Happy Dances and the Contact High

She was a depressed woman in her 50’s, on conventional antidepressants, who I saw in a clinic.  She had none of the “neurovegetative” signs of depression.  That means, she slept well and ate well and her mood was acceptable.  All of the things that we generally measure in antidepressant response were there, so there was really not a lot more for me to do, except to renew the prescription.  I did ask a few questions.

Did she have a purpose in life?  Yes, she had a job in a bookstore, which she enjoyed, and grown children, who had babies of their own, and she loved to play with them, but they lived a bit of a distance away, so she could not play with them as often as she liked.

So I asked her what was the most fun in her life.  She started laughing wildly, and stamping her foot.  I knew this had to be a good answer, and I was ready.  I thought she was going to talk about drugs or sex.  I was really surprised with what she came up with.

“Seeing you.”

Now I do “happy dances” with patients and sometimes we have a sing-along if there are a few around, and I joke with them and I am a really happy person who goes home to True Love every night but I had never heard that one.

“You don’t get it.  You are so much fun.  You are a contact high.”

Well I had never heard of that one.  As soon as she said that I stood up and grabbed her around the shoulders and we did my “happy dances” because she did not have one of her own.  Sometimes my “happy dance” is dancing around like some old Chassidic Jew from my childhood, but to the outside world it looks like something Tevye would do in “Fiddler on the Roof.”  I do this a lot.  So much so that I wonder how many Christians or atheists or other things have any idea they are dancing around like a bunch of Jews.  Once I got an entire clinic waiting room to do this.  I do not think that they had any idea they were dancing Jewish when we all went “Yiy-ty-da-dy-dy” or whatever because Yiddish is so hard to transliterate.

Another “happy dance” I enjoy is the French Can-Can, simplified version.

Although I can occasionally get a man to dance Chassidic, I never get a man to do Can-Can.  We keep it very simple, alternating a straight kick with a bent leg kick, and changing leg every once in a bit.  It is easier to balance if there are more women.  I have had four or five in a clinic waiting room, easily.  Of course, we have to provide our own music.  We somehow manage to reproduce the classic CanCan of Jacques Offenbach, at least minimally, through our laughs.

Dancing is wonderful and joyous and I get patients to dance for many reasons.  Rhythmic movements of the body, to music, are pleasurable in the most basal sense.

“Contact High” is a concept that intrigues me.

Of course I started with Wikipedia.  Obviously what is going on with me and my patients has nothing to do with an actual transfer of drugs; I mean, there is no way I can be breathing out “stale cannabis smoke” — because I do not generate any fresh cannabis smoke.

But I do like the idea that there can be some kind of a psychological transfer of positive state going on.

I am not sure how I ended up delving into song lyrics, but I found most truly new songs recorded by people I had never heard of were dealing with secondary cannabis smoke or something more potent.

I found something I can relate to better in the Beach Boys lyrics to “Kokomo”

“that dreamy look in your eye/give me a tropical contact high”

Well, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet with just a look in the eye.

Then, there is the story of Stanislav Grof, the founder of transpersonal psychology.  Another one of those wildly innovative psychologists who gets to do fascinating things while us psychiatrists are expected to push prescription drugs (ok, so I have already pushed the envelope a bit.).

Well it seems that the good Dr. Grof and his wife were working with someone who was on LSD and without having ingested the substance, they felt as if they had been intoxicated by it.  I don’t think this one is excreted much through breathing, so something likely happened with “suggestion.”  And it is unlikely these people were hysterical or easily influenced.

I believe the truth of the matter to be that this phenomenon is so utterly banal that we do not notice it.  Who has not been sitting in a movie theater and induced into laughter when what was on the screen was not particularly funny, simply because everyone else was laughing?

It may be more evident in a crowd than it is with another individual, but “suggestion” reigns, and may even change brain chemistry.

I think a lot of people do this sort of thing intuitively, without even realizing what is going on.

I remember one time in my life when I was out of my element, and socially detached, and sad.  I lived in Minneapolis at the time.  I started cruising comedy clubs.  I felt great, just being in a room full of people who were laughing.  I decided, however, that I was funnier than most of them and I was actually a stand-up comic for a bit.  The skills I learned then are still extremely useful, and may have something to do with my capacity to give people a “contact high.”

I remember getting the vague notion in some psychology class that people who were “suggestible” made great candidates for hypnosis, but were somehow “weak.”  I believe now that being suggestible can be a great gift.  What a wonderful power this is, to choose joyous feelings and to deliberately determine to assimilate them.

So go for it.  Fill your life with drug-free contact highs.  Embrace them and enjoy them.

Like CanCan lines in the waiting room at the psychiatric clinic.