"The other side of the opioid epidemic — we're people in severe pain"

"Opioids fill the news with a steady stream of stories of lives lost from overdose and abuse. What we rarely hear is the other side — opioids are also the most powerful pain medication we have. For me, they were life-restoring.

Appropriate pain management that included prescription opioids lifted me from the desperate circumstances of being bedridden and unable to sleep for months at a time to someone who negotiated major settlement agreements. I argued important cases in federal court, and supervised thousands of matters in U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country...

While there is no question that looser prescribing of opioids in the 1990s and early 2000s contributed to the overdose crisis, illegal fentanyl and heroin drive overdoses today, not new prescriptions.  

The prescribing of opioids has dropped every year since 2012 and is at 10 year low — and yet drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, our public policy looks backward in time, intruding on the doctor patient relationship and burdening patient care... 

The substantial majority of people who have misused prescription opioids never received them in a healthcare setting; they obtained them from medicine cabinets, family and friends, or bought on the street."

http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/374246-the-other-side-of-the-opioid-epidemic-were-people-in-severe-pain

We have such a weird relationship with drugs. The differences between the way we treat caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana. The brightlines we try to draw. Because all drugs have medical benefits - even, say, nicotine which reduces anxiety and has a weird protective effect in Parkinson's. There is a reason for higher drug use among people with mental illness: at least at first, it helps. 

We would all engage with substances in a much healthier way if we approached them with nuance. 

Related: why animals take psychoactive drugs; history of drugs

FB: "There is an important but often glossed over distinction between using medication for a health condition in a way that restores function, enabling work and participation in family life, and misusing a substance in a manner that destroys function."

"Are Psychiatric Medications Over-Prescribed in Children?"

"The team looked at the patterns of prescriptions and compared them to the prevalence of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders, and depression in several age groups including young children (3 to 5 years), older children (6 to 12 years), adolescents (13 to 18 years) as well as young adults (19 to 24 years).

Depression is a problem in pediatrics, especially in children in the teen years. Estimates from the CDC are that 1 in 8 teens has experienced a depressive episode and one in twelve children will show some symptoms of ADHD. However, during the period the Columbia team looked at, there were fewer than 1 in 30 teens that were given a prescription for antidepressants. In the case of stimulant medications for ADHD, the rate was about 1 in 20 who were placed on drugs for attentional issues... 

Rates of prescription varied according to age, with the highest number of orders being issued in the age group of young adults (19-24). It was also found that the age of the children at the time they were prescribed stimulants or antidepressants fell in line nicely with the average age of onset for the conditions (ADHD, depression, anxiety) they are meant to treat"

https://www.labroots.com/trending/health-and-medicine/8098/psychiatric-medications-over-prescribed-children?utm_content=buffer0c913&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I feel like there's a thing with a lot of people I know being diagnosed with mental health problems as teens but not trying medication until their 20s. Just, like, "dealing with it" for years for no reason. 

FB: "A study released recently by Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) refutes that belief and their analysis suggests that the opposite is true. Looking at prevalence of childhood neurological and mental health conditions and the rate of prescriptions for psychiatric medications, the results indicate that in some cases there could be a problem of under-prescribing medication for some of these conditions."

"Scientists Aim To Pull Peer Review Out Of The 17th Century"

""If you buy pen refills on Amazon, you get far more useful feedback about the benefits and deficits of a particular product than you do about a work of science that represents years and years of peoples' work and millions of dollars of public investment," Eisen says.

He is not alone in his concerns. Eisen recently attended a meeting of biomedical researchers who want to find a way to modernize this process, to make it more fitting for a world that now lives online and isn't so concerned about the price of paper stock for printing presses... 

Bloom says peer review does a reasonable job of picking studies of interest to journals such as hers, but it does a poor job of improving the quality of the paper.

Some years ago, for instance, she says scientists sent around papers with nine deliberate errors in them. Peer reviewers generally found just three... 

As he envisions it, "you post a work, people comment on it, you update it, and if it gets better through that process, that's great — now you've produced something good," he says. "If, through the process of review and assessment, you and the community realize the work wasn't right, it just sorts of fades and you mark it as such. And I think we'll all be better off if that happens."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/24/586184355/scientists-aim-to-pull-peer-review-out-of-the-17th-century?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180224

"Doctors, Revolt!"

"Dr. Lown identifies first and foremost as a healer. In 1996, he published “The Lost Art of Healing,” an appeal to restore the “3,000-year tradition, which bonded doctor and patient in a special affinity of trust.” The biomedical sciences had begun to dominate our conception of health care, and he warned that “healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.”

He called for a return to the fundamentals of doctoring — listening to know the patient behind the symptoms; carefully touching the patient during the physical exam to communicate caring; using words that affirm the patient’s vitality; and attending to the stresses and situations of his life circumstances.

This time he was the patient in need of healing. And I was the doctor, the product of a system that has, if anything, become even more impersonal and transactional since he first wrote those words...

I had known Dr. Lown as a doctor and a patient; now I got to know him as an activist. We agreed that the health care system needed to change. To do that, Dr. Lown said, “doctors of conscience” have to “resist the industrialization of their profession.”

This begins with our own training. Certainly doctors must understand disease, but medical education is overly skewed toward the biomedical sciences and minutiae about esoteric and rare disease processes. Doctors also need time to engage with the humanities, because they are the gateway to the human experience."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/sunday/doctors-revolt-bernard-lown.html?referer=https://m.facebook.com/

"'I won't fly refugees to their deaths': The El Al pilots resisting deportation"

"In the first nine months of 2017, over 200 deportations of asylum seekers “failed” because German pilots for Lufthansa and its subsidiary, Eurowings, refused to take off with them on board, declaring that flight safety could be compromised if someone says they do not want to take the flight. In the UK last summer, a Turkish Airlines pilot refused to take off upon learning that a refugee was being deported against his will to Afghanistan."

https://972mag.com/i-wont-fly-refugees-to-their-deaths-the-el-al-pilots-resisting-deportation/132582/?utm_source=Small+Victories+Newsletter&utm_campaign=fa6dde3f71-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_636f315e88-fa6dde3f71-142026401

Unapologetically posting this because it made me feel better about the world. 

"When a woman or person of color becomes CEO, white men have a strange reaction"

"When companies appoint a woman or person of color as CEO, white men, on average, don’t appear to react very well, according to a study set to be published in the Academy of Management Journal’s April issue. Instead, the examination of 1,000 executives working at large and mid-sized public companies found that top white male leaders tended to become less helpful to other workers — particularly women and people of color — after the appointment of a minority-status CEO.

“They actually identify less, psychologically, with the organization after the appointment of a minority CEO and that reduces their propensity to help their colleagues,” said James Westphal, a finance professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and one of the authors of the study. “Our theory is that the appointment of minority CEOs triggers biases.”... 

When women and people of color climb all the way to the top of the corporate ladder, they’re often not set up for success. Women and people of color are more likely to be promoted to the highest levels during times of crisis, according to a 2014 study on the phenomenon known as the “glass cliff.” If they can’t turn the firm around quickly, these leaders are swiftly replaced by white men, the study found.

The forthcoming study from the University of Michigan and University of Texas researchers provides insight into other reasons minority CEOs might struggle in their role. If white male leaders in the company react to their appointment by doing less to help their colleagues that could, ironically, wind up reflecting poorly on the new leader."

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-a-woman-or-person-of-color-becomes-ceo-white-men-have-a-strange-reaction-2018-02-23

FB: "“They actually identify less, psychologically, with the organization after the appointment of a minority CEO and that reduces their propensity to help their colleagues,” said James Westphal, a finance professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and one of the authors of the study. “Our theory is that the appointment of minority CEOs triggers biases.”"

“‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me”

“I can’t help but think that there’s a whole lot of physical pain I could have avoided if any of the medical professionals I saw had considered the fact that I might have a sporting injury. And I can’t help but wonder if the reason they didn’t has to do with my weight.

When doctors looked at me, they didn’t see a girl who danced, cycled, and played team sports. They saw a fat girl — and they based their diagnosis on stereotypes about what that meant. I’m 29 now, and my knees no longer hurt. I don’t need them replaced — but if I’d listened to the weight-prejudiced opinions of my doctors, I might have.

This story is hardly unique... 

Stigmatization may also, problematically, stop fat people from seeking out medical care in the first place.

“I just don’t go to the doctor,” says Anita, a 28-year-old advertising executive. The last time Anita saw a doctor, it was a routine visit to discuss vaccinations and anti-malarial medication for an upcoming overseas trip. The doctor prescribed the vaccines, and asked a nurse to administer the jabs. It was the nurse who decided Anita had diabetes — without having spoken to her, or seeing anything pertaining to her medical history...

Doctors are highly educated people, but they’re subject to the same biases as the rest of us, and many of them don’t stay up to date with the latest research. That’s not good enough. If obesity really is a major health concern, it’s essential that doctors stay educated on recent studies and metastudies that look at how to get the best outcomes for fat patients. If doctors really do care about their patients, they need to start looking at the overall picture of a person’s health, not simply the size of their body.”

I’ve had conversations about this with friends who are overweight, and almost universally more active than I am, who actively put off going to the doctor because they will have to wade through a lecture about their weight before they will be able to get care. 

FB: “A consistent narrative runs throughout these stories. Hormonal problems? Lose weight. Broken finger? Lose weight. Migraines? Lose weight. Losing weight is the consistent — sometimes only — treatment offered for every ailment imaginable.”

"Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using"

"the kind of bias that produces a doctor who can believe that menstrual toxins exist, and launch a field of study on them based on some wilted flowers (if the story really did happen the way he tells it), did not come from one man alone. The cultural conditioning that has produced the idea that women are dirty, particularly during menses, is quite old. The Old Testament of the Bible claims that women are unclean when they menstruate, and menstrual huts exist in some cultures to separate out menstruating women from the rest of their group... 

De Secretis Mulierum went through at least eighty editions over several centuries (Rodnite Lemay 1992). While it was not a strictly medical text, it is clear that it was both popular and influential. Do doctors refer to De Secretis Mulierum today? Of course not. But this book, to me, represents a broader cultural understanding that menstruation is dirty, that women are powerful, mysterious, dangerous, and sub-human... 

Soon, people were injecting menstrual blood into rodents, and those rodents were dying (Pickles 1979). Others were growing plants in venous blood from menstruating women to determine phytotoxicity; the sooner the plants died, the higher the quantity of menotoxin assumed in the sample.

What’s worse, the presence of the menotoxin in the female body began to expand beyond menstruation. Any woman who was post-menarcheal and pre-menopausal could be found to have the menotoxin in her system. She could not escape it: some reported that the menotoxin could be found in a woman’s menstrual blood, but also venous blood, sweat, and breastmilk. One case study reports that a mother gave her child asthma because she was menotoxic during pregnancy (Perlstein and Matheson 1936), and several contended that colic was caused by menotoxin in breastmilk (Ashley-Montagu 1940; Perlstein and Matheson 1936)."

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/menstruation-blood-and-tissue/

FB: The history of some male scientists' weird theories about menstruation "And this is where I bring it back to my first two points about bias, that science can be biased by the cultural conditioning of those who perform it, and those who tell it. The people who studied the menotoxin really, really wanted to believe in it, to the point that they would ignore negative results and overstate the power of their anecdotes and case studies. The study of the menotoxin spans at least sixty years, maybe ninety depending on which references you consider legitimate, debated in Lancet letters to the editor, and published in several medical journals."

"White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities"

"Despite the preponderance of archaeological evidence that these mound complexes were the work of sophisticated Native American civilizations, this rich history was obscured by the Myth of the Mound Builders, a narrative that arose ostensibly to explain the existence of the mounds. Examining both the history of Cahokia and the historic myths that were created to explain it reveals the troubling role that early archaeologists played in diminishing, or even eradicating, the achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations on the North American continent, just as the U.S. government was expanding westward by taking control of Native American lands.

Today it’s difficult to grasp the size and complexity of Cahokia, composed of about 190 mounds in platform, ridge-top, and circular shapes aligned to a planned city grid oriented five degrees east of north. This alignment, according to Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, is tied to the summer solstice sunrise and the southern maximum moonrise, orientating Cahokia to the movement of both the sun and the moon. Neighborhood houses, causeways, plazas, and mounds were intentionally aligned to this city grid. Imagine yourself walking out from Cahokia’s downtown; on your journey you would encounter neighborhoods of rectangular, semi-subterranean houses, central hearth fires, storage pits, and smaller community plazas interspersed with ritual and public buildings. We know Cahokia’s population was diverse, with people moving to this city from across the midcontinent, likely speaking different dialects and bringing with them some of their old ways of life... 

Early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group—other than the American Indian—could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks. The impact of this narrative led to some of early America’s most rigorous archaeology, as the quest to determine where these mounds came from became salacious conversation pieces for America’s middle and upper classes. The Ohio earthworks, such as Newark Earthworks, a National Historic Landmark located just outside Newark, OH, for example, were thought by John Fitch (builder of America’s first steam-powered boat in 1785) to be military-style fortifications. This contributed to the notion that, prior to the Native American, highly skilled warriors of unknown origin had populated the North American continent."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/white-settlers-buried-truth-about-midwests-mysterious-mound-cities-180968246/#Eg6GLURDITCPAmjS.99

Related: oldest cave painting 

FB: "The splendor of the mounds was visible to the first white people who described them. But they thought that the American Indian known to early white settlers could not have built any of the great earthworks that dotted the midcontinent. So the question then became: Who built the mounds?

"How a Nearly Successful Slave Revolt Was Intentionally Lost to History"

"Official accounts at the time spun the fiction that the revolt was nearly a band of “‘brigands’ out to pillage and plunder,” writes Wendell Hassan Marsh for The Root. But this was the story of the victors— Rasmussen found through the course of his research, not the story of what happened. In reality, the revolt was carefully organized and it threatened to destabilize the institution of slavery in Louisiana.

To uncover the real story, Rasmussen pored through court records and plantation ledgers. “I realized that the revolt had been much larger—and come much closer to succeeding—than the planters and American officials let on,” he tells Littice Bacon-Blood of the Times-Picayune. “Contrary to their letters, which are the basis for most accounts of the revolt, the slave army posed an existential threat to white control over the city of New Orleans.”

Many rebels had copies of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man hidden in slave quarters and rebels had led smaller attacks in the region for years leading up to the revolt, Marsh writes for The Root. Among the ranks of the revolters included those with experience fighting in civil wars in Ghana and Angola. The plan was to establish a black state along the banks of the Mississippi. But as the marching group’s numbers swelled to more than 500 strong, U.S. federal troops and the slave owners’ militia responded quickly."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/its-anniversary-1811-louisiana-slave-revolt-180957760/

"Racism is creeping back into mainstream science – we have to stop it"

"Over the past year I have been investigating this tight, well-connected cabal of people, who nowadays call themselves “race realists”, reflecting their view that the scientific evidence is on their side. Their work is routinely published by Mankind Quarterly, a marginal journal operating since the 1960s, when it was founded by a group of scientists disgruntled with the fact that mainstream journals were unwilling to publish their controversial ideas... 

Lynn sits on the editorial advisory board of Personality and Individual Differences, produced by Elsevier – one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, whose titles include the highly respected journals the Lancet and Cell. Among his papers was The Intelligence of American Jews (2004), arguing that “Jews have a higher average level of verbal intelligence than non-Jewish whites”... 

An Elsevier spokesperson says editorial board members are not involved in making decisions about which articles will be published: “Their role is focused on reflecting the academic debate that takes place within the communities’ domain that the journal serves.” The implication is that the kind of papers written by Meisenberg and Lynn must be a part of mainstream discussion.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/eugenics-racism-mainstream-science

We should probably also be doing more research about how often uteruses stop working because their owners are getting too many degrees. Whether or not short people have poor leadership skills. If people with red hair are angrier. Etc...

"The Duality of the Southern Thing"

"That’s my Alabama: a lot of hard-working people trying to get by while publicity-seeking retrogrades live to embarrass the rest of us. This manifested in last month’s special election for the U.S. Senate, as the perfectly sane candidate Doug Jones stood up against the evangelical zealot and defender of the Old South, Roy Moore. The fact that Jones eked out a victory—and today puts his hand on a Bible and takes the seat that Moore still seems to believe is rightfully his—does not mean the balance has shifted in Alabama yet. For me, a very liberal Southerner, the Jones victory has me thinking about how priorities need to be realigned by national progressives and by the Democratic Party if the South is ever going to be pulled away from the Republicans’ chokehold... 

Alabama has different needs than urban states. Infrastructure and military defense spending, due to Alabama’s five active military bases, are central issues for both conservatives and progressives in Alabama.

Maybe there’s a “third way” that holds hope for Democrats like Jones: to tap into authentic populism—not just the sense of grievance that Trump exploits, but a populism that offers real benefits to actual working people. Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas writer who covers issues...

I’m trying to be radically pragmatic, and trying to recognize that until the Democratic Party learns to speak to the fears of the poor of all races we’ll continue to have apathy instead of outcry. At the same time, Senator Doug Jones would be foolish if he didn’t recognize that among those mythical “working-class voters” Democrats want to win is a huge bloc that already stood solidly behind him: about 98 percent of African American women cast their votes for Jones. He should make a habit of imagining a black woman every time he speaks of the working class.

But to hold on to his seat, maybe the thing he most needs to convey to all Alabama voters is that he represents a party that does not look down on them."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-duality-of-the-southern-thing-bryan

FB:" poor and working-class voters in Alabama could foreseeably be rallied by the Democratic Party—but only when Southern poverty is no longer the punchline of a joke."

"A vivid emotional experience requires the right genetics"

"a substantial proportion of Europeans and Africans have a variation on ADRA2b that deletes the alpha2b adrenoreceptor, possibly cutting some of the wires on the norepinephrine brakes. People with this deletion had stronger memories of emotionally charged events, a 2007 study found. Todd and graduate student Mana Ehlers wanted to see if this deletion might affect how people perceived emotional images... 

For both groups, viewing emotional images increased activity in the lateral amygdala, an area of the brain involved in emotional processing. But people with the ADRA2b deletion had an extra input from an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This brain area is “related to emotional processing and internal emotional experience,” Ehlers explains. “It’s putting the emotional experience into context based on your own experiences. Our genetics, at least in part, determine whether we perceive emotions more strongly or more vividly.” Ehlers, Todd and their collaborators published their results April 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience."

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/vivid-emotional-experience-requires-right-genetics

I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than "person has version of gene, person has vmPFC input". It's probably more like that network Always develops in people with one version, and sometimes doesn't in people with a different version. But it's cool to see a study going from a specific gene to neurological activity to human cognitive behavior. 

"Why Your Biology Runs on Feelings"

"Whether feelings correspond to positive or negative ranges of homeostasis, the varied chemical signaling involved in their processing and the accompanying visceral states have the power to alter the regular mental flow, subtly and not so subtly. Attention, learning, recall, and imagination can be disrupted and the approach to tasks and situations, trivial and not, disturbed. It is often difficult to ignore the mental perturbation caused by emotional feelings, especially in regard to the negative variety, but even the positive feelings of peaceful, harmonious existence prefer not to be ignored... 

It is often asked, not unreasonably, why feelings should feel like anything at all, pleasant or unpleasant, tolerably quiet or like an uncontainable storm. The reason should now be clear: When the full constellation of physiological events that constitutes feelings began to appear in evolution and provided mental experiences, it made a difference. Feelings made lives better. They prolonged and saved lives. Feelings conformed to the goals of the homeostatic imperative and helped implement them by making them matter mentally to their owner as, for example, the phenomenon of conditioned place aversion appears to demonstrate. The presence of feelings is closely related to another development: consciousness and, more specifically, subjectivity."

http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/why-your-biology-runs-on-feelings

This is too long, I recommend skimming, but it addresses interesting points. 

"How Dad Lost His Voice — And Finally Learned to Listen"

"Suddenly, Dad stopped talking. He looked from one of us to the other. “I just noticed something,” he said. “You’re totally calm, and your mother is getting really upset.”

“Of course she is,” I said. “You’re telling her to her face that something she experienced, didn’t happen. What the hell did you expect?”

It was an outburst that, a few years earlier, would have sent him into an aria of self-justification. Instead, he absorbed what I’d said and sat back in his chair. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Then he motioned to my mom to finish her side of the story.

The adjustment happened slowly, over the course of months: Without the ability to jump in and redirect, my father was forced to sit on his hands. He had to listen for the patterns of other people’s speech, to wait for breaks in the conversation, little moments of silence where he could actually make himself heard."

http://narrative.ly/dad-lost-voice-finally-learned-listen/

FB: "When his voice disappeared, it cracked open a way of interacting — with colleagues, friends, even his own family — that he’d never considered before. And it made some of his most earnest, deeply held beliefs a bit less theoretical and more real. He learned what it was like to be silenced."

"This Aging Roxbury Victorian Will Become a Home for Minority Women Pursuing STEM"

"the newly purchased Victorian became the [G]Code House—a house where girls (that’s where the G comes in) can live, get support, and learn to code. The program is aimed at women ages 18 to 24 who are interested in a STEM field like computer science, but can’t afford to continue their education past high school. To kick off its first year, the program will recruit women who are currently Boston residents, including those about to age out of homeless shelters and other temporary living situations. The idea is that [G]Code participants will eventually help to reduce Boston’s gender gap in tech...

Wallace and Nau bought the home from a developer who scooped it up after a foreclosure. They hope remaking the house into a community resource—rather than letting it fall prey to another developer—will work to fight the city’s affordable housing crisis.

“We could easily have rented out this property and contributed to the gentrification that is taking place so rapidly in our community by just having it be a regular rental property,” Wallace says.

Instead, she asks, “Can people in their community look at their properties as not just cash cows but something that can be useful and resourceful?”

The [G]Code program is currently seeking partnerships with local institutions and industries to build a sponsorship model, hopefully allowing for first-year residents to live at the house rent-free. Women are permitted to stay for several years, but will be required to pay rent after their first year as they enter the job market. Move-ins will start next year as more details about the program are finalized."

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/2018/03/01/gcode-house-roxbury/

"Stop Pretending You Know What an Abuser Looks Like"

"What do we do? We mistrust the victim’s account. We ask for photos, proof, and chapter-and-verse not so much because we disbelieve him or her but because we want bad behavior to show in obvious ways that it doesn’t. We want the home in which the abuse occurs to look as squalid as it does in our imagination because the décor and furnishings, perhaps even the fresh flowers in vases, belie what went on. We think we’re being fair and impartial but we’re still scanning the horizon for those tell-tale black hats...

Again, our black hat stereotypes rule: We not only require consistency and clarity but discount the degree to which person abused is in love with, in thrall to, or otherwise dependent on the abuser. We think of abuse as a 24/7 thing without understanding the extent of the abuser’s manipulations or how loving someone who hurts you perverts the most meaningful exchanges in life. Again, our blinders are set to judge without taking into account what research knows about the cycle. It’s important to remember that the person being abused still wants something from the abuser—most usually love—and that makes the dynamic all the more confusing."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201803/stop-pretending-you-know-what-abuser-looks?amp

"Severe Shortage Of Psychiatrists Exacerbated By Lack Of Federal Funding"

"nearly 1 in 20 adults in the U.S. — some 13.6 million — live with some form of serious mental illness. Sixty percent of those adults received no mental health services in the past year. The report also notes that in June 2016, mental health took up the largest amount of U.S. health care spending for the first time.

Since 2000, Kirch says medical schools have worked to expand psychiatry departments, increasing the number of spots by 30 percent. But the federal government, which funds medical residency programs, put a cap on them under the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

"That number has been capped for 20 years now by legislation," Kirch says. "No one intended that legislation to become permanent. And now that the population is both growing and aging, it's become the bottleneck...

Kirch and other mental health advocates are urging Congress to act on legislation to expand medical residency training programs as a method of dealing with this crisis."

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/09/592333771/severe-shortage-of-psychiatrists-exacerbated-by-lack-of-federal-funding?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180309

FB: "Seventy-seven percent of U.S. counties have reported a severe deficiency of psychiatrists. To put this in perspective, there are more than 3,800 psychiatrists in California, but only 34 in all of Wyoming, the report says."

"Black Kids Don’t Want to Read About Harriet Tubman All the Time"

"The “diverse” books making it to the shelves aren’t very diverse at all. With few exceptions, the same stories are being told again and again, fed to children like some bowl of dry, lumpy oatmeal with just a sprinkle of brown sugar to make it go down a little easier.

The typical children’s picture books featuring black characters focus on the degradation and endurance of our people. You can fill nearly half the bookshelves in the Schomburg with children’s books about the civil rights movement, slavery, basketball players and musicians, and various “firsts.” These stories consistently paint African-Americans as the aggrieved and the conquerors, the agitators and the superheroes who fought for their right to be recognized as full human beings.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate those kinds of books; our history deserves an airing with all children. But I’m not trying to have my kid float off into dreamland with visions of helping runaway slaves to freedom, or marching through a parade of barking dogs and fire hoses, or the subject matter of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” — yes, there is a children’s book devoted to this song protesting lynching.

Meanwhile, stories about the everyday beauty of being a little human being of color are scarce."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/children-literature-books-blacks.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

! yes! When I was little, I was turned off by a book if there was a black person on the cover because I knew it was going to be boring. I knew what the plot was going to be, what the lesson was going to be, and I knew that it wasn't going to be joyful or fantastical like my other books. 

And I think that contributed to my childhood desire to distance myself from blackness; as one of very, very few black families in my community, my primary exposure to other black people was through these kinds of books and I learned that black people were boring and struggling and stressful. If I wanted to access the depth and breadth of human experience that was reflected in my other books, I couldn't let myself be black.

It was the same thing with TV episodes that featured black people; outside of the Cosby Show, maybe the Pride Family, all of the shows I watched when I was growing up had mostly white casts and if a black person showed up it was going to be a boring, stressful plot.

I realize now that most of these books and TV shows were written by white people, for a white audience, and that is why they fundamentally didn't serve me. But at the time, it genuinely turned into years of my childhood avoiding content that included people who looked like me, because the lesson that media taught me was that my blackness condemned me to a sad and limited human experience.

FB: so important. Seriously, this is how I learned that race/blackness was boring and terrible and I wanted to avoid it. "Regardless of what the publishing industry seems to think, our babies don’t spend their days thinking about Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and black bodies swinging; they’re excited about what the tooth fairy will leave under their pillows, contemplating their first ride on the school bus, looking for dragons in their closets."

"For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It"

"I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others... 

What Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured “natives” elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.

Unlike magazines such as Life, Mason said, National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/

FB: National Geographic adressing its own role in American racism

"Ticks Creep Into Canada, Bringing Lyme Disease (and Confusion) With Them"

"This all makes for a muddy diagnostic regimen even in regions with a long history of Lyme, but with Canada’s exposure still comparatively new, many doctors may not even suspect Lyme in an ailing patient. And even when they do, there are often systemic and cultural barriers to testing, according to Jim Wilson, the founder of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, who contracted Lyme disease many years ago and was very sick for several years before he found effective treatment. After his daughter contracted Lyme in 2001, he decided to found the organization to raise awareness of the issue.

Many medical doctors feel caught in a Catch-22, Wilson suggested — simultaneously discouraged from making a diagnosis on clinical symptoms alone, and limited to laboratory tests that are often inconclusive. Doctors that diagnose and treat Lyme disease effectively — through a mixture of educated clinical diagnosis and testing — “have been policed out of business,” Wilson says, leaving them hesitant to diagnose and treat the disease at all. This leaves many patients with little recourse but to turn elsewhere — including seeking diagnosis via for-profit labs the U.S... 

Of course, some patients and advocates argue that the current guidelines are not based on the best evidence and that they are beholden to powerful interests. Disability insurance companies in Canada often claim that chronic Lyme disease does not exist, for example, so that they don’t have to pay disability claims. Such companies sometimes hire infectious disease doctors as experts to testify in court to deny claims, Wilson explains.

At the same time, many insurance companies deny life insurance to potential clients who have had a Lyme disease diagnosis, says Janet Sperling, a Lyme disease researcher at University of Alberta."

https://undark.org/article/lyme-disease-ticks-canada/?utm_content=buffer2d37e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"A Mental Disease by Any Other Name"

"You sit with Frank as he receives his diagnosis, schizophrenia, and immediately all sorts of associations flood into your head. In the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia often means homelessness, joblessness, inability to maintain close relationships, and increased susceptibility to addiction. Your son is now dangling off this cliff. So you hand him over to the doctors, who prescribe him antipsychotics, and when he balloons up to 300 pounds,1 and they tell you he’s just being piggish, you believe them...

Having a dissolved self can make it immensely hard for a schizophrenic person to present a coherent picture of themselves to the world, and to relate to other, more gelled selves. “Schizophrenia is a disease whose main manifestations are sufferers’ [diminished] abilities to engage in social interactions,” says Matcheri S. Keshavan, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and an expert on schizophrenia. And yet, ironically, people with schizophrenia need others just as much as socially capable people do, if not more. “A problem with schizophrenia is however much they want [social interactions], they often lose the skills needed for navigating them,” Keshavan says... 

“Take a young man with schizophrenia who’s socially unable to engage,” Keshavan says. “In a collectivistic culture, he’s still able to survive in a joint family with a less fortunate brother or cousin … he’ll feel supported and contained. Whereas in a more individualistic society, he’ll feel let go, and not particularly included. For that reason, schizophrenia tends to be highly disabling [in individualistic countries].” Individualist cultures also “[diminish] motivation to acknowledge illness and seek help from others, whether from therapists or in clinics or residential programs.” notes Russell Schutt, a leading expert on the sociology of schizophrenia... 

When this happens, the Dagara people begin a collective effort to heal the broken-down person; one marked by loud rituals involving dancing and cheering and with an underlying current of celebration. Malidoma remembers watching his sister go through it. “My sister was screaming into the night,” he says, “but people were playing around her.” Usually, the uncontrollable breakdowns last about eight months, after which effectively new people emerge. “You have to go through this radical initiation where you can become the larger than life person the community needs for their own benefit, you know?” If the broken-down person does not have a community around him or her, Malidoma says, he or she may fail to heal. He believes this is what happened to Frank."

http://m.nautil.us/issue/58/self/a-mental-disease-by-any-other-name-rp

FB: "Several studies by the World Health Organization have compared outcomes of schizophrenia in the U.S. and Western Europe with outcomes in developing nations like Ghana and India. After following patients for five years, researchers found that those in developing countries fared “considerably better” than those in the developed countries.8 In one study, nearly 37 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries were asymptomatic after two years, compared to only 15.5 percent in the U.S. and Europe. In India, about half of people diagnosed with schizophrenia are able to hold down jobs, compared to only 15 percent in the U.S.9"

"In Winston Churchill, Hollywood rewards a mass murderer"

"During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.

In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.

Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes...

Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.af5355919899

FB: "But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”"

"How to Accept Anxious Feelings So You Can Let Them Pass"

"I remembered what I’d heard a yoga teacher say once in an uncomfortable pose where the students had their hands above their heads for a long time.

“Just tell your mind that things are going to be like this for the rest of your life. It’ll get bored of the pain and move on.”

I took that idea and started applying it whenever worries came up. I managed to convince myself that I didn’t need to fix anything and that feelings of anxiety were just really not that interesting. It worked out pretty well, so well in fact, that I thought I’d go into a little bit more detail of how I managed to do so and share it with you.

Here are five ways you can begin to accept anxious feelings and live a better life."

https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-accept-anxious-feelings-so-you-can-let-them-pass/

FB: "Often anxiety is so painful that we become fascinated, obsessed even, with understanding and solving our worries. We want to get rid of the pain of anxiety as soon as possible.

Sometimes this is useful, as we come up with strategies to manage our emotions, but a lot of the time it validates the power of our anxiety and adds fuel to the fire. The mind will only focus on what it values; if you can manage to become bored with your anxiety, it will loosen its grip on your life."

"The Abuse Epidemic Hiding in Idyllic French Towns Is Flat-Out Frightening"

"My own country is almost an uncharted territory for me as a reporter. I have often travelled outside of France to report on the plight of being a woman in other countries. In Albania, I met women who had been forced to have an abortion because they were pregnant with girls (it’s called selective abortion). I also went to the Middle East to find out exactly what it's like to be a woman in the Islamic State of Iraq and conducted some interviews in Turkey regarding femicide. There, I learned that assassinations of women are most common after a separation or after asking for a divorce. So when I got back home, I started to collect newspaper clippings that reported on these kinds of incidents in France and realized that sadly, it’s almost just as common in my own country. That’s how I found myself aboard that bus... 

Géraldine is one of the 123 women who was killed by their husband or ex-husband in 2016. The State only started to keep records for these violent deaths from 2006, from which point, at least 153 women had been killed by their partner or ex-partner. The violence that existed before the murder, and the consequential effects it has on the victims’ families is never reported. Sometimes, journalists even write about these stories in a very blasé manner. The feminist blogger, Sophie Gourion has listed them on her Tumblr account under the title “Words kill," for example, “Pissed off in Paris: Partner kills wife and throws her in the trash," could be found on Le Parisien’s website this summer. In May, the magazine 20 Minutes published a story titled, “Morbihan: Drunk Man Throws Wife Overboard.”

https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/charity/a19157642/abuse-epidemic-french-towns/?src=ign_ai&mg=mar&dom=fb

FB: "People also say: “Laurène, this ain’t Bagdad!” But, considering it’s always worse elsewhere is a cowardly way out. Each year in Simone de Beauvoir’s country, 218,000 women are victims of sexual and/or physical violence from their (ex-) partner." 

"Mothers who regret having children are speaking up like never before"

"

"what we’re learning about regretful mothers upends binary thinking that women who regret having children must be neglectful or substandard parents: it’s motherhood these women regret, not the children. Dutton expressed love for her offspring (“I would cut off my arm if either needed it”); it was maternal strictures she bristled against (“I felt oppressed by my constant responsibility for them”). In Today’s Parent, Augustine Brown called her children “the best things I have ever done” and assured readers she wasn’t “a monster” before expressing conflicted feelings: “What I’m struggling with is that it feels like their amazing life comes at the expense of my own,” she wrote, expressing remorse for “this life I wanted so badly and now find myself trapped in.”

Feeling trapped or suffocated is a common theme in Donath’s work; mothers felt “as if the metaphorical umbilical cord binding them to their children were in fact wrapped around their neck.” Many women said they felt pressured to have children. So did German novelist Sarah Fischer, author of Die Mutterglück-Lüge (The Myth of Mothering Joy: Regretting Motherhood—Why I’d Rather Have Become a Father), published in 2016, who writes she knew she’d made a mistake “when the contractions started.”

The premise that motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all role shouldn’t come as a surprise in 2018, given the rise of the “childless by choice” movement or an international decline in birth rates. Still, it’s received as an affront to the “sanctity” of motherhood and the entrenched belief that the maternal instinct is innate and unconditional—despite ample historical evidence to the contrary."

http://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers/

FB:" There’s an inherent paradox, Donath points out: Women are told they instinctively possess the tools to mother well while constantly being told how to conduct relationships with their children to be “good women” and “good mothers.” And that has come to mean child before all, as seen when author Ayelet Waldman famously received hate mail after stating in the New York Times in 2005 that she loved her husband more than her children; she parlayed the outrage into a 2012 book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. The belief that women are uniquely equipped to parent also marginalizes fathers: author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was publicly shamed when she revealed she preferred not to be a full-time parent in her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning. Now a non-custodial mother to two young sons, she has reported being “threatened with death and sexual violence by strangers.”"

"Can Wikipedia Solve YouTube's Conspiracy Theory Problem?"

"It's concerning that YouTube, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue a year, decided to outsource one of its biggest problems to a nonprofit organization, but research shows that Wikipedia does have a good method for combating hoaxes and conspiracy theories. It's not a solution, but If implemented properly, Wikipedia could at least provide people who watch videos about the Earth being flat with links to better, factual information... 

With YouTube essentially springing this announcement on Wikipedia’s cadre of volunteer editors and community members, it’s also worth questioning whether Wikipedia is ready for what could come next: Trolls and conspiracy theorists flooding the platform to try to influence what’s displayed on YouTube."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy8zdm/wikipedia-youtube-conspiracy-theories

Related: Wikipedia and science literacy, another one...