August 2025 Shell Exchange

Welcome to the August 2025 Shell Exchange!

Midway through each month, I drop a list of recommended reads. I try to feature winning hermit crab essays when possible (🦀). But those charming crabbies aren’t always easy to find. So I also make it a point to share pieces on Invisible Illness.

If you come across an essay or article I haven’t mentioned that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.

1. “Marty Makary’s Many Blind Spots about Menopause Hormone Therapy” by Dr. Jen Gunter on The Vajenda

“The breast cancer results of the WHI are Makary’s ‘Kool-Aid.’ He appears to assert that the WHI researchers are themselves unaware that their study doesn’t show that MHT is associated with breast cancer and that everyone has been bamboozled by a ‘Jedi mind trick.’ This implies that almost every author on every WHI study (except a whistleblower or two) and almost every doctor and journal that has published outcome data for the WHI, missed a key statistical issue that that Makary and a few good men and woman caught. No really.”

2. “My Body Went Through a Massive Change in My 40s. I Didn’t Know What Had Really Happened Until Much Later” by Heather Sweeney from HuffPost Personal

“Unlike mine, Emily’s hysterectomy included the removal of her ovaries, so menopause jump-started for her immediately following the surgery. I explained to her that, while my doctor deemed my ovaries healthy and left them where they were, I had discovered a year earlier through hormone testing that I was postmenopausal at age 47.”

3. “Joy in Hard Times: Celebrating Disability Pride” by Julia Metraux from Mother Jones

“Hope is there because the systems aren’t as entrenched. Humanity doesn’t live on the moon yet. Humanity doesn’t live on Mars. Humanity doesn’t permanently live in space. There’s still hope that we can change the future.”

4. “The Ugly Laws, Institutionalization, and the Latest Executive Order” by Rebecca Upton from Disability, Chronic Illness, & Culture

“And now, as of yesterday, we have Trump's executive order to ‘end crime and disorder on America's streets.’ Much like the Ugly Laws, it explicitly targets homeless people, people struggling with addiction, and disabled people (in this case, mentally ill people). Three extremely vulnerable groups of people. If states follow this order, and many of them likely will, it's going to further criminalize homelessness and mental illness (because, to be clear, both were already criminalized) and defund life-saving harm reduction programs.”

5. “I Was Horrified By What a Teacher Asked My Daughter To Do. His Response to Me Was Just as Disturbing” by Joy Nicholas from HuffPost Personal

“When I was her exact same age I was admitted to a hospital for anorexia nervosa. My weight was dangerously low after a series of traumatic circumstances left me reeling, grappling for a sense of control in my life, and finding that control in what I ate. Or rather, didn’t eat.”

6. “‘We did not want to take this guy’: Abuse rates higher at nursing homes with more mental illness” by Elisabth Gawthrop from STLPR

“Nursing homes have long housed people with physical infirmities, but they have also become a home for hundreds of thousands of people with mental illnesses. In some nursing homes, upward of 90% of residents have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychotic disorder.”

7. “Health care organizations screening for depression are skipping a critical question” by Kyle Fitzpatrick, Geoffrey Engel, and J. Wesley Boyd from STAT

“So instead of worrying about legal liability if health care organizations ask the last question on the PHQ-9, perhaps the real liability lies in not assessing potential suicidality, because failure to treat an at-risk patient is the most common reason psychiatrists are sued.”

8. “The Cruelty of Progressive Eugenics” by Rebecca Upton from Disability, Chronic Illness, & Culture

“A lot of people have said in regards to the Sydney Sweeney ad that we should just make fun of her and others on the right, and I don't entirely disagree but it becomes a problem when a lot of progressives sound like the eugenicists they're trying to ridicule. Progressives who claim to be appalled by eugenics and yet somehow I've seen more of them use Down Syndrome as a punchline in the last week than I ever have in my entire life. You can't fight eugenics with eugenics. It isn't suddenly okay to laugh at disabled people just because you're doing it in order to insult Sydney Sweeney. Disabled people have been the targets of ridicule and violence for centuries. Ridicule is used as a tool to dehumanize us. Many of us have been the targets of ridicule our whole lives. If you don't have a problem with that, are you really any different than the eugenicists you claim to be so against?”