Pop quiz. Read this list of items and tell me at what point you decide that whatever does this to you is something you don’t want to have anything to do with.

• Agitation
• Depression
• Suicidal thoughts
• Suicidal actions
• Anxiety
• Panic
• Aggression
• Anger
• Mania
• Abnormal sensations
• Hallucinations
• Paranoia
• Confusion

That’s it. At least for now. The drug in question is new so doubtless more side effects will pop up as more and more people take it.

So what is this magical medication?

Kill or cure

It’s called Chantix and it’s supposed to help people quit smoking.

Now, we all know that smoking is bad for you. More than bad really. Fatal. It can destroy your lungs, cause cancer, increase your risk of heart disease and stroke, make your hair/clothes/breath/house stink and generally screw up your life. But is this really a much better option? A drug that could kill you faster than the stuff it’s supposed to cure?

You have to wonder what the scientists were thinking as they studied the results of their research. Obviously the fact that Chantix might help some people quit smoking goes in the “plus” column. But then as you start to look at the increasingly long and bleak “minus” column you have to think that at some point someone might have said “Er, chaps, maybe this isn’t such a good drug to be offering people?”

So, at what point did someone from the corporate head office stick his head in and say “Look ignore that stuff. We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this drug and by god we’re going to get some of it back.”

I’m sure the conversation was never quite that pointed or direct, or even honest, but the basic gist of it is the same. We have this drug, we’ve spent a lot of money on it, we need to make some of that cash back.

So now the question is how do you persuade someone, anyone, that this could be the drug that finally helps them quit ciggies? You play the guilt game. You create an ad showing kids and a mom who wants to stop and this is the drug that will help her do it – for the sake of her family.

Selfless. Sacrifice.

Suicide. Oh, sorry, did I mention that’s a possibility

And agression too.

So, not only is this a drug that could lead you to kill yourself to stop you killing yourself it could also lead you to kill me.

Here’s what the warning label on Chantix says: If you, your family, or caregiver notice agitation, hostility, depression, or changes in behavior, thinking, or mood that are not typical for you, or you develop suicidal thoughts or actions, anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion, stop taking CHANTIX and call your doctor right away.

My advice.

Keep smoking. It’s safer for all of us.

There’s a fellow I see in my local coffee shop several times a week. He’s not particularly tall but he’s powerfully built, he has a long braid that runs halfway down his back and he has a flamboyant goatee that gives him the look of a character from a Dumas novel about the Three Musketeers. He has a few visible tattoos and I suspect underneath his long-sleeved shirts he has a few more.

Jimmy looks like he can handle himself and if you were to meet him in a dark alleyway you’d probably be nervous he was about to handle you.  But you would be wrong. He looks like he should ride a Harley Davidson motorcycle, instead he rides the bus. He looks like he could be mean, hard-talking dude who has a pitbull, or three, guarding his house. Instead he’s soft spoken, sweet, and has a chihuahua.

He’s someone you can’t judge based on first, or even second, impressions.

“Blessed”

Jimmy often greets you by asking “What’s the good word”. The other day I asked him what his good word is. He said “blessed”. And that’s how he sounds when you talk to him. He feels “blessed” to have good health. “Blessed” to have not just work but a job he loves. “Blessed” to be able to help others.

Talking to Jimmy you can’t help but feel “blessed” to know someone like him. He works in one of the poorest parts of San Francisco, as an outreach worker to people who have not just fallen on hard times but tumbled from a great height. Many of those in the Tenderloin have drug, alcohol and mental health problems. They live in a rough neighborhood where there are more dive bars and liquor stores than any other kind of shop, and where the smell of urine rises out of the alleyways day and night.

Don’t judge

Yet you get a sense that Jimmy doesn’t judge the people he works with. Maybe he knows their stories and what led them there. Maybe he has a sense of how close we all come to ending up there at some point or another in our lives. Whatever the reason, there is a gentleness to him that helps remind me that you cannot get a sense of the person merely by the way they look.

It’s a good reminder in a City where the divides between the haves and have-nots are so great. Where the rich still live in opulent mansions or elegant apartment buildings with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, and where the poor live on the streets or in housing projects with a view of abandoned shipyards and run down tenements.

Hidden qualities

It’s a reminder that the people you see walking down the street, who look well-dressed and comfortable may actually be in great physical or emotional pain and not show it. It’s a reminder that someone who seems happy may be depressed and hiding it. That someone who has worn clothes, thread bare shoes and a less-than-well-groomed look might actually be one of the kindest, most thoughtful and well balanced people you’ll ever meet.

It’s a reminder that we are surrounded by smart, thoughtful, kind, sweet, generous and amazing people. But we can’t tell who they are just by looking. We have to open our hearts, our eyes, and our mouths and get to know them. Maybe, if we are fortunate, we’ll find that we are one of those people too.

One of the hottest concepts in health in recent years has been the idea of ‘mind-body’ medicine. Usually it refers to the ability of the brain to influence the health of the body, tapping into the power of thoughts and emotions to influence our physical health. For instance studies have shown that meditation can help lower blood pressure, reduce the severity of irritable bowel syndrome, even lower the risk of cancer.

But there’s also an increasing body (pun intended) of evidence that shows that the mind-body connection can also work the other way, body-mind, that the physical activities of the body can influence how the brain feels and how healthy both the brain and the body is.

One of the more unusual, and fun, methods of body-mind medicine is laughter yoga where the simple act of pretending to laugh can boost the health of both the body and the brain. When you practice laughter yoga you mimic the physical act of laughing. It sounds silly I know, but practitioners say by pretending to laugh you often end up laughing long and hard, and even if you don’t the sheer physical act of ‘laughing’ has powerful physical, emotional and mental health benefits.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KIYhP-NisI

They say laughter boosts the immune system, which helps you fight disease, it also reduces how much cortisol is circulating through your body (cortisol is the so-called ‘fight or flight hormone produced when you are severely stressed such as being attacked by a pterodactyl - which doesn’t happen too often these days - or watching a Glenn Beck rant, which happens far too often for anyone’s health) and that in turn can reduce how much stress your body is subjected to on a daily basis.

What a cool idea eh! Just by laughing you are doing something good for your body, and your brain, because laughter yoga also helps reduce the likelihood of depression. It’s almost as if this idea is flipping science on its head and instead of thinking that we have to get the brain healthy for us to have a healthy body, we are going the opposite direction, saying to have a healthy brain we first need to get our body into healthy mode.

Think about it. Instead of going through years of talk therapy, psychotherapy, counseling and/or medication - or all of them - you could achieve the same by just laughing every day.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to see  your family doctor and at the end of the exam have them say ‘take two jokes and call me in the morning”. We might actually look forward to going to the doctor. Better still, we might not have to go at all.

A vital part of being healthy is not just having a strong, fit body, you also need to have a strong, tough mind, one capable of withstanding tough times and maintaining a sense of balance and perspective. Building a tough body takes time and a lot of hard work. Building a tough mind is easy. Just support the England football (soccer) team.

Another day, another defeat for England's World Cup team

When you are exercising muscles you develop strength by stressing the muscle; as it recovers the muscle adds extra fibres to get bigger and stronger. It is the stressing of the muscle that helps build it up. It is the same with mental toughness. You need to stress the brain, to go through tough times, endure hardships and adversity to be able to develop the inner strength you need for god mental health.

Now no one in their right mind – and this is all about creating a right mind – would deliberately put themself through pain and suffering and anguish even if the end result was a healthier, more durable mind. But the good news is you don’t have to work hard to get that. It all comes naturally to supporters of the England football team.

Every World Cup that comes around the England team – if they even qualify – go in to the competition confident of their chances to win the whole thing. It’s not surprising really. The English invented the game, the English Premier League is the best in the world, and English teams often dominate European competitions. The problem is, many of the best players on those teams are not English and the best English players have consistently shown they are not good enough when faced by the best of the rest of the world.

End Result; Heartbreak

Every time English fans go into a World Cup game thinking ‘this time it will be different’. By the time the referee blows the whistle for the end of the match they have come to the sad realization that it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Defeat. Pain. Frustration.

On the bright side that constant sense of frustration helps you develop the mental equivalent of a tough hide and that can be really useful in all walks of life.

Tough Times Breed Tough People

A few years ago a friend of mine was doing an in-depth series of studies on mental health in South East Asia as part of a Fellowship he won with the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism program. His Fellowship coincided with the 2004 tragic tsunami that killed an estimated quarter of a million people. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami there was lots of speculation that there would be tremendous levels of mental health problems in the months and years to come with people suffering from the equivalent of post traumatic stress disorder.

Village destroyed by tsunami

Several months after the tsunami Greg traveled to Thailand to see what kind of impact the event had on the mental health of people living in the hardest hit areas. To everyone’s surprise there wasn’t that much evidence to suggest people were suffering at dramatically higher levels than usual. It turns out that people in those communities devastated by the tsunami already had such a tough life that they were better able to cope with the tragedy. It’s not that they were emotionally unaffected by the loss of so many friends and family, it’s just that the day-to-day hardships of their lives had prepared them to endure something that would have left most of us a wreck.

An Easier Route To Toughness

The vast majority of people in the US, Europe and other developed countries don’t have any such hardships on a regular basis to toughen us up so we have to find other ways.

English fans have a cross to bear

That’s why supporting England is so useful. It will guarantee you heartbreak on almost every occasion and leave you better equipped for anything life can throw at you.

But just in case England one day surprises me and does win something I’ve taken out extra insurance. Since moving to San Francisco I have supported the Giants baseball team. They haven’t won the World Series since 1954. And while England only disappoint every four years, the Giants do so every year. It’s like having a refresher course every summer.

So even if England let me down by winning one day, I know my faithful Giants will take up the slack and keep me mentally strong.

I love Shirley, but sometimes she does things that are not just rotten, they pretty much amount to cruel and unusual punishment. She is always singing or humming songs. Sometimes it’s a wonderful classic, but sometimes it’s a trite commercial that she grew up listening to. And sometimes it’s something as awful as a Captain and Tennille song (and if you don’t know who they are think yourself fortunate).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEh7_Ez9TfA

On those days I end up walking around with that darn song stuck in my head, reverberating endlessly. “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat land.” What the hell does that mean anyway.

Now she’s gone one worse. She recently gave me a book called “One Minute Brainteasers“. It’s a collection of puzzles and problems to test your IQ. It’s like crack cocaine for the brain. Once you start it’s hard to put it down. And even if you do, the teasers that you weren’t able to solve keep running through your brain every day. It drives you crazy.

For instance, there’s one section that has sentences with a blank in them and you have to find a food word to fill in the gap. But the catch is the food word ends up as a bad pun. For instance the sentence “Is — the list of the top ten Italian cities” is completed by putting in the food word ‘venison’. So when you say it out loud it sounds like “Is Venice On (geddit) the list etc”. Nasty eh!

That’s what I’ve been going through for weeks now since she gave me the book. It is supposed to be good for your brain but it’s driving me mad.

I mean, check out these sentences and see if you can come up with food words that complete them. Just to put you out of your misery the answers are at the bottom of the page.

1) The witness saw the —- up to the victim and stab him

2) The dog tried to —- his bone

3) Her Grandparents always used to give up meat from —- Easter Sunday

4) Even though Tom Hanks often acts like a —— Ryan always enjoys co-starring with him

5) If Rocky Balboa saw Alice B. Toklas’s significant other he’d probably yell “——-”

ANSWERS

1 - Mango (man go)

2 - Berry (bury)

3 - Lentil (Lent till)

4 - Nutmeg (nut meg)

5 - Yogurt (“Yo, Gert!”