It’s a quiet Tuesday evening in the Cambridge Center Roof Garden in Kendall Square. The sun sets low in the sky, and all is peaceful. One by one, a small group gathers, bringing their own dark cloud of stress and frustration.
The mish-mash crowd of two dozen start up creators, entrepreneurs and PhD students were invited here by Derrick Duplessy, who runs a foundation ( http://duplessy.org/) that helps entrepreneurs get their businesses get off the ground. “I hang out with a bunch of other entrepreneurs in my co-working space at [the Cambridge Innovation Center],” Duplessy said. “We’ll talk all night long about what’s going right, what’s going wrong in our businesses, and I hear those frustrations, but we don’t necessarily have a place to really get them out.”
Everybody gets stressed—and there are millions of ways of dealing with it, from yoga to meditation to heavy drinking.
Tonight on the roof garden, this group has a different approach. Duplessy’s ‘Scream Club’ plans to meet in cities across the country, sharing their stories and letting it all out.
The Scream Club to-do list?
Meet on the top of a tall building, discuss your trials and tribulations…and yes, scream for 60 seconds.
All those long hours, late nights and feelings of self-doubt make this group want to howl. And yes, that sounds fun, but the real question is what all this screaming actually does. According to neuroscientist David Poeppel, it’s still a bit of a mystery. “It’s such a ubiquitous vocalization, across cultures, across age groups, a true universal in terms of vocal behavior,” he said. “But very little is known about it.”
The thing that sets screaming apart, according to Poeppel, is a quality known as “roughness,” which means
the volume rises rapidly and dramatically. “The energy exertion and the sort of externalizing something, I can imagine it has a very cleansing psychological effect,” Poeppel said. “I would imagine not that different from vigorous sports, doing some sort of vigorous physical activity, externalizing some energy can feel very good.”
The idea of screaming to release tension isn’t new. In the late sixties, psychologist Arthur Janov wrote The Primal Scream, an international bestseller about an idea called primal therapy, which tapped into childhood trauma. “What our therapy does,” Janov said in a 2008 interview, “is go back to those early brains, the hurt brain, and relive the pain and get it out of the system. Because meanwhile that pain is being held in storage, and just waiting for its exit, so to speak.”
The therapy was about more than just screams, but this idea that a scream could release stress and trauma inspired tens of thousands, including two of Janov’s most famous patients: Yoko Ono and John Lennon. In a 1970 interview about primal therapy, Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine, “I can feel my own fear, I can feel my own pain. Therefore I can handle it better than I could before, that’s all. I’m the same, only there’s a channel, it doesn’t just remain in me.”
Screaming worked for John and Yoko, and apparently resonated in Boston as well. “It’s cathartic,” Duplessy said. “I designed it to be so, and it is. I’m feeling very peaceful, believe it or not, from screaming so much. I feel like…wow. This is really going to be a thing.”
Duplessy is bringing Scream Club to cities across the country. For five dollars a ticket, participants get to meet up, scream their hearts out, and maybe find some inner peace.
And whether or not scream club is the next big thing, it could at least be the loudest.
