Back in the days when exorcism was popularized by The Exorcist and its sequels, Catholic Church spokespeople were emphatic that the Church did hardly any exorcisms anymore. The bar was set extraordinarily high to prove that a case was one of possession rather than psychiatric distress, and the challenge for the Church was to dissuade credulous people convinced they needed an exorcism. But now, a BBC report suggests that the situation has been turned on its head; that Church leaders in England who believe in demonic possession are doing nothing to protect children wh are beaten to drive spirits out. The article suggests that the problem pertains mostly to African immigrant congregations. Five years ago, Victioria Climbie, an eight-year old girl, was killed by ‘carers who claimed she was possessed by the devil.’ Defenders say things like “Exorcism is a good thing but it’s not meant to be abusive…” while detractors call it child abuse fueled by ignorance. The Church has always crafted a syncretistic appeal atop the foundation of the indigenous beliefs of those it wishes to convert; that is how it assimilatedd European paganism. As the appeal of the Catholic Church shifts increasingly to the Third World, we might expect to see more and more of clerics ‘benignly’ indifferent, if not covertly or overtly supportive, of this modern malignant appeal to superstition and ingnorance. At least the Church-based child abuse in the First World is not consonant with the cultural norms of its congregation.

If you scroll down to the third paragraph, you’ll notice that I got a mention this week: “Eliot Gelwan, a Brookline psychiatrist, reacts to an article he read by a man whose son is addicted to methamphetamine…”

Related: Is a Wine-Soaked Film Too, Er, Rosé?

Mind bending, health giving. As a close follower of the research in the area, I find this New Scientist review of the current renascence of interest in the psychotherapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs hits all the high spots.

The Committee is also focusing on US webloggers whose weblogging activity has gotten them into trouble at their workplace. (That fired flight attendant you may have heard about is prominent on the committee.)

This is a misguided use of resources and energy, IMHO. I know putting up a banner is characterized here as being merely the least one can do, but there is little more one can do by weblogging unless one is one of a handful of influential webloggers I can count on the fingers of one hand. And those handful of webloggers are influential because they have the ear of the press and are visible beyond the weblog audience. Putting up a banner on your site is little more than self-righteousness. Weblogging is nothing special; it is just an efficient form of fee (interesting Freudian slip? I meant “free”) speech. If people are concerned about imprisoned Iranian webloggers, they should do something like join or create an Amnesty International affinity group and adopt them as prisoners of conscience. The sort of tactics AI uses to publicize cases and address them with the imprisoning authorities are vastly more effective than publicity directed at the small segment of the public which reads weblogs.

For your domestic webloggers who have gotten in trouble at their jobs, there is always the ACLU and other protectors of our civil liberties. I know that the recent massive research study that established how woefully ignorant most American students are about their First Amendment rights also said they are more likely to be informed and involved when an issue is close to their own lifestyles — e.g. restrictions on music — but if this committee thinks that only webloggers are going to protect weblogging freedom, that is because its members unduly construe weblogging as a unique activity rather than a version of free expression. This is ridiculously parochial. (As an aside, being informed about one’s civil liberties also entails being informed about the various ambient threats to one’s rights in our ‘free’ society — for example, that your employers might be monitoring your internet activities at your workplace and that if you weblog on the job it might get you into trouble?)

This effort also strikes me as tactically foolish since, no matter how few people are energetic free speech and civil liberties activists, they are far more numerous than those who would be specifically interested in the right to weblog. Instead of a solipsistic effort to mobilize webloggers to defend other webloggers through the weblog medium, such a committee might function better as a public relations tool for weblogging, using non-weblog media to broaden the awareness of the non-weblog-reading public about the the weblogging phenomenon’s potentially important contributions to freedom of speech both domestically and abroad. Probably, more people can understand the samizdat concept than the weblog concept; the analogies could be drawn for them…

Beware of clicking on the ‘next blog’ button at the top of some ‘Blogger’ blogs which have the ‘Blogger NavBar’ enabled. (From Blogger: “The Blogger NavBar is a navigation bar and toolbar with a form that allows people to search just your weblog using Google’s SiteSearch and gives you the ability to check out what’s happening on other recently published blogs with one click.”) I don’t know why, in this day of low signal-to-noise ratio, anyone would want to go to a random weblog, but weblogger Alvin Borromeo reports that one of the places he reached apparently installed hijacking software as soon as he surfed there. Here and here are other reports of this. This was Blogger’s response to Borromeo:

“Thanks for your email. In this version 1.0 release of the

Blogger Navbar,the NextBlog button brings users to a random blog

that 1) has a navbar, 2) was recently updated and 3) is listed

as a public blog. Right now, it’s impossible to know what sort

of blog you’re going to land on. However, we are working on how

best to help our users avoid content they don’t want to see

along with other ideas and upgrades to the Navbar. Your feedback

is appreciated in this process.”

Once you establish that a devastating disease has a heritable component, you are at pains to explain how the genetic predisposition has survived if the illness confers a reproductive disadvantage, right? The classic example is sickle cell anemia. Homozygotes have the illness; heterozygotes have sickle trait, which confers resistance to malaria, an endemic cause of excess mortality where sickle cell disease originated. Here’s a discovery about the genetics of schizophrenia that bears on this phenomenon; this is the first such explanation of which I am aware for a behavioral disease. For psychiatric diseases, I have been assuming that the selective advantage for those who get the ‘trait’ by inheriting one copy of the gene would be in the behavioral realm. For example, people have speculated that a ‘watered-down’ version of the bipolar (manic-depressive) genetic heritage might confer a selective advantage by giving its bearer a creative and mercurial temperament. At first reading I thought they were saying this ‘schizophrenia gene’ also confers malaria resistance (see the discussion in the comments to the post) but I realized that was a misreading; the article simply drew the same analogy to the sickle cell situation that I have above. The selective advantage of the gene being investigated here is not specified but may be in the realm of physical, not behavioral, health. I am on the lookout for further reports of this research.

This is an aside, but when they refer to ‘types’ of schizophrenia with different symptoms, some psychiatrists, myself included, believe we are talking about distinct, heterogeneous diseases. Without going into too much detail, some people carrying that diagnosis have a disease such as the one described in this article, characterized predominantly by ‘positive’ symptoms such as hallucinations or paranoia. In the realm of schizophrenia, this is the type with the greatest evidence for heritability, and it has the best response to antipsychotic medication and the best overall prognosis. Other schizophrenics have a disease with more disturbance of the organization and logic of thought as well as ‘negative’ symptoms such as passivity, flatness and withdrawal. These are the schizophrenics who show abnormalities in the structure of their brains on MRI and other imaging studies; less genetic influence; less medication response; poorer premorbid functioning even in childhood; and overall worse prognosis. I believe that, in contrast to the ‘other’ schizophrenics who have a biochemical defect on the genetically encoded molecular level, usually inherited, which primarily affects synaptic communication between neurons, this latter class have a disease process, probably acquired or perhaps neurodegenerative, that affects the structure and gross organization (the ‘wiring’) of the brain. Research into the basic nature of the schizophrenic defect or defects and their etiology is hampered by lumping together patients with very different pathologies and processes.

As an analogy, what if our classification of diseases lumped chronic lower back pain sufferers and patients with migraine headaches as having a condition called dolorophrenia, because both had ‘pain’ and responded somewhat to various analgesic medications, and we did not recognize that that basis for classification was inadequate and the patients really had two (or more) very different pathological processes going on. If we took all these dolorophrenic patients and tried to do research into the genetics of their disease, did imaging studies of various parts of their anatomy, studied the longitudinal course of the illness, investigated the efficacy of other treatment approaches such as spinal surgery, looked at the question of whether there were perceptual or cognitive distortions during episodes, etc. etc., we would not be able to reach statistically significant conclusions about the nature of dolorophrenia because of its heterogeneity. That is the case, I think, with schizophrenia.

but have you seen them like this?

This photo is not for the fainthearted: “A nurse holds an Egyptian baby named Manar Maged in a hospital in the city of Banha, 25 miles, north of Cairo Feb. 18, 2005. Egyptian doctors said they removed the second head from the girl, who was suffering from the rare birth defects in an operation on Saturday.”

This is incredibly fun to play with. Type in any boy’s or girl’s name and see an interactive graph of the relative popularity of the name over time, since 1900.

I’ve had a longstanding romance with gadgets. The way I’m counting, I have owned, used or had an intimate relationship with 42 of these 100 at one time or another. And how was it for you? (Mobile PC)

Clicking on the title, I looked forward to reading a perspective that shared my concerns about how progressives had handled themselves in ’04. I agree with him that many of those with a true progressive agenda who threw their lot in with the Democrats are guilty of losing their nerve and not holding Kerry accountable to leftist ideals. The left “…muzzled itself at election time, accommodating the Democrats’ move to the right precisely when people are most tuned in to politics”.

But Harrison goes further. He utterly rejects the logic of Anyone but Bush and minimizes the differences between Bush and Kerry. As someone who was passionate about the necessity of Anyone but Bush, I find it outrageous that Harrison does not seem to find it conceivable that people could both find the lesser-of-evils vote necessary and palatable in 2004 and be committed to and working toward a politics that transcends the two-party system in the longer term. This sort of holier-than-thou, patronizing arrogance of a certain kind of ur-leftist, refusing to compromise on principle, was the downfall of the left in decades past. It is an attitude which will not be its salvation now.

Moreover, Harrison writes as if he invented the notion that there is little to choose between the Demublicans and the Republocrats. I was proud of saying, up until Bush emerged as the Republican candidate in the lead-up to the 2000 election, that I was above electoral politics and that one’s choice in the presidential election could not make much of a difference. Many people had a similar conversion. The weakness of the Democrats’ ability to appeal to the left is that too many people whose inherent decency and morality put them above politics have to be enlisted. It was a triumph, not a disgrace, that these people were successfully mobilized in 2004. It was their conscience — not some conspiracy to quash third parties among the wing of the military-industrial complex that controls the Democratic Party machine — that recruited them to oppose Bush in 2004.

Harrison also ignores the fact that many were initially drawn in by Kucinich and Dean, whose names do not even appear in the essay because they would be awkward contradictions to his thesis. A politics of exuberant grassroots progressivism almost hijacked the Democratic Party in 2004 before it flagged and people made their conscientious lesser-of-evils choice. And it seems to me that the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party between those who feel it loses because it is not enough Republican-like and those who feel it is because it is too much so is not yet over.

In attacking the logic of Anyone but Bush, Harrison asks us if we suppose the Republicans will mount anyone less heinous in future years, and whether the “strategic” vote for Kerry will become a pattern every four years required by equivalent emergencies. His main concern is that this will forestall the effort to build a political alternative, i.e. a third party movement. It may well, for the near term. The Republican “emergency” is of course not Bush; he is the front man for a neo-conservative agenda of dismantling the social progress of the last century or so. It is an ongoing emergency that will continue to require realpolitikal compromises for a great while before we can rely on the upwelling of a Third Wave. Those of us who are disgusted with the current shape of the Democratic Party are at the same historical point as the reactionaries who felt betrayed by the Republican Party in the mid-60’s. How they responded was to carefully and methodically lay the groundwork for the hijacking of that party over the next twenty to forty years. Progressives can count on needing nothing less than an equivalent effort. In the meanwhile, there will probably be alot of Gore- and Kerry-like insipid, co-opted Democrats for whom many find it necessary to hold their noses and vote (for example [ugghh] Hilary Clinton in ’08?). Harrison argues that the last vestiges of difference between the parties, e.g. support for abortion rights, will almost inevitably evaporate over the continuing Republican onslaught of the next decade or so. This ignores the likelihood that defense of abortion rights may be a moot point long before the Democrats have to concede that plank in their platform, as Bush stacks the judicial system with reactionaries who will dismantle progressive velues by coup and not just slow attrition. This was what the Anybody but Bush vote was trying to forestall.

Harrison also feels blaming the American people for the choice 51% of them made is ‘blaming the victim’ and that it is a mistake to conceive of the electorate as permanently reactionary. He has the sort of naive faith in The People that I have seen in decades past, in defiance of the evidence, mostly in the dogmatic Marxist Left: ” …(T)he people we want to reach, the vast majority, having no fundamental stake in the perpetuation of the existing system, are capable of grasping the reality that they are plundered, exploited, and ideologically manipulated in the interests of a ruthless elite.” But the theoreticians of the left have always understood that overcoming the False Consciousness by which the ruled are made to feel that the rulers’ interests are their own is no trivial matter. His solution to turn mass consciousness around is “hard campaigning by an independent left,” with the emphasis on independent. Harrison feels, quite ridiculously, that beginning to model opposition to the Democrats now will align “millions of Americans who are sick of wars, insecurity, declining wages, worsening schools, racism, and homophobia and long for peace, equality, and social justice” behind a third party. He suggests that a declaration of independence by the left is the only thing that would avert a grim future.

The contradiction in Harrison’s thinking is to argue that, within the Democratic party, there is no hope to avoid the co-optation of progressive values by an inescapable False Consciousness, while at the same time arguing that in the broader plane of the electorate such co-optation to Republican ideals could be readily countered by some sort of vigorous movement to raise mass consciousness. He faults those of us who thought the electorate should have known better than to vote for Bush, but is contemptuous of progressive Democrats — the constituency his argument needs — because he thinks they should have known better than to vote for Kerry. He holds progressives to a higher standard of political enlightenment than he does the electorate while arguing that those he criticizes are guilty of a failure of faith in the electorate.

Remember my first posts after the 2004 Bush victory, in one of which I described the relevance of the stages of mourning? I know I talked about my reluctance to leave the anger stage, but this is ridiculous. Harrison is contemptuous of: the Kerry campaign, Democratic party hacks, progressives within the Democratic party, the Greens, other existing attempts at third party movements, Nader’s ineptitude, most of the Left. The only people for whom no scorn is reserved are the Bush folks and the folks who elected him.

Jimmy Carter was the only US president to have qualified in submarines.This news release from the Dept of Defense crows over the upcoming commissioning of the newest nuclear attack sub in the US fleet in his name.

I wonder, however, if Carter will welcome this, or if the US Navy would take note if he did not. The peace and disarmament movement has always been graced by the ‘conversion’ of former heads of state and senior military officers. It is an often-observed phenomenon that, once freed of the pressures of their leadership positions which do not allow them to take a position of conscience, they can be exceedingly persuasive opponents of their country’s potential to unleash mass destruction, having once had their finger on the trigger. I am not certain that the statesman-like Nobel Peace Prize winner Carter has joined those who are freed to become anti-militarists — perhaps some of you readers know — but I assume so, given his outspoken post-presidential diplomatic and humanitarian concerns. The article mentions that Rosalynn and Amy Carter will participate in the launch of the USS Carter, but mention of the ex-president’s intention to attend is conspicuous for its absence.

Even the most modern of these monstrous weapons, armed with MIRVed ICBMs with massive warheads tactical Cruise missiles, are outmoded relics of the Cold War, designed to fight a war too terrible to comprehend against an enemy who no longer represents a threat. The press release boasts that the USS Carter is the largest submarine in its class, with “enhanced payload capacity” and advances enabling it to “develop and test a new generation of weapons.” It is an obscenity to build these things, an obscenity to rob legitimate human needs of the cost of building this thing, an obscenity to reactivate the nuclear arms race and reverse the previous decade’s progress in averting the nuclear threat as the Bush administration is doing, and an obscenity to name this WMD after the American president who most nearly deserves being called a peacemaker. His values are as antithetical to the aims and means of the current administration as can be. It is an obscenity to unleash this against the world in my name as an American citizen as well.

Besides, I thought we did not commemorate the famous by naming monumental works after them while they are still alive. The first time I saw that principle violated was with Reagan, but he was effectively gone for many years before his physical demise, as his Alzheimer’s Disease took his mind.

It brings up a related concern. Will there be any antiemetic strong enough for how I feel when they start naming things after George W. Bush?

This anguished piece from the New York Times Magazine by a California writer about his son’s devastation by methamphetamine addiction ends on a hopeful note, but just barely. As someone who treats detoxing substance users on my psychiatric hospital unit, it is useful for me to have a window into the experience at least some of their loved ones might have. When my ability to be compassionate to one of my patients is frayed, one of the mantras I use to get back to where I want to be in caring for them is to remind myself that this is someone’s son or daughter, that this patient was once a babe in arms cuddled and loved by some mother or father.

But it also makes me desperate to go and hug my sleeping children, still too young to have been exposed to drugs, and never let go.

Here we go again. I have written extensively in FmH in the past about scurrilous and scientifically unwarranted attempts to link antidepressant use to violent crimes. This case invloves a minor, and is fueled by the FDA’s recently mandating a ‘black box warning’ that antidepressants may cause increased suicide risk in children. The defense, contending that sertraline (Zoloft) transformed ‘a “nice, shy Christian boy” to a violent predator’, is attempting to use an “involuntary intoxication” defense, which requires

Antidepressants can rarely induce acute mania, sometimes psychotic, which can possibly meet these criteria, but short of that I cannot think of a way in which an antidepressant can ‘intoxicate’ or obscure distinguishing right from wrong. Adverse events occurring while someone is being treated with an antidepressant are far far more likely to be consequences of the patient’s underlying psychological distress than the effects of the drug. The scurrilous publicity to the contrary steers many patients, or parents of minor patients, away from agreeing to urgently needed and hugely effective therapeutic options for their suffering.

I have nothing but contempt for the stupidity of the missile defense program and nothing but smug satisfaction and relief when I hear about these test failures. Here’s to the status quo!

As seems to have been the case with many of his admirers, I devoured Lovecraft’s work most recently as an adolescent. I went a little overboard; I have first editions of most of his books, and they are virtually the only first editions I have ever collected. It sometimes takes hyperbole to inspire a jaded modern sensibility with the delicious experience of the weird and the horrible. I much prefer Lovecraft’s way of doing it than, say, the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths that pass for horror these days. They play very differently on the emotion of disgust, and with absolutely no irony. Besides, the adjective eldritch seems to have been made specifically for him.

But the evidence is not merely anecdotal! Most psychiatrists are familiar with the neuropsychiatric changes the drug causes, and the psychiatric literature is rife with reports.

This is the essay by Ward Churchill about Sept. 11th that caused him to resign under fire as chair of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. It has been intolerable to the jingoists ever since Sept. 11th and clearly remains so to suggest what is self-evident — that terrorist attacks against the US have some relationship to our arrogant swagger on the world stage.

Churchill, a Native American with an acute sensitivity to historic abuses committed in the name of American values, was certainly tactless in using one form of hyperbole that is taboo in public discourse — likening US militarism against the third world to Nazi genocide. (It remains a virtually unquestioned kneejerk assertion that no other evil is commensurate with Nazi evil. This acts, conveniently, to place the demons outside ourselves and obviate the need to examine our own baser tendencies.)

But Churchill is not exactly, or not only, saying that the American regime is like the Nazis. I read his point as more profound, more disquieting and more accurate. Churchill asks Americans to see that, if we held the average German citizen accountable for going along with the tyranny of the Nazi regime, we must necessarily examine our own complicity in the crimes against humanity that continue to be committed by the Bush regime. It speaks to the parallels that Churchill is drawing that he apparently could not make this point any more freely in the U.S. than a critic of the Nazis could have in Germany of the 1930’s or 1940’s. At least we don’t use concentration camps yet.

“The first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue.” (news.com.au)

Skeptics claim there will always be a world event that can be used to explain an observed spike on the machine. Investigators should be ‘blind’ to the output of the ‘oracle’ during a given period of time until they decide which world events they predict should have registered on it. Then analyze the data. The built-in defense of the true believers is that paranormal phenomena evaporate under too much scientific scrutiny; here is a case in which the scrutiny could be far after the fact. Oh, but wait, if ‘sensitives’ can sense the future, they might sense that scrutiny coming from the future too…

The Republican aganda is really an extreme form of social Darwinism in which we owe nothing to those, domestic or foreign, who are less ‘fit’. By fit, of course, the president and his cronies mean well-connected to a revenue stream and to opportunities to plunder. This is most clear on the domestic front, where the welfare state is being dismantled — hey, America is the Land of Oppurtunuhty, it is not our fault if some people are too stupid to take advantage. But the same sentiment, as well as other time-honored American traditions like xenophobia, invests the Republican attitude to the unfortunates abroad.

And this from professed Christians? They ignore this passage in scripture, I am sure:

This smacks abit too much of Marx’s cornerstone of socialist ideology, “…from each according to his ability, to each according to his need…”

Dan Hartung is back. Lake Effect was one of the best, first weblogs I read regularly, and kept reading it until it dribbled out of existence. Dan always had a way of thinking through clearly, often to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. When I did not agree with him, that was a sign I ought to listen to his argument harder. As the introductory posts in his new weblog reveal, he has been through some difficult changes since he stopped posting to Lake Effect. Stilicho comes online with the hope — and the promise — of reclamation. I wish him well and I will be reading…

A new day at Salon

This more sophisticated approach would avoid Kafkaesque situations like the recent case in which a mentally retarded convicted murderer was said to have had his intellectual development so stimulated by working with his defense attorneys on the appeals of his death sentence that he was no longer below the IQ threshold for execution.

Eric Alterman reviews the gyrations the press must go through to meet the obligation they seem to feel to do dignified reporting about a passel of snakeoil salesmen:

The media and weblog nation are all over this massive study showing that students neither understand nor value their First Amendment rights. Many are drawing the wrong conclusion from this if they are primarily finding fault with the young people’s indifference or incomprehension. The more important finding is that the ignorance and apathy are directly related to the unwillingness of schools to teach the importance of free speech. But what do you expect? What proportion of American schools have caved on daring to teach evolution, for example? Besides, students have less free speech rights than almost any segment of society, so what do you expect them to learn?

I have been paying alot of attention recently to one inescapable fact. Denizens of the United States are the only people deluding themselves into believing that the United States is still the best place to live. In many of the respects that matter, quality of life is far better in the United States of Europe than it is here. ThisNew York Review of Books essay reviewing recent books on the theme by T. R. Reid, Jeremy Rifkin and Timothy Garton Ash manages to capture the essence of the debate. And you can’t simply dismiss it as typical NYRB America-bashing.

I have been fascinated and disturbed by the fact that the price paid for the reduction in battlefield mortality brought about by new body armor and combat medical intervention and evacuation techniques has been far more soldiers surviving with horrendous injuries to unprotected parts of their bodies such as limbs, and with horrendous acute and chronic pain. In a fascinating and disquieting Wired piece, Steve Silberman grapples with these implications as he profiles a pioneer of a revolutionary new anaesthetic pain relief technique known as continuous peripheral nerve block. I read this piece in the print edition of Wired and was impatient for it to appear online so I could blink to it.

The media and weblog nation are all over this massive study showing that students neither understand nor value their First Amendment rights. Many are drawing the wrong conclusion from this if they are primarily finding fault with the young people’s indifference or incomprehension. The more important finding is that the ignorance and apathy are directly related to the unwillingness of schools to teach the importance of free speech. But what do you expect? What proportion of American schools have caved on daring to teach evolution, for example? Besides, students have less free speech rights than almost any segment of society, so what do you expect them to learn?

[Click on the photo…] (CNN [thanks, Seth])

I have heavily edited this passage, but if you aren’t already familiar with it, you owe it to yourself to click here to read the unedited original. You may be amazed*.

*(or at least nostalgic)

“Some moments become lasting recollections while others just evaporate.” What makes the difference, and how? (Scientific American)

“America’s largest brewing company, Anheuser-Busch, released its latest product last week — a beer that contains caffeine.” (Washington Post)

And: related story from The Guardian.

“Many say the possibility of military conflict between the United States and Iran, which Washington believes seeks to develop nuclear weapons, is now growing. While verbal warfare between Washington and Tehran is nothing new, international pundits point to a number of recent developments, large and small, that suggest rhetorical bombshells could give way to the real thing.” (Washington Post) Are the American people going to let the Bush dysadministration open the next front in the imperial neverending war? You bet they are; 42% and counting already in support, and the propaganda blitz hasn’t even started yet. If you oppose this expansion of American aggression, the time is now to begin building effective opposition to the war machine.