dreams: hopping like a kangaroo and meeting one

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This past Wednes­day morn­ing, I dreamed that I could hop like a kan­ga­roo. The envi­ron­ment I was in reminded me of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas cam­pus, with tall stone build­ings and wide walk­ways. The walk­way in my dream looked like this lovely lime­stone with a nice, not too smooth, not too rough tex­ture on top.

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I have MS. The morn­ing after wak­ing up from this dream, I tried and made four piti­ful kan­ga­roo hops that were not fluid and bouncy-​lovely like the ones in my dream. In the dream, a young kan­ga­roo hopped up next to me while I was hop­ping along. We looked at each other for a few sec­onds while we both hopped. Then the kan­ga­roo turned around and hopped in the other direc­tion, only to hop up again later. We met three times like this. It was faster than I was, but I was mov­ing along at a nice clip. As I was encoun­ter­ing a step that was about two inches high, I got a lit­tle ner­vous that I might not be able to make it, but to my sur­prise and joy, I did. The dream was very phys­i­cal, and I can still remem­ber the feel­ing of my stom­ach ris­ing as I jumped onto the step. It was as if I really did hop like a kan­ga­roo for about four city blocks. There was no one else in this land­scape. It occurred to me while I was hop­ping that other peo­ple might find it very strange and be both­ered by it, but I thought, ‘So what. This is a won­der­ful way to get around.’

The night before, I had seen this arti­cle. Also, my side­kick and I have been look­ing at three-​wheeled elec­tric scoot­ers that I’m sav­ing to buy (on top of my reg­u­lar sav­ings) in Sep­tem­ber. So, men­tally, I’ve been get­ting around town in my scooter for a cou­ple of weeks, con­sid­er­ing mileage, where I could go, what I might do, etc. It was nice of my brain to put those things together for me and give me a chance not only to hop like a kan­ga­roo, but to meet one in my dream.

I’ve had a dream since I got MS, in which I ran. It felt like not hav­ing MS, but I didn’t enjoy run­ning in the dream any more than I enjoyed run­ning when I could walk all day. Hop­ping I like.

suicide hotlines

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Rape and Sui­cide by Kevin Caruso at suicide.org

Call the National Sex­ual Assault Hot­line at 1 – 800-​656-​HOPE

If you ever are sui­ci­dal call 1 – 800-​SUICIDE or your local emer­gency number.

The Trevor Project: Sui­cide Intervention

The Trevor Project is the lead­ing national orga­ni­za­tion pro­vid­ing cri­sis inter­ven­tion and sui­cide pre­ven­tion ser­vices to les­bian, gay, bisex­ual, trans­gen­der, and ques­tion­ing youth.

1−866−488−7386

Online Sui­cide Pre­ven­tion at Laura’s Play­ground a Trans­sex­ual, Trans­gen­dered and Cross­dress­ing Sup­port and News site

a Live Sup­port Mod­er­ated Chat Room for Trans­sex­u­als both FTM and MTF, Trans­gen­dered, Inter­sex, Androg­y­nes, Cross­dressers and their Friends, fami­ies and Sig­nif­i­cant Oth­ers only.

Bul­ly­ing and Sui­cides ~ the Rela­tion­ship
 by Carl ToersBijns

The num­ber of kids com­mit­ting sui­cides keeps ris­ing and there appears to be no end to this epi­demic until the dynam­ics of bul­ly­ing and its impacts are accepted as abnor­mal char­ac­ter­is­tics of our soci­ety and dealt with in an effec­tive pre­ven­tion meth­ods and efforts.

It is the respon­si­bil­ity of our gen­er­a­tion and those fol­low­ing us to keep work­ing on this most impor­tant con­di­tion that is destroy­ing our youth today with­out remorse­ful feelings.

National Run­away Safe­line We are here to lis­ten and here to help.

Call 1 – 800-​RUNAWAY to talk with some­one now. Not ready to call? You can also post on our bul­letin board, send us an email, or start a live chat…

articles on women legislators

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How Women Leg­is­la­tors Help States Become More Sup­port­ive Of Older Cit­i­zens by Joanne Con­nor Green and Charles Lock­hart at The Soci­ety Pages

A stronger pres­ence of women in state leg­is­la­tures turns out to be good for older men and women. Just as female leg­is­la­tors weigh in on behalf of meet­ing the needs of fam­i­lies with chil­dren, they also appear more likely than male leg­is­la­tors to fur­ther poli­cies that make a real dif­fer­ence in med­ical care and com­mu­nity sup­port for senior res­i­dents. As the United States moves deeper into an era where sup­port and care for older peo­ple will be an ever more cen­tral con­cern in soci­ety and pub­lic pol­icy, the grow­ing pres­ence of elected female leg­is­la­tors will almost cer­tainly help the United States face these issues and find family-​friendly solu­tions. Toward the end of life as well as at its begin­ning and dur­ing the mid­dle, women in office seem sen­si­tive to the prac­ti­cal con­cerns of fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als in need of sup­port. Across Amer­ica, the states whose vot­ers more often send women to serve in their leg­is­la­tures are there­fore likely to be the states best pre­pared to meet the grow­ing chal­lenges of an aging population.

We Need More Women in Leg­is­la­tures World­wide, Period by Rose­marie Clous­ton at the George­town Pub­lic Pol­icy Review

… Ester Duflo and her col­leagues have shown that in a ran­dom­ized sit­u­a­tion in India where women were put in charge of local gov­ern­ing coun­cils, these bod­ies invested more in pub­lic ser­vices pri­or­i­tized by women (e.g., drink­ing water) than when men were in charge. They also found that in areas with female coun­cil heads, teenage girls had greater career aspi­ra­tions for them­selves than girls liv­ing in areas with coun­cils headed by men. Not only does it appear that women deliver poli­cies for women but they may also polit­i­cally empower their gen­der, par­tic­u­larly in future gen­er­a­tions, so the impact may not be imme­di­ately evi­dent in many stud­ies. Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame have stud­ied this rela­tion­ship between female leg­is­la­tors and polit­i­cal activ­ity across devel­oped democ­ra­cies and found that women and girls are “more likely to dis­cuss pol­i­tics, and younger women [antic­i­pate becom­ing] more polit­i­cally active [in adult­hood] when there are more women in parliament.”

Facts about women leg­is­la­tors in the U.S. at The National Foun­da­tion for Women Legislators

fallacious arguments from fetus fetishists

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Meet Bubba. He’s a tubal preg­nancy (the most com­mon kind of ectopic preg­nancy). As per­sons go, its’s lack­ing that je né sais quoi— or, I don’t know— that qual­ity for which you would run into a burn­ing build­ing to save it. If this thing dropped from a tree onto your shoul­der at a pic­nic, the chance that you would want to pre­serve it in any­thing but formalde­hyde is remote.

Now meet the per­son­hood ini­tia­tive on ectopic pregnancy

Any wish to risk or trade your own life for the life of this lar­val flesh could not qual­ify as “rea­son­able”. The only things that can be “known” about it are strictly bio­log­i­cal, and the chances that it will ever be a viable fetus are so much more remote than the like­li­hood that it would kill its host with­out med­ical inter­ven­tion that would kill it first, that giv­ing it the rights of “per­son­hood” demands that a women take “heroic” risks to save Bubba, here, because PERSON.

Being killed by a part­ner is the third lead­ing cause of death for preg­nant women. That usu­ally kills the unborn too. They want to charge that man with two mur­ders, but pro­tect­ing the woman doesn’t seem to inter­est them that much, because GUNS! And it doesn’t mat­ter how poor you are, no mat­ter that you don’t have health insur­ance, no mat­ter that you already have chil­dren that you are hav­ing a hard time pro­vid­ing for, no mat­ter if you aren’t employed and have no source of income, no mat­ter if you have health prob­lems that make preg­nancy dan­ger­ous for you,it doesn’t even mat­ter if there is no chance that the fetus will ever be viable, because PERSON.

Of course, no man is going to take all the above “you“s per­son­ally, because that’s HER problem.

Can you think of other instances writ­ten into law in which a per­son can be charged with mur­der for not risk­ing their life to save some­one else? Can you think of such a case, in which a res­cue attempt would have most likely left both dead?

The belief that a zygote/​embryo/​fetus has a “soul” is a reli­gious belief, and one that Per­son­hood U.S.A. and the Per­son­hood Ini­tia­tive are lob­by­ing to have have enshrined into law, so that every zygote/​embryo/​fetus has the rights of any other per­son; but the woman who car­ries it. Her rights as a per­son would be sub­or­di­nate to that thing that can’t live with­out her, even when it can’t live within her, because it’s a PERSON. (And she’s some­thing else.)

The thought that this lit­tle mass of cells, chew­ing through it’s mother’s fal­lop­ian tube could have a social value equal to or greater than that of an adult woman denies the “per­son­hood” of women to a degree that is patho­log­i­cal. It makes the fetus a fetish denuded of it’s bio­log­i­cal real­ity and it’s depen­dency. Of course, the assump­tion that the woman’s role— her pur­pose in life— is to pro­duce and care for the wee ones, no mat­ter its toll on her, no mat­ter the cost to her is taken so much for granted that she’s expected to do it and do it well with no resources, no sup­port, no respite.

I made sev­eral attempts to refute their repul­sive logic that women with ectopic preg­nan­cies should be forced to stay in a hos­pi­tal bed, then undergo auto­trans­fu­sion (be given trans­fu­sions of her own blood) after a rup­ture until the fetus is viable no mat­ter how unlikely that would be. But there’s no rea­son to argue with their bogus inter­pre­ta­tions of a bunch of num­bers they pulled from hos­pi­tal records in Israel. They used a jum­ble of num­bers and sup­po­si­tions about those num­bers to make mud pies; while not acknowl­edg­ing that Israel has uni­ver­sal health insur­ance, no com­punc­tion about end­ing a preg­nancy to pro­tect the mother, and one third the mater­nal death rate of the U.S. Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion about ectopic preg­nan­cies in Israel has absolutely noth­ing to do with women in the U.S.— espe­cially women who are unin­sured or who are black women who are much more likely to die of ectopic preg­nan­cies than white women.

We women are PERSONS. ALL OF US ARE PERSONS. No one should be able to tell us that we have to risk our lives, or even fun­da­men­tally change our lives because some peo­ple believe that God gives peo­ple “souls” at con­cep­tion and wants to use that “argu­ment” to take con­trol over women’s bod­ies and lives.

A woman wants to die for her fetus that’s her busi­ness and her prob­lem and her ide­o­log­i­cal mad­ness. If no one close to her tries to talk her out of it then you know how lit­tle she is cherished.

PERSON and MIRACLE BABIES! is proper legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for NOTHING. These peo­ple are reli­gious extrem­ists and ded­i­cated misog­y­nists wor­thy of the name AMERICAN TALIBAN. It’s about time that these peo­ple stopped impos­ing their church on our state and took their inter­fer­ing filch­ing hands off of our bodies.

penitence and penitentiaries: early prisons and prison reform in the U.S.

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51uBKspTRVL._AA160_In this post, I’d like to tell you some things I learned about the early his­tory of pris­ons in the U.S., from Angela Davis’ book Are Pris­ons Obso­lete, which she pub­lished in 2003. This books cov­ers pris­ons in the U.S. from their incep­tion through the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tury. The racist and sex­ist con­struc­tions of what is “crim­i­nal” and what is “pun­ish­ment” has changed through­out the cen­turies, yet racism still dom­i­nates the Amer­i­can view of what a “crim­i­nal” looks like and what a “con­vict” looks like. She traces the evo­lu­tion of prison in the U.S. from it’s ori­gins to the big busi­ness it is today— espe­cially pri­vate pris­ons, which are huge cor­po­rate busi­nesses that require a grow­ing num­ber of pris­on­ers in order to keep mak­ing profit.

First, though, I’d like to start with this early his­tory— what we think of “prison” writ large as “jus­tice” began in the eigh­teenth cen­tury in Europe, in the 19th cen­tury in the U.S., and was spread through­out the world via colonialism.

Incar­cer­a­tion, prior to the nine­teenth cen­tury in the U.S., was not used as pun­ish­ment, but only to detain a per­son until their pun­ish­ment was car­ried out. Draw­ing and quar­ter­ing, bury­ing peo­ple alive, burn­ing alive, etc. were acts of revenge and spec­ta­cles for pub­lic con­sump­tion. The move­ment to make incar­cer­a­tion the pun­ish­ment itself, was inspired by the Enlight­en­ment and Protes­tant Reform, and was shaped in part by a bud­ding cap­i­tal­ist ideology.

Accept­ing the ideal of Enlight­en­ment that the indi­vid­ual has inalien­able rights and lib­er­ties (“indi­vid­ual” mean­ing white men), allowed reform­ers to frame ille­gal acts as a break in the social con­tract. Tak­ing away those rights and lib­er­ties could be seen as pun­ish­ment enough and putting the crim­i­nals behind walls, removed from soci­ety seemed to reform­ers at the time to not be revenge, but a chance for the crim­i­nals to achieve per­sonal ref­or­ma­tion. It cer­tainly elim­i­nated the spec­ta­cle of bizarre pun­ish­ments, tor­tures, deaths, and des­e­cra­tion of corpses. By com­par­i­son, it looked humane and sensible.

The first pen­i­ten­tiary in the U.S., was in a con­verted area of the Pennsylvania’s Wal­nut Street Jail that was con­verted to a prison in 1790. In this prison, crim­i­nals were being given an oppor­tu­nity for pen­i­tence and reform through “total iso­la­tion, silence, and soli­tude.” It was believed that pris­on­ers could make “progress.”

This Penn­syl­va­nia sys­tem was one of two mod­els of impris­on­ment, the other was the Auburn model. The dif­fer­ence between the two mod­els was that in the Penn­syl­va­nia sys­tem, the pris­on­ers worked in soli­tude; and in the Auburn sys­tem, the pris­on­ers worked in groups. Auburn became the model because the labor pro­vided by the pris­on­ers was more effi­cient. “Effi­ciency” is a par­tic­u­larly cap­i­tal­ist value that was just tak­ing hold at the time. Pris­on­ers were given sen­tences in units of time, which reflected the grow­ing cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­ogy and the new prac­tices of pay­ing labor­ers for time worked.

John Howard— an Eng­lish prison reformer— was very influ­en­tial on Amer­i­can reform­ers. The monas­tic style of life the reform­ers imposed reflected their reli­gious beliefs. The con­di­tion in which reflec­tion and labor would allow the “souls” of pris­on­ers to “flour­ish” was con­sid­ered to be char­i­ta­ble by the reform­ers and assumed to be effec­tive toward chang­ing the char­ac­ter of the pris­on­ers. There were peo­ple at the time who rec­og­nized iso­la­tion as tor­ture. After vis­it­ing the East­ern Pen­i­ten­tiary in 1842, Charles Dick­ens had this to say about it

In its inten­tion I am well con­vinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for ref­or­ma­tion; but I am per­suaded that those who devised this sys­tem of Prison Dis­ci­pline, and whose benev­o­lent gen­tle­men who carry it into exe­cu­tion, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capa­ble of esti­mat­ing the immense amount of tor­ture and agony that this dread­ful pun­ish­ment, pro­longed for years, inflicts upon the suf­fer­ers… I am only the more con­vinced that there is a depth of ter­ri­ble endurance in it which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-​creature. I hold this slow and daily tam­per­ing with the mys­ter­ies of the brain to be immea­sur­ably worse than any tor­ture of the body… because its wounds are not upon the sur­face, and it exhorts few cries that human ears can hear; there­fore I the more renounce it, as a secret pun­ish­ment which slum­ber­ing is not roused up to stay.

Con­tinue read­ing →

the unreliability of the DSM

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our jobs by Mickey Nardo, M.D. at 1boringoldman.com

Instead of talk­ing about the inad­e­quacy of the DSM-​5 Revi­sion process, we are now embroiled in the pro­poganda arm of the NIMH RDoC ini­tia­tive. The DSM-​5 Task Force is off the hook since they were faced with an impos­si­ble task. The neu­ro­science and genomic infor­ma­tion does not map onto our descrip­tive clin­i­cal syn­dromes, so the NIMH is tak­ing over the task of redefin­ing men­tal ill­ness based on some­thing big­ger, bet­ter, or other [as yet unde­fined, but in com­mit­tee] than symp­toms to con­tinue the search for some­thing that the neu­ro­science and genomic infor­ma­tion does map onto.

Here’s the thing. OUR PATIENTS DON’T MAP ONTO THE DSM-​5. The prob­lem right now is that the DSM-​5 Task Force didn’t take their decade+ win­dow of oppor­tu­nity to make the kind of revi­sions in the clin­i­cal diag­nos­tic sys­tem that it deserved, that they were assigned. They spent their time try­ing to turn it into a bio­log­i­cally based sys­tem with nei­ther the sci­ence to back up the change or any man­date from psy­chi­a­trists or the men­tal health com­mu­nity. Rather than refine our cat­e­gories into more homo­ge­neous pack­ages of likely can­di­dates [like Melan­cho­lia, Cata­to­nia], they took the inde­fen­si­ble posi­tion that all men­tal ill­ness is bio­log­i­cal and got nowhere. They pro­posed a “cross cut­ting” “dimen­sional” par­al­lel sys­tem but couldn’t bring it off. So we have a DSM-​5 that is less the clin­i­cal diag­nos­tic sys­tem than its pre­de­ces­sor, even less reli­able with kap­pas in the range of the DSM-​II. We don’t really know if the neu­ro­science and genomic infor­ma­tion does not map onto our descrip­tive clin­i­cal syn­dromes is right because OUR PATIENTS DON’T MAP ONTO THE DSM-​5 either.

articles on psycho-​social aspects of mental illness and the DSM

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paint­ing by Wass­ily Kandinsky

Psy­chi­a­trists under fire in men­tal health bat­tle by Jamie Doward in the guardian

In a ground­break­ing move that has already prompted a fierce back­lash from psy­chi­a­trists, the British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Society’s divi­sion of clin­i­cal psy­chol­ogy (DCP) will on Mon­day issue a state­ment declar­ing that, given the lack of evi­dence, it is time for a “par­a­digm shift” in how the issues of men­tal health are under­stood. The state­ment effec­tively casts doubt on psychiatry’s pre­dom­i­nantly bio­med­ical model of men­tal dis­tress – the idea that peo­ple are suf­fer­ing from ill­nesses that are treat­able by doc­tors using drugs. The DCP said its deci­sion to speak out “reflects fun­da­men­tal con­cerns about the devel­op­ment, per­sonal impact and core assump­tions of the (diag­no­sis) sys­tems”, used by psychiatry.

Dr Lucy John­stone, a con­sul­tant clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist who helped draw up the DCP’s state­ment, said it was unhelp­ful to see men­tal health issues as ill­nesses with bio­log­i­cal causes.

“On the con­trary, there is now over­whelm­ing evi­dence that peo­ple break down as a result of a com­plex mix of social and psy­cho­log­i­cal cir­cum­stances – bereave­ment and loss, poverty and dis­crim­i­na­tion, trauma and abuse,” John­stone said. The provoca­tive state­ment by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-​5, the fifth edi­tion of the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­a­try Association’s Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Disorders.

The man­ual has been attacked for expand­ing the range of men­tal health issues that are clas­si­fied as dis­or­ders. For exam­ple, the fifth edi­tion of the book, the first for two decades, will clas­sify man­i­fes­ta­tions of grief, tem­per tantrums and wor­ry­ing about phys­i­cal ill-​health as the men­tal ill­nesses of major depres­sive dis­or­der, dis­rup­tive mood dys­reg­u­la­tion dis­or­der and somatic symp­tom dis­or­der, respectively.

Some of the manual’s omis­sions are just as con­tro­ver­sial as the manual’s inclu­sions. The term “Asperger’s dis­or­der” will not appear in the new man­ual, and instead its symp­toms will come under the newly added “autism spec­trum disorder”.

The DSM is used in a num­ber of coun­tries to vary­ing degrees. Britain uses an alter­na­tive man­ual, the Inter­na­tional Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Dis­eases (ICD) pub­lished by the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion, but the DSM is still hugely influ­en­tial – and controversial.

The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, wel­comed the DCP’s deci­sion to speak out against psy­chi­atric diag­no­sis and stressed the need to move away from a bio­med­ical model of men­tal dis­tress to one that exam­ined soci­etal and per­sonal factors.

Do we need to change the way we are think­ing about men­tal ill­ness? fol­low­ing quote by Oliver James in the Guardian

A stu­dent friend of mine once started claim­ing that she was being con­trolled by elec­tri­cal impulses beamed across the city by “author­i­tar­ian cap­i­tal­ists”. She spent hours in the bath, clean­ing herself.

Fol­low­ing her removal to an asy­lum, her par­ents arrived to col­lect her pos­ses­sions. Nearly all of her (mostly clean) clothes were deemed so “soiled” they would need to be burnt. The room was obses­sively cleaned. Her father was a health inspector.

Within the med­ical model of men­tal ill­ness, she had inher­ited genes pre­dis­pos­ing her to obses­sive rit­u­als and to psy­chosis. The model does not enter­tain the pos­si­bil­ity that the health inspector’s intru­sive­ness dis­tressed her or, as it turned out, that he had sex­u­ally abused her.

Yet 13 stud­ies find that more than half of schiz­o­phren­ics suf­fered child­hood abuse. Another review of 23 stud­ies shows that schiz­o­phren­ics are at least three times more likely to have been abused than non-​schizophrenics. It is becom­ing appar­ent that abuse is the major cause of psy­choses. It is also all too clear that the med­ical model is bust.

In the press release accom­pa­ny­ing pub­li­ca­tion of DSM-​5, David Kupfer, who over­saw its cre­ation, states: “We’ve been telling patients for sev­eral decades that we are wait­ing for bio­mark­ers. We’re still wait­ing.” This is an aston­ish­ing admis­sion that there are no reli­able genetic or neu­ro­log­i­cal mea­sure­ments that dis­tin­guish a per­son with men­tal illness.

While there is some evi­dence that the electro-​chemistry of dis­tressed peo­ple can be dif­fer­ent from the undis­tressed, the Human Genome Project seems to be prov­ing that genes play almost no part in caus­ing this. Eleven years of care­ful study of our DNA shows that dif­fer­ences in it do not explain men­tal ill­ness, hardly at all. If one sib­ling is anx­ious or depressed and another is not, at most, dif­fer­ences in DNA can only explain 1 – 5% of why it is one and not the other.

Of course, some researchers main­tain that, given more time (and money), they will still come up with sig­nif­i­cant results. But off the record, nearly all mol­e­c­u­lar geneti­cists admit that it now really does look as if dif­fer­ences in DNA will explain very little.

By con­trast, there is a huge body of evi­dence that our early child­hood expe­ri­ences com­bined with sub­se­quent expo­sure to adver­sity explain a very great deal. This is dose depen­dent: the more mal­treat­ment, the ear­lier you suf­fer it and the worse it is, the greater your risk of adult emo­tional dis­tress. These expe­ri­ences set our electro-​chemical thermostats.

So does sub­se­quent adult adver­sity. For instance, a per­son with six or more per­sonal debts is six times more likely to be men­tally ill than some­one with none, regard­less of their social class: the more debts, the greater the risk.

We need fun­da­men­tal changes in how our soci­ety is organ­ised to give par­ents the best chance of meet­ing the needs of chil­dren and to pre­vent the amount of adult adversity.

Britons and Amer­i­cans have exactly twice the amount of men­tal ill­ness of main­land west­ern Euro­peans (23% ver­sus 11.5%). Thirty years of Thatcher and “Blatcher” turned us into a nation of “affluenza”-stricken, shop-​till-​you-​drop, “it could be you”, credit-​fuelled con­sumer junkies. Per­sonal debt – a major stres­sor for adults – rose from £200bn in 1980 to £1,400bn in 2006. After 1979, the amount of men­tal ill­ness mushroomed.

For­get about genes. We would halve the amount of emo­tional dis­tress in this coun­try if we had the more equal, rel­a­tively cohe­sive, less debt-​ridden polit­i­cal eco­nom­ics of our Euro­pean neighbours.