How gluttonous civic officials made room for dessert
I very much enjoyed Linda Geddes’ article on the vagus nerve (The key to depression, obesity, alcoholism – and more? Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists, 23 August). It is, as she says, a nerve of marvellously diverse function, as we’ve known for some time. The auricular branch of the vagus, which, as Geddes notes, innervates the ear, used to be known as the alderman’s nerve. Apparently, civic officials, overstuffed at state banquets yet still desiring dessert, were known to squirt cold water into an ear in the hope of stimulating gastric emptying, and making space for more.
In my day, junior doctors were warned against syringing the ears of elderly patients with cold water for fear of stopping their hearts. But now a digital device attaches to your ear rather than cold water. Progress indeed.
Prof Jack Price
Struggle for support
In New Zealand, police attend a family harm episode every three minutes. In the year ending June 2022, 175,573 family harm investigations were recorded, but the majority of incidents go unreported. Māori women are more likely to be affected by family and sexual violence than any other ethnicity, with nearly 50% experiencing partner abuse in their lifetime.
In April, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child identified “serious concern about the persistent rates of abuse and neglect of, and violence against, children” in New Zealand, and noted a lack of services available to children who have suffered violence, abuse and trauma. At the same time, vitality-massagetherapy.com the country’s suicide rate for those aged 15-19 was reported to be the highest of 41 OECD/EU countries, with suicide rates significantly higher for Māori men.
On the innerBoy app, users receive support from Taimalelagi Mataio Faafetai (Matt) Brown, who with his wife, Sarah, founded the program. More than 36,000 men signed up within the first hour of its launch earlier this year. Last month, its Instagram page reached close to 450,000 users.
Matt and Sarah Brown have worked in domestic violence prevention for a decade, and founded the anti-violence movement She Is Not Your Rehab. The couple begandeveloping the innerBoy app in 2020, as New Zealand faced long lockdowns during the Covid pandemic. Rates of domestic violence rose, with many left without support groups and resources needed to help them. During a television interview about domestic violence during lockdown, Brown invited those who were struggling to contact him for support around dealing with their anger.
“Thousands of men wrote,” Sarah says. “Matt was emailing back, and on FaceTime, Zoom, until 3am and I’d say, this is not sustainable, but clearly there’s a huge problem, and why is there nothing online? All we found were dated anger management programs. We don’t need people to manage their anger, we need people to look beneath their anger and see what the real emotion is.”
The innerBoy app asks users to sign up for 30 minutes a day for a 30-day program that provides prompts, questions and activities for users. It includes asking users how they feel, and to reflect on life experiences and how they survived them. The free app reflects an increase of online resources, including In Your Hands, a service finder tool released alongside the government’s Te Aorerekura strategy, and which also provides stories from those with violence in their past who have sought to change their behaviour.