whose daughter, Mary, had failed the first grade. And eventually, Mary made it into one of Catherine's articles, titled Ordinary Theodore and Stupid Mary. Things were going well for Catherine. She'd professionalized motherhood, cranked out a star child, and dispensed parenting advice to mothers across the nation.

And then, Isabel left. off to college. And Catherine? Bereft. Like her life's work had just up and vanished. Which it kind of had. She fell into a deep depression.

And then she had a dream. She told Isabel about it later. It was about Carl Jung, the Swiss analytical psychologist. He'd recently published what would become one of his most influential books, psychological types.

And in Catherine's dream, Young showed up at her house. He cut out paper dolls with her children and rode away on a giant horse. It was a weird dream, but Catherine took it as a calling. When she woke up, she took all of her own notes and burned them in the living room. She didn't need them anymore. From then on, she would turn her full attention to life as Young's disciple. Catherine was totally taken with Young's theory of personality and his words, introvert and extrovert, which he defined as whether you turned your psychic energy inward or outward. And sensation versus intuition. When making decisions,

do you pay more attention to what's happening in the physical world around you, or do you trust your gut? And this just clicked for Catherine. She took Young's language and in 1926 cobbled together a little grid with different possible personality combinations. It was the first real blueprint of what would become the Myers-Briggs. You know how people can get fixated on one idea, and it just becomes their lens for everything? Like, it could be evolution or dialectical materialism or the Illuminati, varying degrees of validity, of course, but this one idea just explains everything for them. For me, it's always capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, capitalism.

Why did my sink clog? Capitalism. Why is my cat ignoring me? Capitalism. Well, Catherine's universal theory of everything was that personality came in types, and she used type to explain almost everyone's behavior. This urge to put people in personality boxes,

it isn't unique to Catherine. The ancient Greeks had a theory with just four boxes. A person could be, like, pragmatic, caloric, melancholic, or a sanguine type, depending on the balance of fluids in your body. And we've come up with plenty of other personality sorting schemes. Zodiac signs, Harry Potter houses, sex in the city characters, every single BuzzFeed quiz. But back in the 20s, Catherine had caught on to a few things that made her system especially appealing. First, it was simple enough that anyone could understand it, but the Jungian language gave it a sheen of authority and rigor.

But more than that, Catherine's types let people feel unique and seen. The ancient Greeks might tell you you're an angry choleric or a depressive melancholic. Psychologist might say you're neurotic or antisocial. But for the most part, Catherine's system was reassuringly positive. If you're an extroverted, intuitive type, it means you're an explorer, an inventor, keen-minded. If you're an introverted feeling type, you might be a little quiet and reserved, but that's because you're not hung up on impressing other people. Instead of diagnosing our differences, Catherine's system seemed to affirm them. In her world, everyone had a role to play, and her type system was the gateway to discovering it.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and you're listening to an episode of our podcast, Science Diction. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. As utopian as that sounds, this line of thinking also had a dark side. When I was reading her parenting advice columns, one thing that struck me was how closely they mirrored some of the language of eugenic thought. She basically believed that one thing that personality assessment could be used, for was to identify intellectually strong members of society versus intellectually weaker members of society. For Catherine, it was all about optimizing society, ushering people into their ideal roles,

and thereby advancing society as a whole. She called for the unique treatment of different types of people. Essentially life plans that would allow the strong to rise to the top, and that would allow the weak either to be sort of brought up to levels of mediocrity or in some cases simply called off. And she's not specific about what that means. But there certainly is the sense in her writing that if you identify children who are weaker than others, it doesn't make as much sense to give resources to them as it does to give resources

to stronger members of society. It is worth noting that this was pre-World War II, and eugenic thought was somewhat mainstream at the time. But years later, Isabel would inherit some of these ideas, and some still see echoes of them in the indicator today. In 1935, Catherine finally closed her cosmic laboratory of baby training for good. And the next year, at last, she got a chance to meet the man she called her personal god, Carl Jung. She'd actually been writing him letters for years, and sometimes he'd write back.

And now he'd be in the United States for a conference and agreed to squeeze Catherine in for a meeting. She dragged Isabel to her meeting, maybe out of nerves, maybe to share this monumental moment with her daughter, who is now nearly 40 years old. But Isabel was unimpressed. She later claimed she didn't even listen to the conversation between her mother and Jung. But for Catherine, the day was transformative. It was just a quick appointment in Young's hotel room. Catherine told him how she'd burned her own writing after reading his. And he was kind to her.

Their relationship as occasional pen pals had become strained in recent years. He'd been terse with her over what he saw as meddling in other people's affairs, and once expressed irritation that she wasn't using enough postage on her letters, leaving him to pay the difference. But at this meeting, Young encouraged her. He told her that it was a mistake to burn her notes and that she could have made a real contribution. And then, before they parted,

Catherine offered him what she could to support his great work. Money. She handed him a check for $25, what would be about $500 today. She said she wished it could be more. That was the first episode in a new three-part series from Science Diction on the Myers-Briggs' type indicator. So, Johanna, what's coming up in chapters two and three? So it turns out that

Catherine had way more to offer the world than $25. So next week, we're going to pick up the story with Isabel, who picked up her mother's work and really started to shape the Myers-Briggs into not just a personality test, but the personality test. And then in chapter three, we're going to get into the big question. Does it actually work or is it all just junk? I'm looking forward to this. You can hear all of these episodes on Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts. Johanna Mayer and Chris Agusa, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Charles Bergquist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Emily Zhang. BJ Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcasts, or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. By the way, did you know that today is National Radio Day? Yeah, if you love radio as much as we do here, it's a great day to support your favorite program and your favorite radio station with a donation. Thanks. And this week on the SciFri Vox Pop app, we want to know your questions about solar power. Are you ready to get off the grid and just get your own solar panels? Or maybe you want to know just how the shift from fossil fuel energy works.

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