Jan Wong

Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian who grew up in Montreal speaking English, some French and zero Chinese. In the summer of 1972, while majoring in Asian studies at McGill University, she traveled alone to the People's Republic of China. At 19, she talked her way into a spot at Peking University, becoming the first of two Westerners to study in China during the Cultural Revolution, a tale she recounts in her memoir, Red China Blues, My Long March from Mao to Now. As a foreign correspondent based in Beijing for six years, Jan was an eyewitness to the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. Named one of Time magazines top ten books of 1996, Red China Blues remains banned in China. She is a recipient of the George Polk Award in the U.S. for business reporting, a National Newspaper Award in Canada for foreign reporting, the New England Press Association Newswoman of the Year Award, the Globe and Mail’s Stanley MacDowell Prize for Writing, the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Silver Medal, a National Magazine Silver Award in Canada for column writing and the Daily Bread Food Bank Public Education Award in Toronto, among other honors. Her latest book, Out of the Blue: a Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness, was published on May 5, 2012. Jan Wong's website

Oct 292012
 
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Toxic workplaces inspire (common but costly) "depessive realism".

by Jan Wong

Depressives see their glasses as always half empty, which some would argue is a more accurate and realistic view of the world around them, especially if they toil in a toxic workplace. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggested that depressives have “a keener eye for the truth.” Andrew Solomon describes a study in which depressed people who played a video game for half an hour knew precisely how many monsters they had slaughtered whereas those who weren’t depressed guessed four to six more than they had actually killed.

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