May is Mental Health Month which is, according to Mental Health America, meant to 'promote health and wellness in homes, communities, schools, and inform those who don't believe it's attainable.' Depression has been called a 'silent killer'; anxiety disorders and other psychiatric disorders have been called 'invisible as someone suffering from them may well have no obvious physical symptoms, even though that person may be experiencing deep pain within. Undiagnosed mental illness is said to be 'highly prevalent' and, too, a cause of 'needless morbidity.'
Further, even while rates of mood and anxiety disorders may seem to decline with age, a report in the May Archives of General Psychiatry has found that these conditions actually remain 'very common' in older adults, especially women. Researchers studied 2575 participants 55 years and older who were part of theNational Comorbidity Survey Replication NCS-R (43%, 55-64 years; 32%, 65-74 years; 20%, 75-84 years; 5%, 85 years). All were 'noninstitutionalized' and resided in households within the community. The study concluded that:
Prevalence rates of DSM-IV mood and anxiety disorders in late life tend to decline with age, but remain very common, especially in women. These results highlight the need for intervention and prevention strategies.
I've had the under-diagnosis of mental illness in older adults---and the lack of adequate treatment, with potentially tragic results---on my mind much of late.
My mother-in-law, Grace, died this past Mother's Day. She was 81 years old and had long been in very poor health, physically (she struggled to walk and had had both knees replaced in 2006) and mentally, for many years. She suffered from depression and anxiety and had been hospitalized for these throughout her life. During her last years, she rarely left her house deep in the New Jersey suburbs; I can't count how many times my husband Jimcoaxed and cajoled her to come walk with him around the block---'I'll be right beside you, Mom, holding your hand!"---or, when that seemed too daunting, up and down her long driveway. She was smart and curious and, when I first met her in 1994, loved to read five newspapers a day and send Jim a manila folder of clippings. Jim is a historian and his most recent book, On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, is rooted in Grace's love of movies and stories, and her roots in Hudson County, in New Jersey.
On the Irish Waterfront was published in August of 2009 but Grace was not able to read it. Her eyesight was gone as the result of a stroke. But even more, what Jim refers to as the 'depths of her emotional unease'---sporadically treated and not talked about---had had their toll. Lying pale on her bed in the nursing home with the TV set droning on overhead, she did not respond when Jim read the chapter in the acknowledgments about his mother reading excerpts from Jimmy Breslin's columns in the New York Herald Tribune out loud to her friends over the phone.
And I'll always wonder, how might Grace have smiled with that little pleased laugh to hear such stories of herself, had her mental illness been treated consistently and understood for what it is, rather than being explained away as this or that physical ailment, or as a personality trait, or just because 'she was old and it must be Alzheimer's'?
As the study concludes:
'The study of nationally representative samples provides evidence for research and policy planning that helps to define community-based priorities for future psychiatric research. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of individual and co-existing mood and anxiety disorders when studying older adults, even the oldest cohorts. Further study of risk factors, course and severity is needed to target intervention, prevention and health care needs.'
Yes, further study is needed.
'Even among the oldest cohorts.'
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
SEX AND THE OIL SPILL
Political Irony
Sex and the Gulf Oil Spill
Posted: 10 May 2010 08:39 PM PDT
Reagan famously stated that government was not the solution, government was the problem (while simultaneously growing government at unprecedented rates). But I’ve always thought that the reason Republicans believe government is always the problem is because they don’t know how to govern. Of course, there is an alternative theory that they want to prove that government is incompetent by purposely making it as incompetent as they can.
Regardless of which of these theories you might subscribe to, you couldn’t pick a better example of it than the recent oil spill in the gulf. After all, it was just two years ago that a major scandal was uncovered in the very group charged with overseeing safety in oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out, the Bush administration (especially Dick Cheney) seems to have purposely tried to destroy the MMS by filling it with the shadiest characters one can imagine. Personnel in the MMS were dealing cocaine and other drugs, had sex with (including orgies) and accepted lavish gifts from people in the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and steered government contracts to companies they owned on the side.
At the same time, the MMS gutted safety regulations, including removing requirements for safety equipment that more than likely would have prevented the huge gulf oil spill.
Sex and the Gulf Oil Spill
Posted: 10 May 2010 08:39 PM PDT
Reagan famously stated that government was not the solution, government was the problem (while simultaneously growing government at unprecedented rates). But I’ve always thought that the reason Republicans believe government is always the problem is because they don’t know how to govern. Of course, there is an alternative theory that they want to prove that government is incompetent by purposely making it as incompetent as they can.
Regardless of which of these theories you might subscribe to, you couldn’t pick a better example of it than the recent oil spill in the gulf. After all, it was just two years ago that a major scandal was uncovered in the very group charged with overseeing safety in oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out, the Bush administration (especially Dick Cheney) seems to have purposely tried to destroy the MMS by filling it with the shadiest characters one can imagine. Personnel in the MMS were dealing cocaine and other drugs, had sex with (including orgies) and accepted lavish gifts from people in the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and steered government contracts to companies they owned on the side.
At the same time, the MMS gutted safety regulations, including removing requirements for safety equipment that more than likely would have prevented the huge gulf oil spill.
Friday, May 7, 2010
80,000 CHEMICALS
U.S. facing 'grievous harm' from chemicals in air, food, water, panel says
By Lyndsey Layton
Friday, May 7, 2010; A03
An expert panel that advises the president on cancer said Thursday that Americans are facing "grievous harm" from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored.
The President's Cancer Panel called for a new national strategy that focuses on such threats in the environment and workplaces.
Epidemiologists have long maintained that tobacco use, diet and other factors are responsible for most cancers, and that chemicals and pollutants cause only a small portion -- perhaps 5 percent.
The presidential panel said that figure has been "grossly underestimated" but it did not provide a new estimate.
"With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action," the panel wrote in a report released Thursday.
Federal chemical laws are weak, funding for research and enforcement is inadequate, and regulatory responsibilities are split among too many agencies, the panel found.
Children are particularly vulnerable because they are smaller and are developing faster than adults, the panel found. The report noted unexplained rising rates of some cancers in children, and it referred to recent studies that have found industrial chemicals in umbilical-cord blood, which supplies nutrients to fetuses. "To a disturbing extent, babies are born 'pre-polluted,' " the panel wrote.
Health officials lack critical knowledge about the health impact of chemicals on fetuses and children, the report said.
In addition, the government's standards for safe chemical exposure in workplaces are outdated, it said.
In 2009, about 1.5 million American men, women and children had cancer diagnosed, and 562,000 people died from the disease.
"There are far too many known and suspected cancer-causing chemicals in products people, young and old, use every day of their lives," said Kenneth A. Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group. "Many of these chemicals are believed to be time bombs, altering the genetic-level switching mechanisms that lead to cancerous cellular growth in later life."
The panel said the country needs to overhaul existing chemical laws, a conclusion that has been supported by public health groups, environmental advocates, the Obama administration and even the chemical industry.
The current system places the burden on the government to prove that a chemical is unsafe before it can removed from the market. The standards are so high, the government has been unable to ban chemicals such as asbestos, a widely recognized carcinogen that is prohibited in many other countries.
About 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use in the United States, but federal regulators have assessed only about 200 for safety.
By Lyndsey Layton
Friday, May 7, 2010; A03
An expert panel that advises the president on cancer said Thursday that Americans are facing "grievous harm" from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored.
The President's Cancer Panel called for a new national strategy that focuses on such threats in the environment and workplaces.
Epidemiologists have long maintained that tobacco use, diet and other factors are responsible for most cancers, and that chemicals and pollutants cause only a small portion -- perhaps 5 percent.
The presidential panel said that figure has been "grossly underestimated" but it did not provide a new estimate.
"With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action," the panel wrote in a report released Thursday.
Federal chemical laws are weak, funding for research and enforcement is inadequate, and regulatory responsibilities are split among too many agencies, the panel found.
Children are particularly vulnerable because they are smaller and are developing faster than adults, the panel found. The report noted unexplained rising rates of some cancers in children, and it referred to recent studies that have found industrial chemicals in umbilical-cord blood, which supplies nutrients to fetuses. "To a disturbing extent, babies are born 'pre-polluted,' " the panel wrote.
Health officials lack critical knowledge about the health impact of chemicals on fetuses and children, the report said.
In addition, the government's standards for safe chemical exposure in workplaces are outdated, it said.
In 2009, about 1.5 million American men, women and children had cancer diagnosed, and 562,000 people died from the disease.
"There are far too many known and suspected cancer-causing chemicals in products people, young and old, use every day of their lives," said Kenneth A. Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group. "Many of these chemicals are believed to be time bombs, altering the genetic-level switching mechanisms that lead to cancerous cellular growth in later life."
The panel said the country needs to overhaul existing chemical laws, a conclusion that has been supported by public health groups, environmental advocates, the Obama administration and even the chemical industry.
The current system places the burden on the government to prove that a chemical is unsafe before it can removed from the market. The standards are so high, the government has been unable to ban chemicals such as asbestos, a widely recognized carcinogen that is prohibited in many other countries.
About 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use in the United States, but federal regulators have assessed only about 200 for safety.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
JAILING WOMEN FOR HAVING A SUNTAN?
You'd think I was making this stuff up, but sadly I'm not.
In an effort to enforce the highly conservative values of Iranian law – like women being covered from head to toe – religious and now police officials are cracking down on women's behavior.
Tehran police chief, Brig Hossien Sajedinia, has expressed concern over "suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins."
"The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehavior by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values," he said."We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them."
National law requires women to wear headscarves and shape shrouding cloaks, but Islamic leadership argue that many women, particularly those in the capital, are defying the law and apparently in doing so they are not only getting tans, but causing earthquakes.
Islam leaders often intensify their scrutiny over women's dress in the summers when women are found breaking dress codes to escape the oppressive heat. With the sun beating down all day and temperatures in the mid-90s, being covered from head to toe at all times is incredibly uncomfortable.
Do women deserve arrest and imprisonment for simply trying to escape the heat? Should women be sequestered indoors because of the strict dress codes inflicted on them?
I certainly think not. Ximena Ramirez
In an effort to enforce the highly conservative values of Iranian law – like women being covered from head to toe – religious and now police officials are cracking down on women's behavior.
Tehran police chief, Brig Hossien Sajedinia, has expressed concern over "suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins."
"The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehavior by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values," he said."We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them."
National law requires women to wear headscarves and shape shrouding cloaks, but Islamic leadership argue that many women, particularly those in the capital, are defying the law and apparently in doing so they are not only getting tans, but causing earthquakes.
Islam leaders often intensify their scrutiny over women's dress in the summers when women are found breaking dress codes to escape the oppressive heat. With the sun beating down all day and temperatures in the mid-90s, being covered from head to toe at all times is incredibly uncomfortable.
Do women deserve arrest and imprisonment for simply trying to escape the heat? Should women be sequestered indoors because of the strict dress codes inflicted on them?
I certainly think not. Ximena Ramirez
Sunday, May 2, 2010
WE ARE SO MUCH ALIKE.....
One more piece of evidence that chimpanzees are far more like humans than we tend to, and probably want to, admit: BBC News reports scientists in Scotland and others from Oxford University have documented behavior which suggests chimpanzees emotionally feel death much like humans do.
In the first case, the behavior of chimps after the death of a terminally ill 50-year-old female chimp at a Scottish safari park was documented with video cameras. Her friends and family became lethargic leading up to the death and stayed with her, grooming her in the final moments. After she died, her daughter stayed near the body, even though she had never slept nearby before.
In the second, also documented on video, mothers of dead chimps carried around and defended the bodies of their dead, and later naturally mummified, offspring for over two months.
Boundaries Between Humans and Animals Not As Clearly Defined
James Anderson, who led the first study:
Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: Reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation, and self-awareness, for example. But science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as people used to think.
It’s Time for Extending Human Rights…
The natural extension of this is, if chimps are better than 99 percent the same as humans biologically, have greater cognitive ability than previously thought, and now also have emotionally-similar grieving to humans, how can we justify testing products on them without consent? How can we keep them in conditions that are less comfortable than we ourselves would stay in? Really, shouldn’t we be talking about extending what we now call human rights to at least some non-human animals?
In the first case, the behavior of chimps after the death of a terminally ill 50-year-old female chimp at a Scottish safari park was documented with video cameras. Her friends and family became lethargic leading up to the death and stayed with her, grooming her in the final moments. After she died, her daughter stayed near the body, even though she had never slept nearby before.
In the second, also documented on video, mothers of dead chimps carried around and defended the bodies of their dead, and later naturally mummified, offspring for over two months.
Boundaries Between Humans and Animals Not As Clearly Defined
James Anderson, who led the first study:
Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: Reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation, and self-awareness, for example. But science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as people used to think.
It’s Time for Extending Human Rights…
The natural extension of this is, if chimps are better than 99 percent the same as humans biologically, have greater cognitive ability than previously thought, and now also have emotionally-similar grieving to humans, how can we justify testing products on them without consent? How can we keep them in conditions that are less comfortable than we ourselves would stay in? Really, shouldn’t we be talking about extending what we now call human rights to at least some non-human animals?
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