Author Archives: FmH

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About FmH

70-something psychiatrist, counterculturalist, autodidact, and unrepentent contrarian.

Depression or Just a Little Emotional Blow?

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Many Diagnoses of Depression May Be Misguided, Study Says: “About one in four people who appear to be depressed are in fact struggling with the normal mental fallout from a recent emotional blow, like a ruptured marriage, the loss of a job or the collapse of an investment, a new study suggests. To avoid unnecessary diagnoses and stigma, the standard definition of depression should be redrawn to specifically exclude such cases, the authors argue.

The study, appearing today in The Archives of General Psychiatry, is based on survey data from more than 8,000 Americans; it did not analyze the number of people who had been misdiagnosed.

Psychiatrists and other doctors who take careful medical histories do so precisely to rule out such life blows, as well as the effects of physical illnesses, before making a diagnosis of depression.

But the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual does not specifically exclude people experiencing deep but normal feelings of sadness, unless they are bereaved by the death of a loved one. And an increasing number of school districts and health clinics use simple depression checklists, which do not take context into account, the authors said.” (New York Times )

The study compared 157 bereaved individuals and 710 who met the criteria for major depressive disorder whose episode had been triggered by another loss. Grief specifically precludes a diagnosis of major depression, but the investigators showed that those diagnosed with depression after other losses did not differ significantly from the bereavement group on a well-chosen spectrum of indicators of the severity and impact of their symptoms. They concluded that the data “do not support the validity of uniquely excluding uncomplicated bereavement but not uncomplicated reactions to other losses” from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

The researchers are a social worker, two sociologists and one psychiatrist — interestingly, a psychiatric epistemologist who participated in the formulation of the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-4), the official ‘bible’ of acceptable psychiatric diagnoses and their defining criteria. This should be a clue that the study should be interpreted in light of the perennial conflict within mental health care between the medical and social models; it is a shot across the bow aimed at biological psychiatry. When psychoanalysts dominated in shaping the psychiatric paradigms of diagnosis and treatment in the era before modern psychopharmacology, a crucial distinction was made between “endogenous” and “reactive” depression. One still hears vestiges of that outlook when healthcare personnel observe, “Wouldn’t you be depressed too if you had gone through what he/she did?”

With the ascendency of biological models and medication-based treatment, roughly since the ’60’s, however, the distinction was largely thrown out (with the exception of the exclusion for acute grief), and a generation of psychiatrists were trained to see it as quaint and archaic. The focus in diagnosing and treating has come more and more to be on the description, the symptoms, of an episode of emotional distress (such as can be captured in the symptom checklists the article mentions) to the exclusion of the meaning of that distress to the individual and its contextualization in an individual life. With the development of medications that can treat depressive symptoms, what has been lost has been the question of whether they should be treated in all instances. Recent dogma emphasizing that depressive episodes not be seen as self-contained but as manifestations of a lifelong relapsing condition mitigates for preventive treatment through indefinite antidepressant maintenance. Relapses are explained with disdain as the result of inadequately insightful patients failing to comply with that paradigm. I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether this deserves to be seen as an aspect of the medicalization of everyday life driven by market pressures and the selling of healthcare down the river by the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and its handmaiden physicians.

On the other hand, I quibble with the implication of the article that this finding points to wholesale “misdiagnosis” of depression where it is unwarranted. That would be too simple, and I doubt it is what the authors intended. What is at stake is not just tidying up diagnostic criteria or diagnostic practices. There is no “true” definition of what depression is to aim for; it is a social construction that reflects dominant values and assumptions. We are in the midst of a full-fledged clash of conflicting paradigms, with a study such as this at its nidus. As Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , evidence inconsistent with the dominant paradigm is explained away or ignored until a sufficient accumulation occurs.

What are the dangers of ignoring these challenges to the dominant conception of depression, markedly broadened from that of a generation ago and ignoring context almost entirely? One of our real social ills may be not the prevalence of depression but of the narcissistic expectation that we are entitled to have any depressive distress eradicated, and the parallel assumption that it is the fault of a ‘chemical imbalance’ rather than the way we make sense of the world, process our feelings or treat one another. What is at stake is something very basic about the parameters of the social construction of the self in modern society. There may be biological consequences as well. I have been troubled by the possibility — which I cannot get many of my colleagues to take seriously — that having too low a threshold for beginning or maintaining our patients on antidepressants may actually perpetuate or worsen depressive dysfunction of the brain. Although antidepressants are not, in a rigid sense, addictive, their use may cause a self-perpetuating necessity to continue to use them. I hope to have more to say about that in the future as I clarify and extend my thinking about this issue.

Depression or Just a Little Emotional Blow?

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Many Diagnoses of Depression May Be Misguided, Study Says: “About one in four people who appear to be depressed are in fact struggling with the normal mental fallout from a recent emotional blow, like a ruptured marriage, the loss of a job or the collapse of an investment, a new study suggests. To avoid unnecessary diagnoses and stigma, the standard definition of depression should be redrawn to specifically exclude such cases, the authors argue.

The study, appearing today in The Archives of General Psychiatry, is based on survey data from more than 8,000 Americans; it did not analyze the number of people who had been misdiagnosed.

Psychiatrists and other doctors who take careful medical histories do so precisely to rule out such life blows, as well as the effects of physical illnesses, before making a diagnosis of depression.

But the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual does not specifically exclude people experiencing deep but normal feelings of sadness, unless they are bereaved by the death of a loved one. And an increasing number of school districts and health clinics use simple depression checklists, which do not take context into account, the authors said.” (New York Times )

The study compared 157 bereaved individuals and 710 who met the criteria for major depressive disorder whose episode had been triggered by another loss. Grief specifically precludes a diagnosis of major depression, but the investigators showed that those diagnosed with depression after other losses did not differ significantly from the bereavement group on a well-chosen spectrum of indicators of the severity and impact of their symptoms. They concluded that the data “do not support the validity of uniquely excluding uncomplicated bereavement but not uncomplicated reactions to other losses” from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

The researchers are a social worker, two sociologists and one psychiatrist — interestingly, a psychiatric epistemologist who participated in the formulation of the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-4), the official ‘bible’ of acceptable psychiatric diagnoses and their defining criteria. This should be a clue that the study should be interpreted in light of the perennial conflict within mental health care between the medical and social models; it is a shot across the bow aimed at biological psychiatry. When psychoanalysts dominated in shaping the psychiatric paradigms of diagnosis and treatment in the era before modern psychopharmacology, a crucial distinction was made between “endogenous” and “reactive” depression. One still hears vestiges of that outlook when healthcare personnel observe, “Wouldn’t you be depressed too if you had gone through what he/she did?”

With the ascendency of biological models and medication-based treatment, roughly since the ’60’s, however, the distinction was largely thrown out (with the exception of the exclusion for acute grief), and a generation of psychiatrists were trained to see it as quaint and archaic. The focus in diagnosing and treating has come more and more to be on the description, the symptoms, of an episode of emotional distress (such as can be captured in the symptom checklists the article mentions) to the exclusion of the meaning of that distress to the individual and its contextualization in an individual life. With the development of medications that can treat depressive symptoms, what has been lost has been the question of whether they should be treated in all instances. Recent dogma emphasizing that depressive episodes not be seen as self-contained but as manifestations of a lifelong relapsing condition mitigates for preventive treatment through indefinite antidepressant maintenance. Relapses are explained with disdain as the result of inadequately insightful patients failing to comply with that paradigm. I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether this deserves to be seen as an aspect of the medicalization of everyday life driven by market pressures and the selling of healthcare down the river by the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and its handmaiden physicians.

On the other hand, I quibble with the implication of the article that this finding points to wholesale “misdiagnosis” of depression where it is unwarranted. That would be too simple, and I doubt it is what the authors intended. What is at stake is not just tidying up diagnostic criteria or diagnostic practices. There is no “true” definition of what depression is to aim for; it is a social construction that reflects dominant values and assumptions. We are in the midst of a full-fledged clash of conflicting paradigms, with a study such as this at its nidus. As Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , evidence inconsistent with the dominant paradigm is explained away or ignored until a sufficient accumulation occurs.

What are the dangers of ignoring these challenges to the dominant conception of depression, markedly broadened from that of a generation ago and ignoring context almost entirely? One of our real social ills may be not the prevalence of depression but of the narcissistic expectation that we are entitled to have any depressive distress eradicated, and the parallel assumption that it is the fault of a ‘chemical imbalance’ rather than the way we make sense of the world, process our feelings or treat one another. What is at stake is something very basic about the parameters of the social construction of the self in modern society. There may be biological consequences as well. I have been troubled by the possibility — which I cannot get many of my colleagues to take seriously — that having too low a threshold for beginning or maintaining our patients on antidepressants may actually perpetuate or worsen depressive dysfunction of the brain. Although antidepressants are not, in a rigid sense, addictive, their use may cause a self-perpetuating necessity to continue to use them. I hope to have more to say about that in the future as I clarify and extend my thinking about this issue.

Will Vermont Secede from the Union?

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“The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State. Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms.” (Washington Post via Alternet)

Will Vermont Secede from the Union?

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“The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State. Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms.” (Washington Post via Alternet)

AugCog

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Augmented Cognition International Society: “Limitations in human cognition are due to intrinsic restrictions in the number of mental tasks that a person can execute at one time, and this capacity itself may fluctuate from moment to moment depending on a host of factors including mental fatigue, novelty, boredom and stress. As computational interfaces have become more prevalent in society and increasingly complex with regard to the volume and type of information presented, researchers have investigated novel ways to detect these bottlenecks and have devised and continue to determine strategies to aid users and improve their performance by effectively accommodating capabilities and limitations in human information processing and decision making.

A main goal of the field of Augmented Cognition (AugCog) is to research and develop technologies capable of extending, by an order of magnitude or more, the information management capacity of individuals working with 21st Century computing technologies.”

Military to use bomb-sniffing robots

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“As it increases its use of robots in war zones, the military will begin using an explosive-sniffing version that will allow soldiers to better detect roadside bombs, which account for more than 70 percent of U.S. casualties in
Iraq.

…There are nearly 5,000 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from about 150 in 2004. Soldiers use them to search caves and buildings for insurgents, detect mines and ferret out roadside and car bombs.” (Yahoo! News)

Why do we sleep?

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“Promoting changes in brain circuitry may well be the fundamental purpose of slumber—the answer we’ve long been searching for. But it could also turn out to be a byproduct of something more fundamental still. For instance, some of the genes that are especially active during sleep seem to play a role in rebuilding cell membranes and synthesizing basic molecules like proteins and lipids. So sleep’s ultimate function could be to repair or rebuild brain cells in light of new experience, with reinforced circuitry as one result.” (Slate)

U.S. Iraq Role Is Called Illegal by Saudi King

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“King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told Arab leaders on Wednesday that the American occupation of Iraq was illegal and warned that unless Arab governments settled their differences, foreign powers like the United States would continue to dictate the region’s politics.

The king’s speech, at the opening of the Arab League meeting here, underscored growing differences between Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration as the Saudis take on a greater leadership role in the Middle East, partly at American urging.” (New York Times)

Bush’s Royal Trouble

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The Saudis too know how to read election results: “Abdullah’s bowing out of the April 17 event is, in fact, one more warning sign that the Bush administration’s downward spiral at home is undermining its ability to achieve its policy objectives abroad. Friends as well as foes see the need, or the chance, to distance themselves from the politically besieged Bush.” — Jim Hoagland (Washington Post)

Teenager Casts Light on a Shadowy Game

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‘I died and came back…’: “While asphyxiation games have been around for many years, a series of locally publicized deaths around the country over the last few years, coupled with a realization that teenagers are seeing the game on Internet sites like YouTube, and playing it in more threatening variations — more often, like Levi, alone with a rope — are sparking a vigorous and open discussion in schools and among parents’ groups, summer camp administrators and doctors.” (New York Times )

Swinging at Windmills

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A close look at Catholic conspiracy theories: “Question: Who’s afraid of Jews in the boardroom? Freemasons in the basement? Reds under the bed? Black helicopters in the sky? Answer: A surprising number of otherwise sensible people. Even under the new shadow of terrorism, old fears live on, breeding bogeys that knot together in a vipers’ tangle of menace.” (Crisis [thanks to walker])

whocalled.us

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whocalled.us: “The phone is ringing, and I don’t recognize the number, All Caller ID says is, ‘NAME UNAVAILABLE‘. Please help me figure out who is calling and what they want…” They keep a database of which numbers generate the most queries.

DefectiveByDesign.org

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A project of the Free Software Foundation: “…a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do. These products have been intentionally crippled from the users’ perspective, and are therefore “defective by design”. This campaign will identify these “defective” products, and target them for elimination. Our aim is the abolition of DRM as a social practice.”

The Right Kind of Pain

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London Review of Books’ editor Mark Greif on the Velvet Underground:

“The Velvet Underground showed that aural pain becomes pleasure especially when listening to it constitutes an act of affiliation with a higher, because worse and more ‘transgressive’, standard of life. The person who doesn’t like being abused by Cale’s viola, or the badly recorded guitars of White Light/White Heat, is stupid, straight. The person who learns the pleasure of the abuse, who will listen to the 17 minutes of ‘Sister Ray’ and then put it on again, has ascended to a higher sphere – or rather descended into the underground – simply by the act of listening, with or without actual access to works, spoon, smack, transvestites, tenements, whips or leather boots.”

In some interesting senses, the essay seems an overgrown collegiate “compare and contrast” writing exercise, posing the Velvet Underground against the Grateful Dead, East Coast vs. West Coast, punk against hippie. Although we usually think of the former as having succeeded the latter, because of the Velvets’ prescience and the Dead’s longevity they were contemporaries.

Gov’t to take a hard look at horror

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Torture, murder and deadly plagues, all making their way to a theater near you. “The Federal Trade Commission is putting the final touches on a follow-up to its September 2000 report on the marketing to children of violent movies, music and video games. The first such assessment in three years, it will examine the selling practices of a mainstream entertainment industry that in the interim has become increasingly dependent on abductions, maimings, decapitations and other mayhem once kept away from studio slates.” (New York Times )

Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?

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“For more than a half-century, auditory hallucinations have primarily been studied and discussed in terms of severe mental illness, most notably schizophrenia, and linked to bizarre delusions, disordered thought and emotional dissociation. Approximately 75 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia hear voices, and for the majority the experience is overwhelmingly negative. Those voices may issue commands, comment sarcastically on everyday actions or berate, curse and insult the hearer. As many as one-third of people with schizophrenia attempt suicide; as many as one-fifth hear voices that command them to do so. [The Hearing Voices Network, a small but influential support group founded in 1991 and based in Manchester, UK], does not dispute that auditory hallucinations are frequently painful: many of the organization’s leading members have endured harrowing voices themselves and, at one time or another, sought psychiatric help.

What H.V.N. does dispute is that the psychological anguish caused by hearing voices is indicative of an overarching mental illness. This argument, disseminated through a quarterly newsletter, numerous pamphlets and speeches and alternative mental-health journals, are as voluminous and diverse as its membership. But H.V.N.’s brief against psychiatry can be boiled down to two core positions. The first is that many more people hear voices, and hear many more kinds of voices, than is usually assumed. The second is that auditory hallucination — or “voice-hearing,” H.V.N.’s more neutral preference — should be thought of not as a pathological phenomenon in need of eradication but as a meaningful, interpretable experience, intimately linked to a hearer’s life story and, more commonly than not, to unresolved personal traumas. In 2005, Louise Pembroke, a prominent member of H.V.N., proposed a World Hearing Voices Day (held the next year) that would “challenge negative attitudes toward people who hear voices on the incorrect assumption that this is in itself a sign of illness, an assumption made about them that is not based on their own experiences, is stigmatizing, isolating and makes people ill.” (New York Times Magazine)

Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?

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“For more than a half-century, auditory hallucinations have primarily been studied and discussed in terms of severe mental illness, most notably schizophrenia, and linked to bizarre delusions, disordered thought and emotional dissociation. Approximately 75 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia hear voices, and for the majority the experience is overwhelmingly negative. Those voices may issue commands, comment sarcastically on everyday actions or berate, curse and insult the hearer. As many as one-third of people with schizophrenia attempt suicide; as many as one-fifth hear voices that command them to do so. [The Hearing Voices Network, a small but influential support group founded in 1991 and based in Manchester, UK], does not dispute that auditory hallucinations are frequently painful: many of the organization’s leading members have endured harrowing voices themselves and, at one time or another, sought psychiatric help.

What H.V.N. does dispute is that the psychological anguish caused by hearing voices is indicative of an overarching mental illness. This argument, disseminated through a quarterly newsletter, numerous pamphlets and speeches and alternative mental-health journals, are as voluminous and diverse as its membership. But H.V.N.’s brief against psychiatry can be boiled down to two core positions. The first is that many more people hear voices, and hear many more kinds of voices, than is usually assumed. The second is that auditory hallucination — or “voice-hearing,” H.V.N.’s more neutral preference — should be thought of not as a pathological phenomenon in need of eradication but as a meaningful, interpretable experience, intimately linked to a hearer’s life story and, more commonly than not, to unresolved personal traumas. In 2005, Louise Pembroke, a prominent member of H.V.N., proposed a World Hearing Voices Day (held the next year) that would “challenge negative attitudes toward people who hear voices on the incorrect assumption that this is in itself a sign of illness, an assumption made about them that is not based on their own experiences, is stigmatizing, isolating and makes people ill.” (New York Times Magazine)

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

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Beginning to explain it means questioning the assumption that you have to explain humor: “Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees and rats. They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke — or, to be precise, the first stand-up routine to kill with an audience of primates.” (New York Times )

An Inside-the-Bushies Mentality

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David Ignatius: “Here’s the challenge for the Democrats: Become the party that fixes things, that solves problems, that respects expertise and professionalism. Let the GOP be the party of smart alecks and know-it-alls and smirking e-mail writers. The Republicans have made a bed of political arrogance; let them sleep in it for a good long while.” (Washington Post op-ed)

Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.)

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My National Security Letter Gag Order: “It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author — who would have preferred to be named — is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author’s attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.” (Washington Post)

Pluto might still be a planet . . . over New Mexico

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“Pluto-traditionalists rejoice. The downgraded dot in the sky has regained its status as our solar system’s ninth planet. Or at least it is when it’s hovering over New Mexico.

That’s the gist of a nonbinding measure approved by House members this week. Rep. Joni Gutierrez introduced it, and for good reason, she says: The Las Cruces Democrat grew up two blocks from the astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet, or, um, planet, if there’s any chance it’s above us right now.” (Albuquerque Tribune)

March Madness

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The Gonzales office pool: “It’s looking like after dumping on the Geneva Convention, ignoring the Constitution and firing public servants for not toeing the Bush line, Alberto Gonzales may have to resign as Attorney General. We sure hope so — it would be a big step toward restoring the nation of laws we know and love.

If you guess the date and time Gonzales steps down, we’ll give you a year’s supply of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to celebrate.” (True Majority)

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment

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People with this rare injury express increased willingness to kill or harm others to save lives: “the findings, published online by the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision-making, and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments. The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

“I think it’s very convincing now that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,” said Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain, and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in these people is clearly intact.”” (New York Times )

Happy Ostara

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“Sping has arrived and the day and night are balanced. Ostara is the vernal equinox, when the God and Goddess walk the fields, causing the animals to reproduce. Some traditions view this as a time of courtship between the God and Goddess. Ostara is the German Goddess of fertility and rebirth, but also of enchantment, innocence and dawn.”

http://pages.infinit.net/haiku/images/basho.gif' cannot be displayed]First day of spring–
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.

— Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694)
Translated by Robert Hass

Cellar door

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Wikipedia entry: “A widely repeated claim holds that the phrase cellar-door is the most beautiful in the English language… Cellar door is a combination of words in the English language once characterized by J. R. R. Tolkien to have an especially beautiful sound. In his 1955 essay “English and Welsh”, commenting on his affection towards the Welsh language, Tolkien wrote:

“Most English-speaking people…will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.”

…Nonetheless, this phrase has been subject to a legendary degree of misattribution. In common circulation, this pronouncement is commonly attributed to “a famous linguist”. [3] It has also been mistakenly attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker[4], and Robert Frost although no such texts have surfaced. The most detailed account alludes to a survey, possibly conducted around the 1940s, probing the word in the English language generally thought to be the most beautiful. Contributing to this survey, American writer H. L. Mencken supposedly claimed that a Chinese student, who knew little or no English, especially liked the phrase cellar door — not for what it meant, but rather for how it sounded. Some accounts describe the immigrant as Italian rather than Chinese. Another account suggests that it is a mispronunciation of the French words C’est de l’or, which can be translated as “It is gold”.In 1991, Jacques Barzun repeated the claim, attributing it to a “Japanese friend”…

References in literature, media and music follow.

Here is a link to other “beautiful (and not so beautiful) words, according to various references.”

Cellar door

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Wikipedia entry: “A widely repeated claim holds that the phrase cellar-door is the most beautiful in the English language… Cellar door is a combination of words in the English language once characterized by J. R. R. Tolkien to have an especially beautiful sound. In his 1955 essay “English and Welsh”, commenting on his affection towards the Welsh language, Tolkien wrote:

“Most English-speaking people…will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.”

…Nonetheless, this phrase has been subject to a legendary degree of misattribution. In common circulation, this pronouncement is commonly attributed to “a famous linguist”. [3] It has also been mistakenly attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker[4], and Robert Frost although no such texts have surfaced. The most detailed account alludes to a survey, possibly conducted around the 1940s, probing the word in the English language generally thought to be the most beautiful. Contributing to this survey, American writer H. L. Mencken supposedly claimed that a Chinese student, who knew little or no English, especially liked the phrase cellar door — not for what it meant, but rather for how it sounded. Some accounts describe the immigrant as Italian rather than Chinese. Another account suggests that it is a mispronunciation of the French words C’est de l’or, which can be translated as “It is gold”.In 1991, Jacques Barzun repeated the claim, attributing it to a “Japanese friend”…

References in literature, media and music follow.

Here is a link to other “beautiful (and not so beautiful) words, according to various references.”

Bad medicine in New Orleans

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The Katrina-ravaged health care system is ‘critically ill’: “Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the healthcare system in New Orleans remains in such disarray that patients with heart disease and cancer are getting inadequate care, local medical authorities told Congress on Tuesday. By one estimate, they said, the number of deaths may have increased by more than 40% from pre-Katrina figures.

The federal government has pumped in millions of dollars in aid, but hospitals and clinics that care for the poor — already strained before the storm — have not recovered. Behind the failure to improve healthcare in New Orleans is a squabble between state and federal officials with competing visions.” (Los Angeles Times)

The Pragmatism of Prolonged War

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‘War Managers’ are not ‘War Enders’: “More than ever, in the aftermath of the Scooter Libby verdict, the country’s major news outlets are willing to acknowledge that the political road to war in Iraq was paved with deceptions. But the same media outlets were integral to laying the flagstones along the path to war — and they’re now integral to prolonging the war.

With the same logic of one, two, and three years ago, the conformist media wisdom is that a cutoff of funds for the war is not practical. Likewise, on Capitol Hill, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing about how the war must wind down — but the money for it, we’re told, must keep moving. Like two rails along the same track, the dispensers of conventional media and political wisdom carry us along to more and more and more war.

The antiwar movement is now coming to terms with measures being promoted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi and Reid have a job to do. The antiwar movement has a job to do. The jobs are not the same.” (FAIR)

Don’t mention polar bears, Bush tells US scientists

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“The Bush Administration has been accused once again of gagging US government scientists by getting them to agree not to talk about polar bears, sea ice and climate change during official overseas trips.

A leaked memorandum issued by a regional director of the US Department of the Interior states that officials within the US Fish and Wildlife Service will limit their discussions when travelling in countries bordering the Arctic region because of sensitivities about climate change.” (Independent.UK)

Feline Reactions to Bearded Men

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I have assiduously resisted the weblogging trend of posting cute cat photos, even on Fridays (yes, my family keeps cats as well as dogs), but I could not resist this research paper by Catherine Maloney, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut; Sarah J. Lichtblau, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois; Nadya Karpook, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida; Carolyn Chou, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Anthony Arena-DeRosa, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

“Abstract

Cats were exposed to photographs of bearded men. The beards were of various sizes, shapes, and styles. The cats’ responses were recorded and analyzed.” (Scientist, Interrupted )

Scroll down the paper for the study’s findings. (And, yes, some of us in my family have beards…)

Housekeeping

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My webhost mistakenly took my site down for a few days there, prompting panicked emails to me from all both of my faithful readers. As you see, FmH is back up now. Sorry…

Situationist International Anthology

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“In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people’s passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of détournement. Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its “Communist” pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then — although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972 — situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world.

The Situationist International Anthology, generally recognized as the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English, presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti and internal documents, ranging from early experiments in “psychogeography” to lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other crises and upheavals of the sixties.

Situationist International Anthology
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited and translated from the French by Ken Knabb
Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006
ISBN 978-0-939682-04-1
532 pages. $20.00″

R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard, 77

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All of our values are simulated. “One of his better known theories postulates that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. This seductive “hyperreality,” where shopping malls, amusement parks and mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films dominate, is drained of authenticity and meaning. Since illusion reigns, he counseled people to give up the search for reality.” New York Times R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard

The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood

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“Childhood is a syndrome which has only recently begun to receive serious attention from clinicians. The syndrome itself, however, is not at all recent. As early as the 8th century, the Persian historian Kidnom made references to ‘short, noisy creatures,’ who may well have been what we now call ‘children.’ The treatment of children, however, was unknown until this century, when so-called ‘child psychologists’ and ‘child psychiatrists’ became common. Despite this history of clinical neglect, it has been estimated that well over half of all Americans alive today have experienced childhood directly (Suess, 1983). In fact, the actual numbers are probably much higher, since these data are based on self-reports which may be subject to social desirability biases and retrospective distortion. The growing acceptance of childhood as a distinct phenomenon is reflected in the proposed inclusion of the syndrome in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, or DSM-IV, of the American Psychiatric Association (1990). Clinicians are still in disagreement about the significant clinical features of childhood, but the proposed DSM-IV will almost certainly include the following core features:

1. Congenital onset
2. Dwarfism
3. Emotional lability and immaturity
4. Knowledge deficits
5. Legume anorexia”

NASA long ago devised mental breakdown plan

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But that was for a psychological crisis in space, not back on Earth: “Long before NASA was confronted with an off-duty astronaut’s bizarre behavior and arrest in Florida earlier this month, the agency had developed procedures to deal with a mental breakdown in space.

The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier’s wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.

The procedures have been in effect for at least six years, but the space agency did not develop any protocols for dealing with astronauts who become unstable while on the ground.” (Houston Chronicle)

Also:

“Welcome to Human Interactions in Space, a research program dedicated to identifying and characterizing the psychosocial issues that affect the health and well-being of space crewmembers and the mission control personnel that support them. The program goal is to develop countermeasures that will enhance the safety and success of people involved with long-duration space missions.”

Nader says he may run in 2008…

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…especially if Hillary gets the nomination (San Francisco Chronicle). He says he’s going to wait and see what the Democrats come up with. Many hold Nader responsible for bringing us Bush and Co. I am all for an idealist gadfly who can push the Democrats toward more progressive stances but his intransigence and egotism appear boundless. However, he is not the problem but only a symptom of a system which does not have room for idealism and a segment of the liberal voting public too myopic to realize that (amongst all the other versions of voter myopia that plague the American electorate…) If he runs, I hope that those who voted for him in the past have learned their lesson and will not play their small but perhaps decisive part in handing the election to the Republicans again.

The Obama Myth

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Factual Discrepancies to the Selma Claim: “Sunday’s march in Selma, Ala., may have been a sacred commemoration of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ civil rights march of 1965, but beneath it all lurked raw politics, with Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., competing fiercely for black voters.

While local churches were packed with parishioners, just a few hundred yards apart on Martin Luther King Jr. Street, the rival Democratic presidential candidates made their pitches, both praising civil rights leaders for paving their way.

‘Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Ala. I’m here because somebody marched for our freedom. I’m here because y’all sacrificed for me,’ Obama told a crowd.” (KTRE)

Did anyone hear the soundbites from Obama’s Selma speech? He certainly has developed a down-home accent recently. I hope this won’t be a harbinger of a wholesale attempt to reinvent himself similar to blue-blood New England preppie Dubya’s vote-trolling transformation into a drawlin’ Texas shucks-jes’-folks common man.

Nader says he may run in 2008…

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…especially if Hillary gets the nomination (San Francisco Chronicle). He says he’s going to wait and see what the Democrats come up with. Many hold Nader responsible for bringing us Bush and Co. I am all for an idealist gadfly who can push the Democrats toward more progressive stances but his intransigence and egotism appear boundless. However, he is not the problem but only a symptom of a system which does not have room for idealism and a segment of the liberal voting public too myopic to realize that (amongst all the other versions of voter myopia that plague the American electorate…) If he runs, I hope that those who voted for him in the past have learned their lesson and will not play their small but perhaps decisive part in handing the election to the Republicans again.

Dowd now believes Gore "prescient" on several issues…

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…despite previously belittling him. ‘In her February 28 column, titled “Ozone Man Sequel” (subscription required), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described former Vice President Al Gore as the “man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism and Iraq,” and wrote that “[i]t must be excruciating not only to lose a presidency you’ve won because the Supreme Court turned partisan and stopped the vote, but to then watch the madness of King George and Tricky Dick II as they misled their way into serial catastrophes.” Dowd wondered who Gore must blame more for his defeat in the 2000 election: “Does he blame himself? Does he blame the voting machines? Ralph Nader? Robert Shrum? Naomi Wolf? How about Bush Inc. and Clinton Inc.?” Yet, as blogger Bob Somerby noted (Daily Howler, ) Dowd omitted an obvious other potential target of blame: the media. Indeed, Dowd herself, while now praising Gore for being “prescient” on such issues, relentlessly mocked Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign and onward for what she described as Gore’s “obsessions about global warming and the information highway.” Dowd has also compared Gore to the “wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party” for his criticism of the Iraq war; and has repeatedly furthered numerous falsehoods about Gore, such as that Gore once claimed to have “invented the Internet…” ‘ (Media Matters)

The Conservatives’ "Secular Problem"

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Bill Scher writes in The Huffington Post: “Today through Saturday, when Republicans and conservatives gather in Washington for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, will they face up to the biggest obstacle preventing them from connecting with voters? Their ‘secular problem.’

Lots of ink has been spilled about how Democrats and liberals suffer from a ‘religion problem’ — a perceived hostility towards Christianity and religion in general.
But Pew Research Center exit poll data from the 2006 midterm elections shows the opposite.

Democrats crushed Republicans among secular voters, broadly defined as those who attend church seldom (favoring Democrats 60% to 38%) or never (67% to 30%). Republicans retained strong support among those who attend church more than weekly. But among those who only go weekly — the larger portion of the religious vote — the Republican lead shrunk from 15 points to 7.

In short, Republicans failed to be competitive among secular voters, while Democrats were at least competitive among regular churchgoers. And since the secular vote is roughly equal to the regular churchgoing vote, according to the last several national election exit polls, that means Republicans and their conservative base have a far bigger secular problem than their rivals have a religion problem.”

Ready to take on the world

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Al-Qaeda’s resurgence: “KARACHI – Al-Qaeda will this year significantly step up its global operations after centralizing its leadership and reviving its financial lifelines. Crucially, al-Qaeda has developed missile and rocket technology with the capability of carrying chemical, biological and nuclear warheads, according to an al-Qaeda insider who spoke to Asia Times Online. While al-Qaeda will continue to operate in Afghanistan and Iraq, it will broaden its global perspective to include Europe and hostile Muslim states, Asia Times Online has learned. For the first time since its attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, this could be al-Qaeda’s year on the offensive. “

With gratitude to the American neocons.

Last Throes of Cheney’s Credibility

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Joe Conason: “…the broader collapse of Middle East policy under Cheney’s intellectual stewardship. Thanks to his belligerent outlook, we have abandoned the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, encouraged both Shiite and Sunni extremism, diminished our own military strength, and made democracy synonymous with irreparable destruction. No wonder the vice president thinks things are going so well.” (truthdig)

The Redirection

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//www.threeriversonline.com/56147511_f7ad2a129b.jpg' cannot be displayed]Seymour Hersh’s new New Yorker piece details the ways that, as our Iraq policy has gone all to hell and the dysadministration has turned more to destabilizing Iran, we end up finding common cause with some of our so-called enemies in the Twat ® (“the war against terror”). The New Yorker, helpfully, links to all of Hersh’s Iran pieces, which make interesting sequential reading:

  • The Coming Wars (1/24/05): “What the Pentagon can now do in secret.”

  • The Iran Plans (4/17/06): “Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?”

  • Last Stand (7/10/06): “The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy.”

  • The Next Act (11/27/06): “Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?”
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US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

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“Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.” (Sunday Times of London)

Highly placed military officers would of course be sacked if they made that sentiment public… unless an unassailable number of them did it at the same time. My guess is that there would be considerably more than five that way…

US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

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“Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.” (Sunday Times of London)

Highly placed military officers would of course be sacked if they made that sentiment public… unless an unassailable number of them did it at the same time. My guess is that there would be considerably more than five that way…

Here comes Newt

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Dick Morris: “Newt, consigned by many observers to Elizabeth Dole or Dan Quayle status in this GOP nominating process, appears to be moving up into contention, overtaking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and battling to be the conservative alternative to either former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or Arizona Sen. John McCain. ” (The Hill)

Last of the True Believers

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“Even if Congress moves next to fiddle with funding the war, [Bush] might just have the upper hand.

History is on the president’s side. Even in unpopular wars, Congress has failed to sustain major efforts to control the purse strings. As unpopular as the Vietnam War was, Congress never cut funding while U.S. troops were on the ground in Indochina.

While tolerating the right of lawmakers to “express their opinion” in a resolution, Bush is signaling that a fierce fight awaits those who aim to cut war funds. For starters, he will not shy away from accusing Congress of abandoning the troops, no matter how clever Democratic leaders might be in crafting measures that undercut Bush policy without restricting the flow of resources for troops on the ground.” (CQ)

Hell hath no fury like Hillary

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Toby Harnden: “A delicious spat between the Obama and Hillary camps today after coruscating anti-Clinton comments from Hollywood mogul David Geffen that vividly encapsulated every concern about Hillary and Bill that nestles in the hearts of Democrats wary of the couple.

What did it reveal? That this will be a bloody campaign. That Team Obama is prepared to do battle. That Team Clinton wants to bury Obama early. And that Hillary will respond to every slight with ferocious indignation while protesting with a straight face that she only wants to run a positive campaign.

Geffen’s comments to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times were incredibly damaging to Hillary. Dowd is one of the most influential political journalists in the US. Two decades ago, she sunk the presidential campaign of Joe Biden. Hillary wants to make sure Maureen doesn’t do the same thing to her.” (Telegraph.UK)

Geffen’s major misgivings speak to the unelectability of Clinton and the vulnerability to giving the election easily to the Republicans if she is the nominee.

Emotional Decisions

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“Emotions are ordinarily conceived as irrational occurrences that cloud judgment and distort reasoning. This view is well entrenched, despite work in both philosophy and psychology that establishes a strong connection between emotion and cognition. During recent years there has been an explosion of research which indicates that rather than being natural adversaries, rational and emotional processes function together. Barnes and Thagard (in press) argue that emotions and inferences are both necessary when we empathize with other people. Social psychologists have explored the function of emotions in social perception and judgment (Forgas, 1991). But the interdependence of emotional and cognitive processes is perhaps most powerfully presented in recent neurobiological studies which establish that emotion is indispensable in rational decision making.” (— Barnes and Thagard)

Some sweet news

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“Scientists funded in part by the Mars Inc. candy company delivered the not-unwelcome news Sunday morning during what was described as the first systematic review of chocolate’s effects on learning and memory.

A two-hour symposium on the neurobiology of chocolate, billed as a potentially ‘mind-altering experience,’ drew a standing-room-only crowd during the annual meeting in San Francisco of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Five years ago, a similar meeting popularized evidence suggesting that flavanols, a chemical found in the beans from which chocolate is made, have beneficial effects on cardiovascular health.

Now it seems chocolate might do even more.” `(San Francisco Chronicle)

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar

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A Newbery-winning book has been banned from some school libraries around the country.: “The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.Yet there it is on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” (New York Times )

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar

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A Newbery-winning book has been banned from some school libraries around the country.: “The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.Yet there it is on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” (New York Times )

25-million year-old frog?

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“In this photo released by the Institute of Natural History and Ecology of the state of Chiapas, a chunk of amber containing an almost one-centimeter (0.4-inch) frog that was recently discovered by a miner in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, Feb. 16, 2007. If authenticated, researchers believe that the frog could have been preserved in the amber for 25 million years.”

"Umpteen" Denials = "Doth Protest too Much?"

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Defense Chief Again Says U.S. Will Not Wage War With Iran: “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that the United States had no intention of attacking Iran and that any American military efforts against it would be confined to Iraq to disrupt the smuggling of bomb-making materials over the border.

‘For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran,’ he said at a Pentagon news conference. ‘We are not planning a war with Iran.’ ” (New York Times )

How Lilly sells Zyprexa

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In an installment of Slate‘s “Hot Documents” series, a 2001 memo from Lilly’s marketing department lays out the battle plan for marketing the antipsychotic medication Zyprexa (Lilly’s brand of olanzapine). It is commonplace to observe that the health of the American people is hostage to Big Pharma these days; several important aspects of just how this has been brought about are highlighted here.

The major therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology during my professional career in psychiatry have been the development of new types of two classes of medications, antidepressants and antipsychotics, the rationale for developing which has been the notion that they are less prone to cause side effects than older antidepressants or antipsychotics, and thus far more tolerable and less complicated for our patients to take. Eli Lilly has been at the forefront of these developments with its products Prozac (fluoxetine), the first of the SSRI antidepressants, and Zyprexa (olanzapine), one of the first two new-generation “atypical” antipsychotics.

I have long ranted about prescribing trends in psychiatric medications which follow from these developments. The vast expansion in prescribing of these classes of drugs, often for inappropriate or marginal indications, and decreasing intensity of followup and supervision of their use, leads to rampant problems. These have included the highly-publicized seeming association between antidepressant prescribing and suicidality and (to a lesser extent) incidents of violence and rage; the discomfort associated with discontinuing antidepressants too rapidly; and, as the current article highlights, the epidemic of serious and supposedly unanticipated metabolic complications emerging with the use of the atypical antipsychotic medications.

A more pervasive and perhaps more serious complication than these has been the changing message we are giving our patients — that reaching for the prescription pad can replace the careful crafting of a relationship with an afflicted individual that allows them to come to grips with their life problems; that people do not need to be seen as individuals but rather merely instances of a diagnostic class; that an external agent (a doctor; a medication) can fix them with little effort on their part; that they are passive witnesses rather than active agents in their recovery and, by extension, in their lives; that there is less and less room for personal responsibility in life; that there is little value to careful diagnosis and little distinction between diseases requiring treatment and “cosmetic” personality variants one must either accept or modify slowly and painstakingly.

The leaked memo confirms what I have assumed — that Big Pharma has had deliberate and explicit strategies to persuade less qualified practitioners to prescribe these medications; to prescribe them with less care and supervision; to prescribe them for a broader range of conditions for which they are less appropriate; and to disregard the serious complications they can cause.

All of these, of course, have one goal and one goal only — to maximize profit and commodify already horribly disenfranchised patients with mental health problems. And, when the medications rather than the marketing practices are blamed for the complications and adverse outcomes that follow, mental health treatment is vilified, psychiatric illnesses further stigmatized, and suffering individuals dissuaded from seeking appropriate care that could alleviate their serious distress.

Must know terms for today’s intelligentsia

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…”[A] startling number of so-called ‘intellectuals’ remain grossly ignorant of pending technologies and the revealing sciences (the postmodernists immediately come to mind). Today’s intelligentsia, in order to qualify for such a designation, must have the requisite vocabulary with which to address valid social concerns and effectively assess the future.

Here is a list of must-know terms (there are many, many more, but these are IMO the most critical and fundamental)…” (Sentient Developments)

Extra Senses

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“Aristotle defined our five senses over two and a half thousand years ago. But in fact we have many more. In this five part series, Graham Easton delves into the Extra Senses that we take for granted. He finds out how they work and meets some remarkable people who experience these senses in a unique way.” (BBC – Radio 4)

Time Travelers: Lay Off Grandpas

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“You know what’s getting really tedious? All these time travelers. It seems like two weeks don’t go by without some jerk with a time belt and a bad attitude blinking into my living room and trying to zap me into molecules, usually right in the middle of House. Some of them are members of something called ‘The Chrono-Police,’ some are plucky adventurers from the 30th century, and one of them was a crazy scientist/inventor from 2035 who tried to brain me with a bust of President Clinton-Bush.” — Lore Sjoberg (Wired News)

R.I.P. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy

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Innovator of Family Therapy Dies at 86: “Dr. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, a psychiatrist who helped establish a powerful therapy for mental illness that brings patients’ extended families into treatment as allies, died Jan. 28 at his home in Glenside, Pa. He was 86.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Dr. Catherine Ducommun-Nagy, also a psychiatrist.

Dr. Nagy (pronounced nahj), as he was known, was one of several therapists, including Murray Bowen and Lyman C. Wynne, who in the 1950s and 1960s began to look beyond individual psychology to understand and try to treat severe mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia. (Dr. Wynne died on Jan. 17.)

Dr. Nagy noticed that destructive patterns of family interaction often spanned generations. To address them, he brought patients’ grandparents and children into therapy sessions, if possible, as well as parents and siblings. He found that by working to balance loyalties and ethical obligations among family members, he could help soothe patients’ symptoms, if not always cure them.

This work became the foundation for six books and some 80 articles, many of which have been read widely in translation in Europe and elsewhere. One of his most influential books, Invisible Loyalties (Harper & Row, 1973), written with Geraldine M. Spark, inspired a generation of therapists to think more broadly about mental health as part of a family system, dependent on hidden loyalties and commitments.” (New York Times )

During the last generation, we have seen the waning influence of extended family in American social structure. This might have made Nagy’s therapeutic techniques passé. However, what is more enduring and appealing has been his introduction of the notion of ethical obligations and commitments in family life. Talking about fairness and unfairness is a very experience-near way of addressing some of the distress people feel in families, and it is certainly amplified, and inherently more difficult to talk about, when one of them has a major mental illness. Nagy’s powerful therapeutic techniques never had the notoriety or sex appeal of those of some of his more flamboyant or photogenic colleagues, but he will be missed by many thoughtful therapists who treat the family context.

Afternoon nap may lower heart disease risk

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“Taking midday naps often may significantly reduce the risk of death from coronary heart disease, according to a new study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Athens Medical School (UAMS) in Greece.

Subjects who took a nap regardless of the frequency and duration were one third less likely to die from heart attack or stroke than those who did not, the researchers reported in the February 12, 2007 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine.

But some experts quickly warned that people should not rely on taking a nap to reduce their risk of heart disease…” (foodconsumer.org)

I am not sure if the napping is the independent variable here. It may be that people who take naps take better care of themselves in general, are less driven and more relaxed, etc. Correlation is not causation.

Pace says he hasn’t seen evidence of Iranian meddling

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“A day after the U.S. military charged Iran’s government with shipping powerful explosive devices to Shiite Muslim fighters in Iraq to use against American troops, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday that he hasn’t seen any intelligence to support the claim.” (San Jose Mercury News)

It is incredible that the dysadministration be allowed to get away with this yet again. First of all, the proportion of the IED-related casualties arising from the supposedly-Iranian devices is miniscule. Secondly, even if the devices in question originate in Iran, there is no evidence that Iranians have brought them into Iraq or that their use is state-sponsored. They may just as well have been bought on the black market. And wouldn’t it be in the interests of at least some of the Iraqi insurgents to turn the US’ attention in the direction of Iranian meddling? Encouraging the extension of armed conflict to Iran would further diffuse American power, bog us down even more severely and create the opportunity for a humiliating American defeat an even more humiliating American defeat than we are undergoing now.

March 3, 2007, Lunar Eclipse

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“The next eclipse is right around the corner: Saturday, March 3, 2007… The phenomenon will be visible from parts of all seven continents including the eastern half of North America. In the USA, the eclipse will already be underway when the moon rises on Saturday evening. Observing tip: Find a place with a clear view of the eastern horizon and station yourself there at sunset. As the sun goes down behind you, a red moon will rise before your eyes. Rising moons are often reddened by clouds or pollution, but this moon will be the deep, extraordinary red only seen during a lunar eclipse.” (NASA )

Here, There and Everywhere

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“I am an American consumer, and the battle to catch the corner of my eye is growing more desperate by the hour. Desperate and counterproductive, it now seems clear. We all know what happened in Boston the other week, when the guerrilla marketing of a cartoon series triggered a grand mal metro seizure, but only I know what happened in Los Angeles several days earlier. I was standing in an airport security line when I spotted an advertisement for Rolodexes printed across the bottom of the tub into which I was about to set my shoes. The ad bewildered me for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t expect to see it there (even though, by now, I should have, since researchers estimate that the average city dweller is exposed to 5,000 ads per day, up from 2,000 per day three decades ago). The second and greater mystery, however, was why a major company would want me to associate its product with the experience of being searched. Rolodex — the official corporate sponsor of airport paranoia. It didn’t make sense.” — Walter Kirn (New York Times)

Bill Maher: a lesson in Smith death

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Maher cuts through the media circus: “‘If you want to find something in this that’s meaningful, it’s a good time to make the point that people in this country die from prescription drugs, I think that’s what it was. I think that when you’re 39 years old and you turn up dead … it’s probably because of drugs. In this country, as long as your name is on the little bottle, you’re cool. Marijuana has been tested exhaustively over the last 30 years–just by me. I don’t remember anybody ever dying from that. But that’s illegal, and whatever she was doing is cool because it’s a pharmaceutical drug.'” (Chicago Tribune)

About That Mean Streak of Yours:

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Psychiatry Can Do Only So Much: “On the other hand, maybe he was mean by nature, a concept that may sound heretical coming from a psychiatrist because it seems dangerously close to rendering a moral judgment on a patient’s soul, something doctors should doubtless leave to theologians and philosophers.

But if some people turn out happy and good despite a lifetime of withering hardships, why can’t some people be mean or bad for no discernible reason?

There can be a relationship between nastiness and mental illness, and many therapists assume that when patients are mentally ill and mean, the illness is probably the cause of the ill temper.

But human meanness is far more common than all the mental illness in the population combined, so the contribution of mental illness to this essential human trait must be very small indeed.” — Richard Friedman MD (New York Times )

This is one in my continuing series of posts objecting to the medicalization of everyday life, which is particularly rampant in the mental health field. Psychiatrists are taught, as the writer above alludes to, to avoid passing moral judgment on others’ souls, but what if the only other way to validate your perceptions of or reactions to the way someone does business with you is to diagnose them with a disorder?

One of my particular interests in my work is the treatment of irritability and interpersonal violence, some of which is attributable to personality disorders and some to brain pathologies. Some, but not most…

The duty of the psychiatrist is as much to know when not to treat as to treat. We have to be very careful not to contribute to the epidemic of erosion of personal responsibility for behavior in modern society. Giving someone a diagnosis can serve to let them “off the hook”; this is a relief and a service when it is appropriate but a travesty when it is not, as it often is not. How many times have I heard a patient say, “I can’t help it. They tell me I’ve got a chemical imbalance” or the like?

An essay such as Friedman’s is a bold affront to a worrisome facet of the medical status quo, to be heartily welcomed from one curmudgeon to another.

Bill Maher: a lesson in Smith death

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Maher cuts through the media circus: “‘If you want to find something in this that’s meaningful, it’s a good time to make the point that people in this country die from prescription drugs, I think that’s what it was. I think that when you’re 39 years old and you turn up dead … it’s probably because of drugs. In this country, as long as your name is on the little bottle, you’re cool. Marijuana has been tested exhaustively over the last 30 years–just by me. I don’t remember anybody ever dying from that. But that’s illegal, and whatever she was doing is cool because it’s a pharmaceutical drug.'” (Chicago Tribune)

A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors

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‘Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events. But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.

…”For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.” ‘ (New York Times )

The Unseen and Unexplained, Inching Closer to the Truth

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“Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that Lost is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural.

A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?” The answer came as categorically as the words under the Magic 8-Ball: “Yes. Absolutely.”

By itself, Lost may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside Heroes, as well as Medium, Ghost Whisperer and Raines, a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

Lost… is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning…” (New York Times )

Point well-taken, but shouldn’t we be hearkening at least as far back as The X-Files and Millennium, if not Twilight Zone and Kolchak, with such concerns?

Koreans Share Their Secret for Chicken With a Crunch

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Koreans Share Their Secret for Chicken With a Crunch – New York Times: “Many Asian cooking traditions include deep-fried chicken, but the popular cult of crunchy, spicy, perfectly nongreasy chicken — the apotheosis of the Korean style — is a recent development.

In the New York area, Korean-style fried chicken places have just begun to appear, reproducing the delicate crust, addictive seasoning and moist meat Koreans are devoted to.” (New York Times )

I am addicted to this stuff (although never a lover of American Southern fried chicken…).

Wash. Proposal Would Annul Childless Marriages

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After three childless years, marriages would be unrecognized and partners ineligible for marital benefits: ““For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation … The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine,’ said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage.'” (NWCN via walker)

Watada’s Court-Martial Ends in Mistrial

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The Army lieutenant who refused to deploy to Iraq did not fully understand a document he signed admitted to elements of the charges, the judge ruled. Watada was charged with conduct unbecoming and missing movement for staying behind when his brigade shipped out last June, as covered here. (I think war resisters deserve broad coverage, as I have explained.) Watada asserted that, because the war was illegal, his responsibility as an Army officer was to disobey his deployment order. Does any reader know if, under military law, he can face a second court-martial after the mistrial?

Law Would Ban IPods When Crossing Street

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“Walk, jog or bicycle across a New York street with an iPod plugged in your ears and you could get slapped with a $100 ticket under a new law proposed by a legislator from Brooklyn. State Sen. Carl Kruger’s bill would also outlaw the use of cell phones, Blackberries, video games or other electronic devices when crossing the street.” (Washington Post)

Should cut down on the incidence of brain tumors in New York as well as pedestrian-vehicle accidents [grin]…