Leonardo da Vinci’s extensive studies of human anatomy were hundreds of years ahead of their time. (Image by Wikimedia Commons, Leonardo da Vinci.)

At the third assembly of the World Humanist Forum on July 19, Antonio Carvallo proposed the creation of a new working table on the theme of Personal Development. During his presentation, a spark caught my attention. He remarked that, for over 5,000 years, humanity has devoted nearly all its energy to understanding and developing the external world, while neglecting its own internal development as human beings.

Here we are today, with astonishing technological, scientific, intellectual, and social capacities. We can split atoms, map genomes, and communicate instantly across the planet. Yet, in comparison, our understanding of how we function internally as human beings remains painfully limited. Human beings are still too often treated as tools, valued mainly for their capacity to produce and consume.

Ask a teenager what they plan to do with their life, and the question is typically understood to mean: What job will you have? Life becomes synonymous with work. You study in order to work, you work most of your life, and eventually retire—often exhausted and disillusioned. Fulfillment is closely tied to career success, even in a dysfunctional society or a toxic workplace.
Meanwhile, mental health statistics in Western society point to a deep and growing crisis:

• • In 2022, around 59.3 million U.S. adults (≈23.1%) experienced some form of mental illness.
  • In 2022, 15.4 million adults (6%) experienced serious mental illness.
  • In 2022, the CDC reported 49,449 suicide deaths in the United States—about a 3% increase from 48,183 in 2021, marking a record high.

Is this not a dramatic expression of unresolved internal conflict?

Why has internal development been so undervalued? It almost seems like there’s a global conspiracy against it. Most religions begin with an internal experience, but over time, they become increasingly outward-facing — placing God in the sky, focusing on external rituals, and obsessing over food or rules. Political ideologies like Marxism often fail to explore the role of violence, fear, and meaning in how we organize ourselves. Even in the modern “self-help” industry, personal growth is often framed as a way to “optimize performance” within the same dehumanizing structures that cause suffering.

Ask someone, “How do you deal with fear?” Most will struggle to answer. People have no internal tools or language to face and transform their fear. Fear becomes a tool used by the system to control everyday life: we fear being fired, not having enough money, not being loved, being “too much” or “not enough.”

Why are so many people exhausted? What do we actually know about our internal energy — how to cultivate it, renew it, and direct it? These are fundamental questions central to our survival and evolution, and yet society rarely addresses them.

Let’s be clear: we are not proposing personal development so that people can function better in this dehumanized system. True personal development is about changing the focus of our lives entirely. Nothing meaningful can be transformed in the world until we internalize our knowledge of what it means to be human, recognize that life has meaning beyond labor and consumption, and free ourselves from the illusion of fear.

Peace is not the absence of war. It is an internal state of being.

Imagine what it would mean for 8 billion people to embark on a path of self-understanding, learning to overcome pain and suffering, seeing money not as an end in itself but as a tool to humanize the Earth. Imagine if self-knowledge were approached with the same discipline, care, and passion as a musician practices an instrument.

Education must evolve. It must be rooted in the development of the whole human being. Reconciling with oneself should be the first step. The world we long for must first take root within ourselves—only then can we co-create it with others.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Andersson.

Sebastien Lai has sought a meeting with Starmer for more than two years to advocate for the release of his father, 77-year-old Jimmy Lai, who founded Apple Daily. His health is deteriorating and he risks dying in jail.

Lai has been imprisoned for over 1,600 days, mostly in isolation, while awaiting the outcome of a long-delayed trial for sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law. After Lai’s arrest in 2020, Apple Daily was shuttered on June 24, 2021, following police raids and the freezing of the paper’s assets.

Read the full joint letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CP Staff.

On Thursday, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency put out a similar warning, noting that there were 900 cases of travel-related dengue in the U.K. in 2024, almost 300 more infections than the preceding year. The two reports relayed a similar array of statistics about dengue, its symptoms, and rising caseloads. But the U.K. Health Security Agency included a crucial piece of information that the CDC omitted: It noted why cases are breaking records. “The rise is driven by climate change, rising temperatures, and flooding,” it said.

In the past, the CDC has readily acknowledged the role climate change plays in the transmission of dengue fever — but the political conditions that influence scientific research and federal public health communications in the U.S. have undergone seismic shifts in the months since President Donald Trump took office. The new administration has purged federal agency websites of mentions of equity and climate change and sought to dismantle the scientific infrastructure that agencies like the CDC use to understand and respond to a range of health risks — including those posed by global warming. 

Last week, ProPublica reported that the National Institutes of Health, or NIH — the largest source of funding for medical research in the world — will shut down all future funding opportunities for climate and health research. It remains to be seen whether ongoing grants for research at this intersection will be allowed to continue. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his agency plans to cull 10,000 people from its workforce, including new cuts at CDC, an agency that was established in 1946 in order to prevent a different mosquito-borne illness, malaria, from spreading across the U.S. 

Taken together, the suite of directives will prevent the U.S. and other nations whose scientists rely on NIH funding from preparing for and responding to dengue fever at the exact moment when climate change is causing cases of the disease to skyrocket. The abrupt subversion of the personnel and institutions tasked with responding to a threat like dengue bodes poorly for future health crises as climate change causes carriers of disease like mosquitoes, fungi, and ticks to expand their historical ranges and infiltrate new zones.

“The disease pressure in the last couple of years is very dramatic and it’s going in one direction — up,” said Scott O’Neill, founder of the World Mosquito Program, a nonprofit organization that deploys genetically engineered mosquitoes to fight disease in 14 countries. For example, Brazil — the country that consistently registers the highest number of dengue cases — recorded a historic 10 million cases last year. The country reported 1.7 million cases in 2023.

The two types of mosquitoes that most often infect humans with dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, thrive in the warm, moist conditions made more prevalent by rising atmospheric temperatures caused by fossil fuel combustion. The vast majority of annual dengue cases are asymptomatic, but about 25 percent of people infected, depending on the population, develop symptoms like fever, headache, and joint pain. A small percentage of those cases result in severe sickness, hospitalization, and even death.

The number of severe dengue infections corresponds roughly to the size of the pool of people infected every year. In 2023, when there were 6 million total dengue infections, 6,000 people died. In 2024, a year when there were more than 13 million cases registered globally, over 8,000 people died. 

There is no cure for dengue. Patients in wealthier countries generally fare better than patients in developing regions with limited access to medical interventions like blood transfusions and places where waves of dengue patients overwhelm already-strained healthcare systems. Two dengue vaccines are available in some countries, but both have serious limitations in terms of efficacy and how long they confer immunity. 

The NIH began taking climate change and health research seriously in 2021, and the institutes have funded dozens of studies that probe every aspect of the climate-dengue connection since. NIH-funded researchers have sought to understand how warmer temperatures shift the geographic ranges of Aedes mosquitoes, which factors predict dengue outbreaks, and how communities can protect themselves from dengue following extreme weather events.

These studies have taken place in the southeastern U.S., where dengue is becoming more prevalent, and internationally, in countries like Peru and Brazil, where dengue is a near-constant threat. The NIH has also funded studies that bring the world closer to finding medical and technological interventions: more effective vaccines and genetically engineered mosquitoes that can’t develop dengue, among other solutions.

“Disease doesn’t have national borders,” said an American vector biologist who has received funding from the NIH in the past. She asked not to have her name or affiliated academic institution mentioned in this story out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. “I’m worried that if we’re not studying it, we’re just going to watch it continue to happen and we won’t be prepared.” 

Americans aren’t just bringing cases of dengue fever home with them from trips abroad; the disease is also spreading locally with more intensity in warmer regions of the country and its territories. Last March, Puerto Rico declared a public health emergency amid an explosion of cases on the island. By the end of 2024, Puerto Rico registered over 6,000 cases — passing the threshold at which an outbreak officially becomes an epidemic. More than half of the known infections led to hospitalization. Close to 1,000 cases have been reported there so far this year, a 113 percent increase over the same period in 2024. California and Florida reported 18 and 91 locally-acquired cases of dengue, respectively, last year. California registered its first-ever locally-acquired case of dengue in 2023. 

“Dengue is already found in many places in the U.S. that have never seen this disease before,” said Renzo Guinto, a physician and head of the Planetary Health Initiative at the Duke-NUS medical school in Singapore. “To combat this emerging climate-related health threat, U.S. scientists must collaborate with others working in dengue overseas. With no resources and capacity, how can such collaboration occur?”

There are limited non-government sources of funding for climate and health research. The money that is available to American researchers is primarily offered by private foundations like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The grants these philanthropies offer annually pale in comparison to the $40 million Congress made available annually through the NIH for climate and health research in the two years before Trump took office. Researchers will be forced to compete for a small pool of funding in the coming years, which will likely lead to fewer studies and less innovation in the years to come. “The end result will be that much less of this work would be done — we would all tell you to the detriment of Americans long term,” said the vector biologist.   

As dengue spreads with more intensity in the countries where it is already common and slips across borders into zones like North America where the disease is still comparatively rare, it’s clear countries need to expand their arsenals of disease-fighting weapons. But the U.S. appears to be leading a charge in the opposite direction, with thousands of lives at stake. 

“We’re at a time when we need acceleration of innovation and solutions to very pressing global problems,” said O’Neill, whose organization receives funding from governments around the world, including the U.S. “It’s not the time to let ideology drive science rather than let science drive itself.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A deadly mosquito-borne illness rises as the US cuts all climate and health funding on Apr 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Photo by Marco Zuppone

The critics are utterly beside themselves in trying to understand the bruising odds and turns of Donald J. Trump, the reality showman and business tycoon who became US president twice.  One particular group that have become prominent are the aggrieved and estranged.  Former employees who were given their marching orders after brief spells in Trump’s administration have made a career in podcasting and punditry on the man whose bilious orbit they seemingly cannot escape.  A common theme to their recent criticism is that of mental health.  Trump, we are told, is unhinged, a true nutter.

The aggrieved, war loving John Bolton, who had spells in the administration of George W. Bush and a brief one as Trump’s national security advisor, has been particularly noisy in pushing the illness hypothesis.  When asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether Trump’s claim that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was not a dictator could be seen as a negotiating ploy, Bolton would have none of it.  “I think it’s an indication his mind is full of mush, and he says whatever comes into it.  He believes Vladimir Putin is his friend, and you know, you don’t call your friends [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] a dictator.”

Bolton also falls for the old, almost laughable mistake when trying to understand Trump: that facts necessarily matter in that world.  When Trump met the current Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lieutenant General Dan Caine, in Iraq during his first term, the president offered a rather different account to that of Bolton’s.  The former claimed that Caine had told him that the campaign against the ISIS group could be “finished in one week”, that he sported a Make America Great Again hat, and claimed he would “kill” for the president.

Bolton, who accompanied Trump on that visit, was adamant:  “There was no chance that Trump had a conversation with General Caine that bore any resemblance to what he’s described.  I never saw Caine wear a MAGA hat.”  (In a tossup between who to trust between these men, Bolton might just prevail.)

Another former employee who had reiterated similar points of mental decline is Anthony Scaramucci, who spent a mere 11 days in the first Trump administration as communications director before being sacked.  After being a firm loyalist, the born again commentator and financier known as the Mooch could confidently claim to Vanity Fair in 2019 that Trump was “crazy, everything about him is terrible”.

Having failed in spectacular fashion, along with fellow pundits, to read the premonitory signs of a Trump victory over Kamala Harris, he has returned to the theme of the mad man, or at least the ill man.  Some of these views were expressed just prior to a visit to the White House by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  In the Off Air… with Jane and Fi podcast, Scaramucci took it as given that “Trump’s obviously got something wrong with him.  I would say to Keir Starmer the guy is unwell and he’s surrounded by willing sycophants that want to pretend he’s not unwell.”  One did not need to be “a rocket scientist to know that something’s wrong”.

While it did not come from one of the estranged or aggrieved, the most telling remark on Trump’s health was offered by Democratic political consultant and strategist James Carville.  In a posted video, Carville felt speculatively adventurous after the turbulent February 28 meeting between the US president and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Zelensky.  “I want to seek the possibility that maybe I had a point considerably earlier than this when I pointed out on this very channel that Trump had red splotches on his hand which I was told by a number of medical professionals that when you see that condition the first thing you suspect is syphilis.”  There you have it.  Analysis can end, there and then.

Many of these criticisms stem from dross from the first Trump administration, when opinion pieces questioning the man’s faculties and sanity became a feature.  Often, they were slipshod and lazy, seduced by the Trump canard.  Trump derangement syndrome is, after all, a hard thing to shake.  His effect on US politics and its analysis has been so profound as to turn critics and commentators into replicates of his dislike of factual analysis.  Just as book reviewers, as Cyril Connolly remarked, are bound to have their critical faculties blunted by the poor quality of books available for review, Trump as both subject and method has cut through the undergrowth of sensible discourse.  The illness hypothesis is yet another example of this.

Embracing such a proposition avoids the more fundamental point about Trump: that he does know more than you think about what he wants and how he wants to achieve it.  He is most certainly a disturbed human being, infantilised, insecure, and prone to hazes of narcissism, but he can hardly be dismissed as a person without certain cerebral functions.

With a vengeful conviction lacking in his first iteration, he is shaping aspects of US government that are both remarkable and disconcerting.  On the international stage, he has finally stripped bare the cant pursued by the liberal and neoconservative internationalists who insist on a policing role for Washington in the name of “rules”.  For them, the messianic role of the United States will guard the world against such nasties as rule-bending autocrats.  The MAGA philosophy has its dangers and problems, but the mental illness of its chief proponent is not one of them.

The post Aggrieved Speculation: The Trump Illness Hypothesis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The aggrieved, war loving John Bolton, who had spells in the administration of George W. Bush and a brief one as Trump’s national security advisor, has been particularly noisy in pushing the illness hypothesis. When asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether Trump’s claim that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was not a dictator could be seen as a negotiating ploy, Bolton would have none of it. “I think it’s an indication his mind is full of mush, and he says whatever comes into it. He believes Vladimir Putin is his friend, and you know, you don’t call your friends [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] a dictator.”

Bolton also falls for the old, almost laughable mistake when trying to understand Trump: that facts necessarily matter in that world. When Trump met the current Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lieutenant General Dan Caine, in Iraq during his first term, the president offered a rather different account to that of Bolton’s. The former claimed that Caine had told him that the campaign against the ISIS group could be “finished in one week”, that he sported a Make America Great Again hat, and claimed he would “kill” for the president.

Bolton, who accompanied Trump on that visit, was adamant: “There was no chance that Trump had a conversation with General Caine that bore any resemblance to what he’s described. I never saw Caine wear a MAGA hat.” (In a tossup between who to trust between these men, Bolton might just prevail.)

Another former employee who had reiterated similar points of mental decline is Anthony Scaramucci, who spent a mere 11 days in the first Trump administration as communications director before being sacked. After being a firm loyalist, the born again commentator and financier known as the Mooch could confidently claim to Vanity Fair in 2019 that Trump was “crazy, everything about him is terrible”.

Having failed in spectacular fashion, along with fellow pundits, to read the premonitory signs of a Trump victory over Kamala Harris, he has returned to the theme of the mad man, or at least the ill man. Some of these views were expressed just prior to a visit to the White House by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In the Off Air… with Jane and Fi podcast, Scaramucci took it as given that “Trump’s obviously got something wrong with him. I would say to Keir Starmer the guy is unwell and he’s surrounded by willing sycophants that want to pretend he’s not unwell.” One did not need to be “a rocket scientist to know that something’s wrong”.

While it did not come from one of the estranged or aggrieved, the most telling remark on Trump’s health was offered by Democratic political consultant and strategist James Carville. In a posted video, Carville felt speculatively adventurous after the turbulent February 28 meeting between the US president and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Zelensky. “I want to seek the possibility that maybe I had a point considerably earlier than this when I pointed out on this very channel that Trump had red splotches on his hand which I was told by a number of medical professionals that when you see that condition the first thing you suspect is syphilis.” There you have it. Analysis can end, there and then.

Many of these criticisms stem from dross from the first Trump administration, when opinion pieces questioning the man’s faculties and sanity became a feature. Often, they were slipshod and lazy, seduced by the Trump canard. Trump derangement syndrome is, after all, a hard thing to shake. His effect on US politics and its analysis has been so profound as to turn critics and commentators into replicates of his dislike of factual analysis. Just as book reviewers, as Cyril Connolly remarked, are bound to have their critical faculties blunted by the poor quality of books available for review, Trump as both subject and method has cut through the undergrowth of sensible discourse. The illness hypothesis is yet another example of this.

Embracing such a proposition avoids the more fundamental point about Trump: that he does know more than you think about what he wants and how he wants to achieve it. He is most certainly a disturbed human being, infantilised, insecure, and prone to hazes of narcissism, but he can hardly be dismissed as a person without certain cerebral functions.

With a vengeful conviction lacking in his first iteration, he is shaping aspects of US government that are both remarkable and disconcerting. On the international stage, he has finally stripped bare the cant pursued by the liberal and neoconservative internationalists who insist on a policing role for Washington in the name of “rules”. For them, the messianic role of the United States will guard the world against such nasties as rule-bending autocrats. The MAGA philosophy has its dangers and problems, but the mental illness of its chief proponent is not one of them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Sebastien, who leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign, last saw his father in August 2020 — weeks after Beijing imposed a national security law that led to a massive crackdown on pro-democracy advocates and journalists. Among them Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

After nearly four years in Hong Kong’s maximum-security Stanley Prison and multiple delays to his trial, the aging British citizen was due to take the stand for the first time on November 20 on charges of sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces, which he denies.

Lai, who has diabetes, routinely spends over 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, with only 50 minutes for restricted exercise and limited access to daylight, according to his international lawyers.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for his release.

Responding to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred to a November 17 statement in which it said that Lai was “receiving appropriate treatment and care in prison” and that Hong Kong authorities “strongly deplore any form of interference.”

In an interview with CPJ, Sebastien spoke about Britain’s bilateral ties with China, as well as Hong Kong — a former British colony where his father arrived as a stowaway on a fishing boat at age 12, before finding jobs in a garment factory and eventually launched a clothing retail chain and his media empire.

What do you anticipate when your father takes the stand for the first time?

To be honest, I do not know. My father is a strong person, but the Hong Kong government has spent four years trying to break him. I don’t think they can break his spirit but with his treatment they are in the process of breaking his body. We will see the extent of that on the stand.

Your father turned 77 recently. How is he doing in solitary confinement?

The last time I saw my father was in August of 2020. I haven’t been able to return to my hometown since and therefore have been unable to visit him in prison. His health has declined significantly. He is now 77, and, having spent nearly four years in a maximum-security prison in solitary confinement, his treatment is inhumane. For his dedication to freedom, they have taken his away.

For his bravery in standing in defense of others, they have denied him human contact. For his strong faith in God, they have denied him Holy Communion.

We have seen governments across the political spectrum call for Jimmy Lai’s release —the U.S., the European Parliament, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Ireland, among others. What does that mean to you?

We are incredibly grateful for all the support from multiple states in calling for my father’s release. The charges against my father are sham charges. The Hong Kong government has weaponized their legal system to crack down on all who criticize them.

You met with the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently, who said Jimmy Lai’s case remains a priority and the government will press for consular access. What would you like to see Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government do?

They have publicly stated that they want to normalize relationships with China and to increase trade. I don’t see how that can be achieved if there is a British citizen in Hong Kong in the process of being killed for standing up for the values that underpin a free nation and the rights and dignity of its citizens.

Any normalization of the relationship with China needs to be conditional on my father’s immediate release and his return to the United Kingdom.

Your father’s life story in many ways embodies Hong Kong’s ‘never-give-up’ attitude. Do you think Hong Kong journalists and pro-democracy activists will keep on fighting? What is your message to Beijing and the Hong Kong government?

I think most of the world shares his spirit. Hong Kong is unique because it’s a city of refugees. It’s a city where we were given many of the freedoms of the free world. And as a result, it flourished. We knew what we had and what we escaped from.

My message is to release my father immediately. A Hong Kong that has 1,900 political prisoners for democracy campaigning, is a Hong Kong that has no rule of law, no free press, one that disregards the welfare of its citizens. This is not a Hong Kong that will flourish.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

Though this outbreak is small and triple E does not pose a risk to most people living in the United States, public health officials and researchers alike are concerned about the threat the deadly virus poses to the public, both this year and in future summers. There is no known cure for the disease, which can cause severe flu-like symptoms and seizures in humans 4 to 10 days after exposure and kills between 30 and 40 percent of the people it infects. Half of the people who survive a triple E infection are left with permanent neurological damage. Because of EEE’s high mortality rate, state officials have begun spraying insecticide in Massachusetts, where 10 communities have been designated “critical” or “high risk” for triple E. Towns in the state shuttered their parks from dusk to dawn and warned people to stay inside after 6 p.m., when mosquitoes are most active. 

Like West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne illness that poses a risk to people in the U.S. every summer, triple E is constrained by environmental factors that are changing rapidly as the planet warms. That’s because mosquitoes thrive in the hotter, wetter conditions that climate change is producing.

“We have seen a resurgence of activity with eastern equine encephalitis virus over the course of the past 10 or so years,” said Theodore G. Andreadis, a researcher who studied mosquito-borne diseases at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state government research and public outreach outfit, for 35 years. “And we’ve seen an advancement into more northern regions where it had previously not been detected.” Researchers don’t know what causes the virus to surge and abate, but Andreadis said it’s clear that climate change is one of the factors spurring its spread, particularly into new regions. 

Read Next

The disease after tomorrow

Zoya Teirstein

The first triple E outbreak on record occurred in Massachusetts in the 1830s in horses — the reason one of the three Es stands for “equine.” It wasn’t until a full century later, in 1934, that mosquitoes were incriminated as potential vectors for the disease. The first recorded human cases of the disease also occurred in Massachusetts four years later, in 1938. There were 38 human cases in the state that year; 25 of them were fatal. Since then, human cases have mostly been registered in Gulf Coast states and, increasingly, the Northeast. From 1964 to 2002, in the Northeast, there was less than one case of the disease per year. From 2003 to 2019, the average in the region increased to between 4 and 5 cases per year.

The disease is spread by two types of mosquito. The first is a species called Culiseta melanura, or the black-tailed mosquito. This mosquito tends to live in hardwood bogs and feeds on birds like robins, herons, and wrens, spreading the virus among them. But the melanura mosquito doesn’t often bite mammals. A different mosquito species, Coquillettidia perturbans, is primarily responsible for most of the human cases of the disease reported in the U.S. The perturbans mosquito picks up the EEE virus when it feeds on birds and then infects the humans and horses that it bites. Toward the end of the summer, when mosquitoes have reached their peak numbers and start jostling for any available blood meal, human cases start cropping up. 

Andreadis, who published a historical retrospective on the progression of triple E in the northeastern U.S. in 2021, said climate change has emerged as a major driver of the disease. 

“We’ve got milder winters, we’ve got warmer summers, and we’ve got extremes in both precipitation and drought,” he said. “The impact that this has on mosquito populations is probably quite profound.” 

Warmer global average temperatures generally produce more mosquitoes, no matter the species. 

Studies have shown that warmer air temperatures up to a certain threshold, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, shorten the amount of time it takes for C. melanura eggs to hatch. Higher temperatures in the spring and fall extend the number of days mosquitoes have to breed and feed. And they’ll feed more times in a summer season if it’s warmer — mosquitoes are ectothermic, meaning their metabolism speeds up in higher temperatures. 

Rainfall, too, plays a role in mosquito breeding and activity, since mosquito eggs need water to hatch. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means that even small rainfall events dump more water today than they would have last century. The more standing water there is in roadside ditches, abandoned car tires, ponds, bogs, and potholes, the more opportunities mosquitoes have to breed. And warmer water decreases the incubation period for C. melanura eggs, leading one study to conclude that warmer-than-average water temperatures “increase the probability for amplification of EEE.” 

Climate change isn’t the only factor encouraging the spread of disease vectors like mosquitoes. The slow reforestation of areas that were clear cut for industry and agriculture many decades ago is creating new habitat for insects. At the same time, developers are building new homes in wooded or half-wooded zones in ever larger numbers, putting humans in closer proximity to the natural world and the bugs that live in it. 

Read Next

When West Nile virus turns deadly

Zoya Teirstein

On an individual level, the best way to stay safe from EEE and other mosquito-borne diseases is to prevent bites: Wear long sleeves and pants at dusk and dawn, when mosquitoes are most prone to biting, and regularly apply an effective mosquito spray. But there are also steps that local health departments can take to safeguard public health, like testing pools of water for mosquito larvae and conducting public awareness and insecticide spraying campaigns when triple E is detected. Massachusetts is an example of a state that has been proactive about testing mosquitoes for triple E in recent summers. 

The most effective way to protect people from this disease would be to develop a vaccine against it. A vaccine already exists for horses, but there is little incentive for vaccine manufacturers to develop a preventative for triple E in humans because the illness is so rare.  

“Although EEE is not yet a global health emergency, the recent uptick in cases has highlighted our lack of preparedness for unexpected infectious disease outbreaks,” a group of biologists wrote last year in the open-access scientific journal Frontiers. “It would be wise to follow proactive active control measures and increase vigilance in the face of these threats.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is expanding the reach of a rare and deadly mosquito-borne illness on Aug 30, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Thupten Lodoe, also known by his pen name Sabuche, is in his 30s and hails from Seshul county, called Shiqu in Chinese, part of the Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province. 

He was arrested in October 2021 and detained for six months before being sentenced to four years and five months in prison in June 2022 for writing articles deemed a threat to national security and unity.

Lodoe has been detained in a prison in Dartsedo, or Kangding in Chinese, where he has endured harsh conditions, including hard labor, inadequate food and poor living conditions, said the sources who requested anonymity for safety reasons. 

Authorities said Lodoe is receiving medical treatment, but they did not disclose his illness or the hospital’s location, the sources said.

Lodoe’s arrest was part of a larger crackdown on Tibetan writers, intellectuals and cultural figures arbitrarily imprisoned in undisclosed locations, usually for long periods and with no disclosure of their whereabouts. Most were arrested after sharing their views or information about conditions in ethnic Tibetan areas under Chinese government rule.

Following his sentencing, his family was harassed by Chinese authorities, and his two children were barred from attending school.

Fluent in Tibetan, Chinese and English, Lodoe studied at a school established by the Panchen Lama, whose Buddhist spiritual authority is second only to that of the Dalai Lama, in Sichuan province. 

Despite a job offer from the Chinese government, he chose to work independently as an author, writing extensively about the Tibetan language — which Beijing has sought to repress along with Tibetan religion and culture — and translating the American national anthem and poems by an ancient Persian poet into Tibetan.

Chinese police previously warned him to stop writing such articles, but he kept doing so, a friend of Lodoe told Radio Free Asia in an earlier report. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.

Your book was a reassuring memoir to me when I was in the editing process. I had initially started my book as a novel and had hangups about writing a memoir; yours was one of the first I read that was avoiding the trauma dumping, but also providing an honest account of something, particularly labor. I thought it was great.

Did you feel a lot of pressure to discuss your trauma in the book to help it sell better? Personally, it felt like something people were especially interested in.

Thankfully, my publisher was on board with both the memoir material and the story of this hysteria patient being presented as I wanted them to be. The context in which those stories happened were a lot more important to the book than the particulars of anyone’s life or trauma. Lately there’s just an insatiable appetite for the culturally-scripted trauma narrative. Trauma does come into the book, but in the context of Freud’s attempt to cure the traumatized at the level of the fantasy that makes the trauma adhere.

In the beginning of the book, all the different threads felt really disparate: the ballet, the sickness, the hysteria. It was so satisfying when they all came together.

The associative model works well when writing about illness because it allows the form to reflect the context: the brain fog, the interruptions of pain, interrogating your experience in front of others. It felt very natural just following the subject wherever it went.

My own self understanding doesn’t come from my own innate awareness of the body, or diagnostic categories. If anything, it comes from reading a lot. I’m really interested in what happens when we put text and images together in a way where the images then defy their documentary purpose—I hoped that including the images of this famous hysteria patient would be not only a visual aid, but generative.

You wrote about the woman in the photos before they appeared, so I had already formed a mental image of what she looked like. When the photos appeared, I was forced to reevaluate.

Photos bring you closer to the flesh and blood of the person, but also create distance because the image is being used toward artifice. Smoke and mirrors.

Was there anything in particular you were doing to ground yourself physically?

I’m very prone to dissociation and repression, especially when ill, so while writing, the challenge was more forcing myself to be present. As for grounding myself, I don’t know. I would take Adderall when I was editing, which made editing more possible, but it’s not exactly a grounding drug!

Whatever works!

It’s frenetic; good for editing, but not so good for writing. It’s not a very creative drug.

Wasn’t that Hemingway’s advice? “Downers when you’re writing, uppers when you’re editing.”

That’s how it is for me. Weirdly, weed is a great writing drug, which is something I only discovered after the pandemic.

Do you have a ritual of smoking weed before you write?

I don’t really smoke. I like to smoke, but I’m so asthmatic, so I’ll usually do just a quarter of an edible and try to keep the caffeine to a minimum. Do matcha instead of coffee.

I use weed for writing emails. I don’t know if I’ve ever used it when writing writing, but it totally makes sense. It turns off some censorious part of your brain.

Sometimes I forget that drugs can be taken in fun new combinations. I was very pleasantly surprised by how well weed and Adderall mix. Really nice.

Or caffeine! I’ve never had weed with Adderall, but I’ve done it with Modafinil. That one will really get you going, that’s for sure.

It’s fun to find those combinations, to see if you can maintain it for a while as you work.

How did you come up with the idea for the book in the first place?

I started writing about a woman suffering from mysterious symptoms in my fiction MFA, but it really lacked the propulsion necessary for great fiction. I also find writing about myself fairly mortifying. The book only started to take form when I found these ghostly, haunting images of the hysteria patients. They represent what became one of the core themes of the book: this very futile hope that pain could be made visual and demand to be seen. The images are of interest as art objects to many people, but that can be problematic. We like to think of these photos as having been created with agency, but the women were forced to perform their symptoms in the vain hope to have them alleviated. The images provided the occasion for me to explore outside of my own story: medical history, psychoanalytic history, and the pathologies embedded in ballet, which I grew up in. Almost like a collage. There was this tension between late capitalist malaise and the frenetic excitement of the association in the book.

The biggest challenge of this book was working through illness. The biggest trick was finding the form that suited that kind of restriction. Visual artists are probably much more accustomed to working that way. I have a lot of artist friends who say they work best with a set of constraints. Writing can feel so much more open. Finding the form was really finding the set of constraints for myself. That was really the biggest trick.

That’s so interesting. Do the constraints always feel like they’re about form, or do you work with sets of constraints as well?

They’re mainly about form and deadlines for me. I might try to experiment more going forward. You reviewed Stephanie LaCava’s book, right? I love surrealist language games—I should play more games with my writing. That might be a good future challenge.

Oh, I agree. Stephanie’s book is also generously edited for our short attention spans these days.

It really is. She writes a lot of the sentences that I want to write, but I totally can’t—anachronistic or very simple short sentences where what is unsaid comes through more clearly. I always end up writing these long, clunky sentences with em dashes and semicolons, and it ends up in a totally different place than it began.

The most collaborative element of writing for me is reading. It feels so much like collaboration that I try to stay away from reading stuff that’s too similar to what I’m working on, because I’m terrified of unintentionally plagiarizing. I want my work to be in dialogue with something perhaps less obvious.

How do you go about picking the books that you want to serve as disparate influences on your writing? Is it just what speaks to you or do you intentionally seek things out?

Honestly, aside from niche academic interests, I mostly read fiction. I read most of the New York Review of Books’ new releases, a lot in translation, and the recommendations of friends. When I find a writer who speaks to me, I read everything they ever wrote.

There’s nothing more satisfying than working your way through a stack of all of an author’s books. I was so distraught the first time I did that as a kid. Oh my God, I’m never going to read anything that speaks to me this way ever again. Did you do a lot of reading as a kid?

I did, which wasn’t really the norm in ballet where people don’t tend to read as much. I basically just did ballet and read 24/7. I was very serious. I think I have more fun as an adult than I did as a child.

I remember reading Duras for the first time in high school and thinking, oh my God, this is it. This is what a book can be. I was so interested in the fallibility of memory and she’s really into that smoke and mirrors game. She tells the same story over and over in many different ways from many different angles. I don’t want to be that way, but I might end up being that way.

Sometimes part of the work is pushing against your natural tendencies, which are still going to show through anyways. The real creativity comes in that tension.

Pushing against yourself.

If you lean too far into the surrealism, the fallibility of memory, then maybe it becomes too abstract. But if you push back against that urge, you get something very interesting. You did this in the book. At first, there was this miasma of all these disparate ideas: there was ballet, there was this pain you’re experiencing, there was this writing about hysteria, and it was all swirling around, until eventually it crystallized very beautifully and you could understand how all of the elements fit together and why they were things that you were thinking about so much. Sometimes you need to wander around in the fog.

That’s my hope. When I’m reading a book that’s kind of acutely aware of the fallibility of the first person point of view, I appreciate a little bit more context.

I really loved it. It’s a book about how your body is betraying itself, about an illness you don’t fully understand; naturally it will be disorienting and confusing.

It’s like the old writing class adage: showing, not telling. You can show your reader you’re disoriented better than you can tell them.

Did the process of writing this book feel cathartic?

I don’t find writing especially cathartic. It feels good to be done. I got to the end. It’s so hard to know the beginning or the end of a story about a chronic illness—it’s never going to go away. Having the constraint of a deadline, knowing there has to be an end point, was itself a bit cathartic. I can move on to a different story now. Or try to.

You wrote that when you were young, you felt that flavors hurt when you ate and had a challenging time explaining that to your mother. Was it hard to capture in words the sensations that you were experiencing?

Yeah, definitely. There was a book in the ’80s, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, that explored how pain destroys language. It’s harder to describe than most things that we experience, perhaps especially so with chronic pain. The usual one-to-ten scale isn’t especially useful. I agree with Anne Boyer that it’s very convenient for a world which doesn’t want to see or hear about pain to render it invisible or indescribable or destructive of language.

It became a question of context. I can’t necessarily tell you exactly what my arthritis feels like, but I can tell you more about the context in which I experience it.

Writing about my own pain still feels hyperbolic or melodramatic. It brought up so much shame. I was anxious readers would think I was faking it, which obviously reflects whatever medical trauma I have.

Totally. Trying to describe it does feel hyperbolic. You’re trying to say, I’m suffering so much it feels like I’m dying, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Writing about the emotional pain of medical disbelief, skepticism or dismissal can communicate more to the reader than just trying to describe a physical sensation.

Everyone understands shame. The shame that I felt about not being believed and being told that I was crazy was just as bad as the pain. Maybe worse. Once I finally saw doctors who really believed me, the pain became more manageable because I was actually getting the right treatment, but the pain also felt more manageable because I was believed.

That’s both the benefit and the fraughtness of diagnosis. I’m skeptical of diagnostic categories—they can’t really recognize anything about our humanity or suffering. I don’t think they’re liberatory. But at the same time, they’re means of accessing care. That’s what we have to acquiesce to if we need care. You may feel seen or recognized, but it’s a fraught recognition. I don’t have any answers.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Liara Roux.

Qi was taken to a Beijing hospital after being taken ill during a family meal "some time ago," fellow dissident Jiang Lijun said. "He felt unwell after having an alcoholic drink and was taken to hospital, but they were unable to save him."

Australia-based dissident Sun Liyong said he had been unable to find out further details from Qi's family, who are under huge pressure from the authorities not to speak out.

"His wife doesn't want any contact with the outside world, because then the police would come to their home and threaten them," Sun said. "According to my understanding, his family members are afraid, and want to keep things low-key."

Sun said Qi had been suffering from kidney failure caused by uremia, in the later stages of diabetes, and had been going for four hours' dialysis every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the time of his death. He had also been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Shot in both legs

Qi had spent most of his life as a double amputee after losing both legs due to gunshot injuries sustained during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, in which the People's Liberation Army killed hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians, putting a bloody end to weeks of protests on Tiananmen Square.

"At 1.20 a.m. on June 4, 1989, I was shot in both legs at the same time in Xirongxian Hutong, Xidan," Qi once said in a video statement about his injuries.

"When I think back to June 4, 1989, it's not just my injuries that cause me pain -- the emotional pain is much worse," he said in the video clip, while battling sickness, disability and constant harassment by the authorities.

At the time of his shooting, Qi was 33 years old and employed as a painter at the Beijing No. 6 Municipal Construction company. His disability left him to eke out a meager living on subsistence payments supplemented by income as a street hawker.

Beijing-based rights activist Hu Jia said Qi was his best friend and had served as a living witness to the June 4 massacre throughout his life, paying a heavy price in the process. 

"Brother Qi was left disabled by June 4. He embodied historical evidence and was a witness to the massacre by the authorities," Hu said. "The price he paid was second only to that paid by the students and citizens who died in Beijing."

"He was the only person disabled [in the crackdown] who persisted in speaking out for more than 30 years."

Last May, the Tiananmen Mothers, a group representing victims of the June 4 massacre that ended weeks of pro-democracy protests in 1989 President Xi Jinping to take responsibility for the actions of the government ahead of the 34th anniversary of the bloodshed.

Dwindling numbers

Authorities in China typically place dozens of pro-democracy activists and dissidents under house arrest or other forms of restriction ahead of the politically sensitive date, while members of the Tiananmen Mothers victims group are taken to make offerings to their loved ones under police escort.

Meanwhile, the number of living relatives of people killed in the bloodshed -- ordered by then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping -- dwindles every year, as the group continues to call on Beijing to make public details of the massacre and its victims, to pursue those responsible, and to award compensation to victims' families.

Hu said many of Qi's later health problems stemmed from his 1989 injuries.

"If he had not been shot that night more than 30 years ago, he wouldn't have suffered from severe bleeding, amputation or hepatitis," Hu said. "I personally think that he might not have suffered from uremia or the like."

"He should still be alive ... if he had lived life day by day, working in a factory, he would still be alive today," he said. "He could have had a well-off, even middle-class life. He probably wouldn't have gotten divorced from his ex-wife."

Hu described Qi as "like a charging warrior" despite having only stumps where his legs should be.

He said Qi had longed in his later years to join his daughter Qi Ji in the United States, but wasn't allowed to leave China, partly due to the United States.

"They implemented a travel ban and other controls, and the United States didn't grant him a visa," Hu said. "All Brother Qi ever wanted was to see change in our country -- it was very simple."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

This article was produced in partnership with Mississippi Today, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For many people in Mississippi, the path to treatment for a serious mental illness may run through the local jail — even though they haven’t been charged with a crime.

In 2023, Mississippi Today and ProPublica investigated the practice of jailing people solely because they were waiting for mental health treatment provided through a legal process called civil commitment.

We found that people awaiting treatment were jailed without criminal charges at least 2,000 times from 2019 to 2022 in just 19 counties, meaning the statewide figure is almost certainly higher. Most of the jail stays we tallied lasted longer than three days, and about 130 were longer than 30 days.

Some people have died after being jailed purportedly for their own safety.

Every state has a civil commitment process in which a court can order someone to be hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, generally if they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others. But it is rare for people going through that process to be held in jail without criminal charges for days or weeks — except in Mississippi.

If you’d like to share your experiences or perspective, contact Isabelle Taft at itaft@mississippitoday.org or 601-691-4756.

In Mississippi, the process starts when someone files paperwork with a county office alleging that another person’s mental illness or substance abuse is so serious that they are a danger to themselves or others. That person is taken into custody by sheriff’s deputies until they can be evaluated and go before a judge. Although people may wait at a medical facility, if no publicly funded bed is available, they can sit in a jail cell until a treatment bed opens up.

We have spoken with people who were jailed solely on the basis of mental illness, family members of people who went through the commitment process, sheriffs and jail administrators, county officials, lawmakers, the head of the state Department of Mental Health, and experts in mental health and disability law. We have filed more than 100 public records requests and reviewed lawsuits and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports on jail deaths.

Here are five key findings from our reporting so far.

We spoke to more than a dozen Mississippians who were jailed without criminal charges as they went through the civil commitment process. They wore jail scrubs and were often shackled as they moved through the jail. They were frequently unable to access prescribed psychiatric medications, much less therapy or other treatment. They had no idea how long they would be jailed, because they could get out only when a treatment bed became available. They were often housed alongside people facing criminal charges. One jail doctor told us that people going through the commitment process were vulnerable to assault and theft of their snacks and personal items.

“They become a prisoner just like the average person coming in that’s charged with a crime,” said Ed Hargett, a former superintendent of Parchman state penitentiary and a corrections consultant who has worked with about 20 Mississippi county jails. “Some of the staff that works in the jail, they don’t really know why they’re there. … Then when they start acting out, naturally they deal with them just like they would with a violent offender.”

At least 14 people have died after being jailed during the commitment process since 2006, according to our review of lawsuits and records from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Nine died by suicide, and three died after receiving medical care that experts called substandard. Most recently, 37-year-old Lacey Handjis, a Natchez hospice-care consultant and mother of two, died in a padded cell in the Adams County jail in late August. Her death was not a suicide and is still under investigation.

Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten said he asked the state Bureau of Investigation to review Handjis’ death. “It just hurt me because I just know that people who are suffering from those type of conditions shouldn’t be in jail,” he said in September.

Mental health providers we spoke with said jail can exacerbate symptoms when someone is in crisis, increasing their risk of suicide. Jail staff with limited medical training may interpret signs of medical distress as manifestations of mental illness and fail to call for additional care.

After three men awaiting treatment died by suicide in the Quitman County jail in 2006, 2007 and 2019, chancery clerk Butch Scipper no longer jails people going through the commitment process. His advice to other county officials: “Do not put them in your jail. Jails are not safe places. We think they are, but they’re definitely not” for people who are mentally ill.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica surveyed disability rights advocates and state behavioral health agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nowhere else did respondents say people are routinely jailed for days or weeks without criminal charges while going through the involuntary commitment process. In three states where respondents said people are sometimes jailed to await psychiatric evaluations, it happens to fewer people and for shorter periods. At least a dozen states ban the practice altogether; Mississippi law allows it when there is “no reasonable alternative.” In Alabama, a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional in 1984.

Disability rights advocates in other states and experts on civil commitment or mental health care used words like “horrifying,” “breaks my heart” and “speechless” when they learned how many Mississippians are jailed without criminal charges while they wait for mental health care every year.

Wendy Bailey, head of the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, has said it’s “unacceptable” to jail people simply because they may need behavioral health treatment, and staff have encouraged chancery clerks to steer families toward outpatient treatment instead of the civil commitment process when appropriate.

The Department of Mental Health says it prioritizes people waiting in jail when making admissions to state hospitals, and the average wait time in jail after a hearing has dropped. The state has expanded the number of crisis unit beds and plans to add more. And it has increased funding for local services in recent years in an effort to reduce commitments.

In early January, Bailey said the agency has been reviewing commitment statutes in other states that restrict jailing people during the process. During the current legislative session, she said, the agency will support “changes to the commitment process that we hope will divert Mississippians from unnecessary commitments.”

In 2009, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law requiring any county facility that holds people awaiting psychiatric treatment through the commitment process to be certified by the Department of Mental Health. The department developed certification standards requiring suicide prevention training, access to medications and treatment, safe housing and more. But the law provides no funding to help counties comply and has no penalties if they don’t. Only a handful of counties got certified, and after 2013 the department’s efforts to enforce the law apparently petered out.

As of late last year, only one jail — out of 71 that had recently held people awaiting court-ordered treatment — was still certified. There is no statewide oversight or inspection of county jails.

After we asked about the law, the Department of Mental Health sought an opinion from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, which opined that it is a “mandatory requirement” that the agency certify the county facilities, including jails, where people wait for treatment. In October, the department sent letters to counties informing them of the attorney general’s opinion and encouraging them to get certified. Department officials are waiting for counties to initiate the certification process, though they know which jails have held people after their hearings. Department leaders, including Bailey, have emphasized that they have limited authority over counties and can’t force them to do anything.

According to data from the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, 71 of the state’s 82 counties held a total of 812 people prior to their admission to a state hospital during the fiscal year ending in June. According to state data and our analysis of jail dockets, the two counties that jail the most people during the commitment process are DeSoto and Lauderdale — together home to three of the state’s 10 largest cities. DeSoto has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state, and Lauderdale’s is above average. (Those counties’ chancery clerks, who handle the civil commitment process, and officials with the boards of supervisors, which handle county finances, haven’t responded to questions about why they jail so many people going through the commitment process.)

Meanwhile, some smaller, rural counties don’t jail people or do so rarely. Guy Nowell, who served as chancery clerk of Neshoba County until the end of 2023, said the county arranged each person’s commitment evaluations and hearing to take place on the same day to eliminate waits between appointments. If no publicly funded bed is available after the hearing, the county pays for people to receive treatment at a private psychiatric hospital.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today.

A photo of Robert Card released by police.

Since a gunman went on a rampage in Lewistown, Maine, killing 16 people, we’ve learned a few things about the shooter, Robert Card, who was found with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound after a two-day manhunt. A member of the Army Reserve, Card had recently been committed to a mental health facility after he reported hearing voices and threatened to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco, Maine.

Card’s mental health history has been central to reporting that laid out the lead-up to the deadliest mass shooting in the US this year. Questions of how Card was able to have access to guns, given his psychiatric hospitalization and documented concerns of family and soldiers in his reserve unit, drove much of the coverage. Lax gun laws that allow people like Card to slip through the cracks warrant interrogation, but the reality is that most mass shooters don’t have a mental health history like Card’s, nor is a record of mental illness a good predictor of gun violence.

Card’s ability to carry out this tragedy is a symptom of the gun violence crisis in the US, but the presence of his mental illness is not representative of the issue. In the vast majority of cases of mass violence, mental illness is not considered a primary factor. Attempting to rationalize the horrors of a mass shooting by emphasizing the perpetrator’s mental state does very little to address the larger issue at best, and leads to dangerous mental health stigma at worst.

A ‘textbook case’?

The New York Times piece “The Signs Were All There. Why Did No One Stop the Maine Shooter?” (11/2/23) referred to Card having a “textbook set” of warning signs, including that he was “hearing voices.”

Robert Card might be the “textbook case” of someone Maine’s law was aimed at (CNN, 11/5/23), but he’s not the textbook case of a mass shooter.

“The Maine Gunman Was a ‘Textbook Case’ for a State Law Designed to Remove Firearms From People Like Him. Why Didn’t It Work?” read a CNN headline (11/5/23).

“Even to the most untrained eye, Card is the literal textbook example of a person who shouldn’t be allowed to have access to firearms,” a New York Post editorial  (10/26/23) declared.

These pieces refer to Maine’s “yellow-flag” laws, which gun control advocates consider watered-down versions of red-flag laws. Also known as extreme-risk laws, red-flat laws allow the loved ones of a person in crisis or law enforcement to petition a court for an order that temporarily prevents the person from accessing guns. Yellow-flag laws require several procedural steps, including a mental health evaluation, before a gun can be removed from someone’s possession. Red-flag laws don’t require mental health evaluations.

It needs to be made clear: While Card’s mental illness might make him a “textbook example” of someone who should not have had access to a gun, it does not make him a “textbook example” of a shooter. A large majority of firearm deaths involving mental illness are suicides. These pieces did not make that distinction. (Gun suicides outnumber gun murders overall, but by a narrower margin.)

A tiny minority

FBI (6/18): “In light of the very high lifetime prevalence of the symptoms of mental illness among the US population, formally diagnosed mental illness is a not a very specific predictor of violence of any type.”

So while a critique of the weak gun laws that allowed Card access to firearms is warranted, harping on his mental illness doesn’t add much context to the larger epidemic of mass shootings in the US. Mental illness exists all around the world, after all, but only one country accounted for 73% of the mass shootings that occurred in the developed world between 1998 and 2019. And removing guns from everyone who displayed similar symptoms to Card is not likely to decrease mass shootings by a significant amount.

An FBI study that monitored pre-attack behaviors of mass shooters between 2000 and 2013 found that 25% of them had diagnosed mental illnesses (which includes non-psychotic conditions, such as depression and substance abuse). This is not far off from the 23% of US adults who experienced mental illness in 2021, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only 5% of the shooters in the FBI study had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.

And a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily assert a causal relationship. In most cases, the relationship between the violent act and mental illness is incidental (Columbia Psychiatry, 7/6/22).

In a piece for the American Association of Medical Colleges (1/26/23), John Rozel and Jeffrey Swanson cited a 2018 study that found that less than 5% of mass shooters had any record of a gun-disqualifying mental health adjudication, like involuntary hospitalization:

Indeed, if serious mental illnesses suddenly disappeared, violence would decrease by only about 4%. More than 90% of violent incidents, including homicides, would still occur.

They added, “The real story—and the real need—regarding mental illness and violence is suicide.”

The real red flag

Contrary to the implication of MSNBC‘s headline (10/26/23), “psychiatric treatment” is not a helpful criterion for identifying mass shooters.

Card’s family’s concern for his mental health was central to corporate media reporting, including a segment on MSNBC‘s Chris Jansing Reports (10/26/23) and an NBC piece (10/26/23) that described Card’s family and colleagues recalling him hearing voices. A CBS News Boston piece (10/26/23) that outlined a number of facts authorities knew about Card when he was on the run headlined his mental illness: “What We Know About Lewiston, Maine, Shooting Suspect Robert Card and His Mental Health History.”

“Even as [Card] was confronted and hospitalized and had a sheriff’s deputy come knocking, nothing went far enough,” the New York Times article (11/2/23) read.

“Cops Were Warned About Maine Gunman’s Declining Mental Health in May,” reported the Daily Beast (10/30/23).

A New York Post report (10/31/23) was headlined “Maine Mass Shooter Robert Card Claimed Voices in His Head Were Calling Him a ‘Pedophile.’”

Eclipsing the why

Kris Brown (Boston Globe, 10/30/23): “By irresponsibly promoting myths that link mental illness with dangerousness, officials perpetuate stigmas that only continue to hurt people suffering from such illness.”

The obsession with Card’s mental health eclipses why stronger risk-based gun restrictions—like red-flag laws—are so effective. In an opinion piece for the Boston Globe (10/30/23), Kris Brown, the president of gun violence prevention group Brady, points out:

Importantly, these laws were intentionally designed, in their initial recommendation by the Consortium for Risk Based Firearm Policy, to avoid reliance on mental health diagnoses, and instead to focus on the behaviors that best indicate potential future violence.

As NBC (8/6/19) reported in 2019, mental illness is not a significant risk factor in mass shootings—but a record of violent and risky behavior is. Card’s spoken threats and access to guns were statistically much more indicative of the risk he posed to the public than the mental illness that dominated the headlines.

Involuntary commitment and stigma

The stigma caused by this type of reporting is palpable. Following the massacre, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took to Twitter (10/26/23), painting with dangerously broad and wantonly vague strokes:

We must remove these violent, psychiatrically deranged people from their communities and be willing to involuntarily commit them.

The New York Post (10/26/23) defined the issue as “making sure the mentally ill or unstable can’t access guns.”

Unsurprisingly, the New York Post editorial board (10/26/23) was also a fan of involuntary commitment, suggesting that Maine needs red-flag laws—and “better ways to commit the mentally ill.”

The Post editorial made the solution seem simple:

The state must intervene by making sure the sick person’s getting the treatment they need, and keeping them totally isolated from any and all guns. Imagine if cops, prosecutors and mental health workers had acted swiftly to put Card back in a mental hospital and not let him leave.

Advocating for more mental health hospitalization requires an understanding of what’s wrong with mental healthcare in the first place. What, exactly, is the “treatment they need”? Is it available? Are psychiatric hospitals adequately staffed and funded? Is the staff trained enough to manage patients’ conditions and keep everyone safe? Does the patient have insurance, or sufficient funds to pay for treatment? How does stigma from communities, politicians and media serve as a barrier to effective treatment?

The New York Times piece’s subheading (11/2/23) said, “Shortcomings in mental health treatment, weak laws and a reluctance to threaten personal liberties can derail even concerted attempts to thwart mass shootings.” But the text of the article hardly addressed the former. It stated:

The system to treat people who resist getting help on their own is geared toward acute, not long-term, problems. Involuntary stays require an imminent threat of harm and generally last from 72 hours to two weeks.

Suggesting that involuntary commitment can prevent mass violence without engaging in meaningful discussion about barriers to effective mental health treatment—and the trauma inadequate mental health treatment can cause—is lazy.

In response to Ramaswamy’s ill-informed and stigmatizing tweet, journalist Ana Marie Cox (MSNBC, 10/26/23) highlighted another crucial point: 97% of mass shooters are men, and the majority of those men are white. Involuntary commitment has already been on the rise, but white men remain significantly underrepresented in involuntarily  committed populations.

‘That unstable neighbor’

The St. Louis Post Dispatch (11/2/23) snarks that bad lawmaking is “a clear sign of mental instability.”

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial (11/2/23) that advocated for tighter gun laws also used vague and stigmatizing language that villainized “unstable” people. While first discussing red-flag laws that should keep guns out of the hands of those who display signs of mental illness, the piece later sarcastically accused legislators who refuse to pass gun control measures of “mental instability”:

These are the same lawmakers who (talk about a clear sign of mental instability) defeated a measure this year that would merely have specified that children aren’t allowed to carry guns around in public. On firearms, these folks are immune to common sense and beyond convincing.

The piece ended:

Fully 60% of Missourians favor the modest, rational step of keeping guns from the mentally ill, according to a St. Louis University/YouGov poll this year. Yet the only way they will ever achieve that imperative is by sending a saner delegation to Jefferson City. Until then, you’ll just have to keep an eye out for that unstable neighbor.

The righteous call for stricter gun laws is obscured by the facetious conflation of mental illness with violence, political corruption and the need to be locked up. Statistically, the bigger reason to “keep an eye out for that unstable neighbor” with a gun is because of the risk of suicide—not mass violence.

Public stigma—including branding mentally ill people as dangerous—leads to worsening symptoms and reduced likelihood of receiving treatment. It can also lead to discrimination by employers, the healthcare system and the law (American Psychiatric Association, 8/20).

Locking people like Card in mental health facilities doesn’t automatically cure them. And considering mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence, it certainly does not adequately address the mass shooting crisis in this country.

The post Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Illness Doesn’t Address Either Issue appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

In 2022, doctors recorded the first confirmed case of tick-borne encephalitis virus acquired in the United Kingdom.

It began with a bike ride. 

A 50-year-old man was mountain biking in the North Yorkshire Moors, a national park in England known for its vast expanses of woodland and purple heather. At some point on his ride, at least one black-legged tick burrowed into his skin. Five days later, the mountain biker developed symptoms commonly associated with a viral infection: fatigue, muscle pain, fever. 

At first, he seemed to be on the mend, but about a week later, the man began to lose coordination. An MRI scan revealed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. He had been infected with tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, a potentially deadly disease that experts say is spreading into new regions due in large part to global warming. 

For the past 30 years, the U.K. has become roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer on average compared to the historical norm. Studies have shown that several tick-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent because of climate change. Public health officials are particularly concerned about TBE, which is deadlier than more well-known tick diseases such as Lyme due to the way it has quickly jumped from country to country. 

Gábor Földvári, an expert at the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary, said the effects of climate change on TBE are unmistakable.

“It’s a really common problem that was absent 20 or 30 years ago.” 

Read more in this series

How climate change is making us sick

Zoya Teirstein

Ticks can’t survive more than a couple of days in temperatures below zero, but they’re able to persevere in very warm conditions as long as there’s enough humidity in the environment. As Earth warms on average and winters become milder, ticks are becoming active earlier in the year. Climate change affects ticks at every stage of their life cycle — egg, six-legged larva, eight-legged nymph, and adult — by extending the length of time ticks actively feed on humans and animals. Even a fraction of a degree of global warming creates more opportunity for ticks to breed and spread disease.

“The number of overwintering ticks is increasing, and in spring there is high activity of ticks,” said Gerhard Dobler, a doctor who works at the German Center for Infection Research. “This may increase the contact between infected ticks and humans and cause more disease.”  

Since the virus was first discovered in the 1930s, it has mainly been found in Europe and parts of Asia, including Siberia and the northern regions of China. The same type of tick carries the disease in these areas, but the virus subtype — of which there are several — varies by region. In places where the virus is endemic, tick bites are the leading cause of encephalitis, though the virus can also be acquired by consuming raw milk from tick-infected cattle. TBE has not been found in the United States, though a few Americans have contracted the virus while traveling in Europe.

According to the World Health Organization, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 cases of the disease in Europe and northern Asia each year. The total number of cases worldwide is likely an undercount, as case counts are unreliable in countries where the population has low awareness of the disease and local health departments are not required to report cases to the government. But experts say there has been a clear uptick since the 1990s, especially in countries where the disease used to be uncommon.

“We see an increasing trend of human cases,” Dobler said, citing rising cases in Austria, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and other European countries.

TBE is not always life-threatening. On average, about 10 percent of infections develop into the severe form of the illness, which often requires hospitalization. Once severe symptoms develop, however, there is no cure for the disease. The death rate among those who develop severe symptoms ranges from 1 to 35 percent, depending on the virus subtype, with the far-eastern subtype being the deadliest. In Europe, for example, 16 deaths were recorded in 2020 out of roughly 3,700 confirmed cases.

Up to half of survivors of severe TBE have lingering neurological problems, such as sleeplessness and aggressiveness. Many infected people are asymptomatic or only develop mild symptoms, Dobler said, so the true caseload could be up to 10 times higher in some regions than reports estimate. 

While there are two TBE vaccines in circulation, vaccine uptake is low in regions where the virus is new. Neither vaccine covers all of the three most prevalent subtypes, and a 2020 study called for development of a new vaccine that offers higher protection against the virus. In Austria, for example, the TBE vaccine rate is near 85 percent, Dobler said, and yet the number of human cases continues to trend upward — a sign, in his opinion, of climate change’s influence on the disease.

[Read next: Mosquitos are moving to higher elevations — and so is malaria]

In Central and Northern Europe, where for the past decade average annual temperatures have been roughly 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, documented cases of the virus have been rising in recent decades — evidence, some experts say, that rising global temperatures are conducive to more active ticks. The parasitic arachnids are also noted to be moving further north and higher in altitude as formerly inhospitable terrain warms to their preferred temperature range. Northern parts of Russia are a prime example of where TBE-infected ticks have moved in. And some previously tick-free mountains in Germany and Austria are reporting a 20-fold increase in cases over the past 10 years.  

The virus’s growing shadow across Europe, Asia, and now parts of the United Kingdom throws the dangers of tick-borne disease into sharp relief. The U.K. bicyclist who was the first domestically acquired case of the disease survived his bout with TBE, but the episode serves as a warning to the region: Though the virus is still rare, it may not stay that way for long.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A brain-swelling illness spread by ticks is on the rise in Europe on Jul 25, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The Quest for Mainstream Acceptance: Magical Individual to Societal Healing

Today, in the effort to win mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, there are a number of voices in the room. Among them, the loudest are the ones who individualize illness through the medical lens while seeking legitimacy through access to powerful medical institutions, civil society, and the corporation in a proclaimed quest to “heal” those suffering in our society. We see anything from features in Forbes about 20-something tech billionaires microdosing to increase productivity, to 60 Minutes interviews with U.S. Iraq war veterans who report being cured from PTSD, to miracle stories of ketamine working with the poor and formerly incarcerated. Ironically, as this piece is being published, a number of these voices will be discussing and debating the path of the psychedelic renaissance at Psychedelic Science conference, taking place June 19–23 and being marketed as the largest conference on psychedelics in history.

Organizationally, some of the best-known names in the psychedelic space are the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the for-profit System Fail 23 mental health company Compass Pathways, and the nonprofit Usona Institute. Many inside these organizations often promote a course of thought claiming psychedelics in and of themselves can “heal” anything from PTSD to societal conflict. It’s as if there is a search for a balm, a real-life soma, to dissociate from the horrors of race and class. For many, psychedelics are the answer to this search.

Of those who believe psychedelics could find their way to addressing greater structural issues plaguing society, the reasoning often goes that “once the individual heals, then we can work on healing society — or even the world.” In one TED talk for example, MAPS founder Rick Doblin — one of the most prominent names in the psychedelic space — claims that psychedelic experiences have “the potential to help be an antidote to tribalism, to fundamentalism, to genocide and environmental destruction.” During the 2021 Fantastic Fungi Global Summit — an annual summit of mushroom enthusiasts — speaker after speaker discussed how important it is to expand the availability of psychedelics to “help heal the world.” We can expect much of the same rhetoric from various presenters at the Psychedelic Science conference.

The result of this theory of individualized mental health supposes that people and their mental lives exist in a vacuum. Trauma happens to an individual, so use psychedelics to heal the individual. But depression, stress, anxiety, etc., are not a result of personal failures but oppressive, exploitative, and alienating conditions of life under capitalism. Doblin and others will have us believe that we can “heal people” without dealing with the conditions of their lives, but by simply using psychedelics to change how they see those conditions. Far from healing the world, this approach reinforces the conditions that lead to the suffering itself.

There is a naivete born of goodwill, good acid, and a lack of structural analysis that could be amusing if the current state of the world were not so dire. It’s a kind of “magical societal healing” mantra that is echoing through the most progressive sectors of the so-called renaissance, i.e., “we simply gain acceptance to powerful institutions, give these drugs to people, getting them into existing systems of oppression and the change will come” or even more then change, “a more just society” will come. But, as we will discuss, in this process the psychedelic community ultimately seeks to incorporate itself into powerful, controlling institutions, which will not only prevent these substances from helping heal the world but also enlist them in maintaining the systems harming us all.

Gramscian Hegemony and Psychedelic Medicine

Proponents of psychedelics seek to gain acceptance for these substances by medicalizing them. Article after article is published on how psychedelics can help treat various forms of psychological suffering. But medicalization could play a role in further entrenching ruling-class control of psychedelics. To further examine this process, it is important to revisit the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

Gramsci terms the control wielded by the ruling-class “hegemony.” Gramsci believed that if the ruling class was unable to maintain control over the masses, the masses may seek to change circumstances around their ongoing exploitation. For Gramsci, the ruling class does not always need to use domination or coercion to maintain its authority — and actually using these forms of control can sometimes be more destabilizing or fragile for the ruling classes. Instead, they can use “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership to gain a high level of consent among the general population. The ruling class manipulates language, culture, even morality itself to subtly convince the masses that the status quo is normal, natural, and the best course for everyone in society. This helps maintain power in capitalist society and make sure the interests of the capitalist state are represented in the minds of the ranks of the masses.

As Bruce Cohen notes in Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness, an institution continually used to impose ruling-class ideology today is the institution of medicine. Control through institutions such as medicine have proved quite effective for the ruling class because they provide a guise of perceived objectivity. Cohen notes,

These civic institutions are much more effective than direct, repressive organs of the state in manipulating the masses due to their perceived detachment from elite control. Hegemonic power is conducted under the guise of objective and neutral institutional practice, though it is in reality nothing of the sort. Instead, intellectuals and professionals are responsible for the legitimation of ruling-class ideas within the public sphere, articulating such values as seemingly natural and taken-for-granted knowledge about the world.

As we discussed in our previous piece, the medical system helps uphold the status quo by finding ways to reduce natural reactions to damaging systems to specific quantified diagnoses, which can be documented and billed for. This allows for the commodification of natural physical and psychological reactions to oppressive systems. Medical professionals can help in “depoliticizing inherently political problems” in the words of physician and activist Vicente Navarro, leading people to believe that individual action or improvement is the answer instead of collective action for societal change. In this way, the institution of medicine helps impose ruling-class ideology by misdirecting condemnation away from violent systems, which benefit the ruling class, and instead onto individuals.

The medicalization of psychedelics is so useful because it gives the guise of neutral exploration of the science for individual therapeutic purposes while at the same time funneling them into a more subtle form of control, which benefits the ruling class. By being presented as scientifically objective, medical professionals can be effective in the task of instituting ruling-class hegemony because as physician and activist Howard Waitzkin argues, “doctors may be more effective in enforcing societal norms than other social control agents; doctors are less accountable to the public and therefore freer to inject class and professional biases into their relationships with clients.”

But it goes further than shifting from system-based analysis to individual-based analysis. The process of medicalization also leads to material control of these substances by institutions that serve the ruling class. The medicalization of psychedelics means substances that can profoundly affect consciousness and one’s perception of society as a whole will be more likely to be “available” strictly through medical gatekeeping. This will lead to more control over how psychedelics are used, what the outcome of their usage is, all while ensuring a profitable market is created within the medical system that poses no threat to the status quo. Psychedelics in the hands of capitalist doctors, therapists, companies, will be used to reinforce capitalist ideology, individualized psychiatry, and a continued obfuscation of the social and structural factors affecting health and well-being.

Why Incorporate Psychedelics as Medicine?

This brings us to questions around why medical control of psychedelics would be useful. We can propose a number of ideas. One compelling theory is suggested by Caitlin Johnstone in her piece “‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ Entirely about Corporate Greed.” The author notes “the abusive nature of capitalism is causing a widespread mental health crisis that our rulers have a vested interest in preventing so the slaves will keep turning the gears of the machine.” The proposals range anywhere from treating alienation and depression resulting from workplace exploitation with psilocybin to giving MDMA to soldiers to make it easier for them to advance imperialist policy through killing and military violence. Could this latter example be why we see military personnel gathering to conferences like Psychedelic Science like moths to a flame?

Psychedelics themselves do not have an inherent right or left ideology built into them. They have the power to either break down or reinforce traditionally held beliefs around people’s relation to themselves, their loved ones, society, and even reality itself. They can threaten hegemonic ideologies, or they can reinforce and deepen the acceptance of ruling-class ideologies. For some, when combined with critical political analysis, psychedelics can reconnect the user to greater inner purpose, reconnect to community, reestablish the interconnectivity of all living things. With this reconnection could come the potential of a realization of the truly destructive nature of oppressive systems. This opens the possibility for one to see the destructive systems outside of him or herself as the true causes of suffering and develop resolve to fight to destroy those systems. When combined with revolutionary political analysis, this can give these substances revolutionary potential in some cases.

We saw at least some of this process play out in the “first psychedelic wave” in the ’60s as there were often direct connections made between psychedelic use and anti-establishment related political practice. It comes as no surprise, then, that now proponents of the medicalization of psychedelics fear a repeat of the hit the movement took at that time. It’s partially why there is a strong focus on not letting anything “go off the rails” and a condemnation of the connection between political practice and psychedelic use.

The political potential of psychedelic use is what makes it even more important for the ruling class to gain hegemonic control over how these substances are used and made available to the public. It makes it that much more important for medical professionals, for example, to help push bourgeois ideology by helping perpetuate individualization and internalization of psychological suffering, for example, ultimately misdirecting the gaze away from a critical, system-based analysis.

When Gramsci discussed hegemony, he saw the process of the ruling class maintaining ideological control as a constant battle in which ruling-class “norms” are constantly destabilized or questioned. This process of questioning ruling-class hegemony becomes heightened in times of crisis. Today, capitalism creates more and more crises around the globe. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the limits to the biomedical model of maintaining health and well-being. Now, postpandemic peaks, overdose deaths are increasing, and suicides are once again on the rise. We see increasing military conflicts around the globe and the current geopolitical landscape compounding things with rising inflation making it harder for people to make ends meet. These co-occurring crises can cause people to question whether ruling-class institutions such as medicine can actually help treat or alleviate the suffering of the masses. In this context, it is no wonder that medicine would naturally incorporate psychedelics as therapeutic modalities as it becomes even more crucial for capitalist class to restrengthen the legitimacy of ruling-class institutions at this time.

The Need for a Revolutionary Perspective in the Renaissance

By incorporating these substances into medicine and other mainstream institutions, proponents can claim that we are moving toward making these substances more available to help a greater number of people. At the same time, the trend will help keep psychedelics from playing any role in pushing the toiling masses to upend the entire system. As we argue above, hegemonic institutions such as medicine can help monitor and control the conclusions reached by those using these substances. And this obviously extends beyond the strict limits of medicine. For example, those acting as guides or doing integration work are going to be some of the most influential people in influencing the conclusions individuals come to from using psychedelics. This makes their political praxis that much more crucial toward influencing outcomes.

We can already see some of the outcomes of the quest for acceptance into hegemonic institutions in real time today — the venture capitalist, the investor bros, fresh from their journey with “my shaman,” having seen the creation and destruction of the universe, now emerge as new beings. And yet the capitalist capture is so complete, their only recourse is to commodify. They have created companies now traded on the NASDAQ — with all the typical bells and whistles of “fair trade,” “sustainability,” and “equity.” But, contrary to what some may hope, the power and money will not shift post-ayahuasca enlightenment. We should know that these drugs have been available to the rich and powerful for 70 years, many whom were the architects of neoliberalism.

We want to be clear, any possibility of psychedelics helping mitigate suffering under capitalism can be positive. But as these substances are incorporated into hegemonic institutions such as medicine, we should ask ourselves, What is our goal? Is our goal to simply blunt suffering, or is our goal to actually reduce and eliminate suffering? If we want to strive for both, we must question the structures these substances are being incorporated into and how they function to further entrench ruling-class control. We must understand how ruling-class hegemony functions through class institutions.

Overall, our hope is that psychedelics can meet their revolutionary potential and have a role in not only mitigating suffering caused by violent systems, but also help us eliminate those systems altogether. But if system-based analysis is absent from the growing renaissance, and if revolutionary politics are not central to our analysis, then the potential to actually fight systems which create suffering does not exist.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Pappas and Dimitri Mugianis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/capitalist-hegemony-in-psychedelic-medicine/feed/ 0 405661 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/queering-mental-illness-into-a-new-revolutionary-consciousness/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/queering-mental-illness-into-a-new-revolutionary-consciousness/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 05:44:34 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=283970 Jordan Neely was kind of a weird kid. If you ever saw him, you would know what I mean. There was just something profoundly ‘other’ about his spirit and through the right set of eyes, it was something beautiful to behold. He looked just like Michael Jackson back when Michael Jackson still looked like Michael More

The post Queering Mental Illness into a New Revolutionary Consciousness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/queering-mental-illness-into-a-new-revolutionary-consciousness/feed/ 0 398606 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/da-says-man-who-choked-jordan-neely-to-death-on-subway-will-face-manslaughter-charge/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/da-says-man-who-choked-jordan-neely-to-death-on-subway-will-face-manslaughter-charge/#respond Thu, 11 May 2023 22:54:44 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/daniel-penny-jordan-neely-charge

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg confirmed Thursday that Daniel Penny, who last week fatally choked Jordan Neely on the subway in New York City, is set to be charged Friday and could face up to 15 years behind bars.

"Daniel Penny will be arrested on a charge of manslaughter in the second degree," Bragg's office said in a statement. "We cannot provide any additional information until he has been arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, which we expect to take place tomorrow."

While riding the F train on May 1, Neely—a 30-year-old Black subway performer known for impersonating Michael Jackson—was "acting erratically,” but he did not attack anyone on the train, according to witness and freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez.

Neely, who was unhoused, shouted about being "fed up and hungry" and "tired of having nothing," said Vazquez—who posted on Facebook footage of Penny putting Neely in a chokehold that the medical examiner concluded killed him.

Penny, a white 24-year-old Marine veteran, was initially questioned and then released by police; his attorneys claim he acted in self-defense.

Meanwhile, the video has spread online and sparked not only demands for justice but also national conversations about homelessness, mental illness, and racism in the United States.

According to NBC New York:

Multiple protests have taken place in Manhattan since Neely's death, with dozens arrested. Protesters again ratcheted up the volume Thursday, even after learning of the charges said to be coming.

"We need people to be held accountable for their actions, however, we don't want this just to be about the need to incarcerate this man," said Jawanza James Williams, the organizing director for Vocal NY.

Still, some said it has taken too long for the charges to come.

"It's 10 days too late," said protester Tanesha Grant. "Yes it's some step towards progress, but we've been waiting too long."

In a Wednesday speech, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams used Neely's death to promote his unpopular policy of addressing NYC's intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with forced hospitalizations.

"There is no evidence supporting Adams' harmful and dangerous rhetoric," responded New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman. "This kind of stigmatization and fearmongering contributes to the victimization of people with perceived mental illness—the same that led to the killing of Jordan Neely."

"The mayor is right that there are more Jordan Neelys in our city," Lieberman added. "They deserve housing, healthcare, and supportive services to get back on their feet, not to be controlled, criminalized, or killed."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/da-says-man-who-choked-jordan-neely-to-death-on-subway-will-face-manslaughter-charge/feed/ 0 394146 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/25/targeting-mental-illness-will-not-prevent-mass-shootings/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/25/targeting-mental-illness-will-not-prevent-mass-shootings/#respond Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:51:41 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gun-violence-mass-shooting-mental-illness

As the trial begins for the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people in 2018, hearts and lives are still shattered from the recent mass shootings at an Alabama birthday party and the Louisville bank. Ongoing are calls for gun reform along with cries to “deal with mental illness” by lawmakers, as happened in Nashville. In the January California shootings, a congresswoman speculated that if older Asian Americans were able to access appropriate mental health treatment, “things could have been different.”

In my work as a psychiatrist who sees many people with serious mental illness, I know that focusing on mental health will not reduce mass shootings. It is extremely rare for a person with mental illness to kill a group of strangers.

Not all mass shootings are random acts of violence. Shooters have been provoked by racism, homophobia, homegrown terrorism and crusades against abortion providers. By definition we do not categorize these “socially deviant behaviors” motivated by political, religious, or sexual reasons as mental illness.

Research tells us that only a small portion of active shooters are diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Schizophrenia, a very debilitating mental illness, has become a symbol for aggression and unprovoked violence. However, the risk of violence in schizophrenia is mediated largely by other factors like substance use.

Risk factors for violence in severe mental illness overlap with risks in the general population. Risk levels can be estimated, but there are no tools to predict who among the higher risk people will commit violence. Nor can we predict when such violence will be triggered. In fact, many shooters were evaluated in the days preceding the incident and sent on their way.

To be sure, the mental state of a shooter is undeniably important. Common characteristics of past mass shooters are poorly controlled moods, impulsivity, poor judgment, and lack of empathy. These characteristics inform risk, irrespective of a diagnosed mental illness. A majority of shooters were reacting to grievances.

Shooters often experience a crisis and show change in their behaviors in the weeks leading to the attack - over half die at the scene of the crime, having never sought mental health treatment. An individual’s past history of violence also matters because it is a strong predictor of future violence.

Mental illness is a term used loosely in common vocabulary. Poor mental health is not the same as having a diagnosable mental disorder. Mental health is a state of mind that changes over time. People cannot be neatly divided into the mentally ill and the mentally well. About half of the U.S. population has had some mental disorder at some point in their lifetime. This means almost half of the country could be labeled as mentally ill and considered more likely to commit violent acts.

Recently, I did a risk assessment for a colleague’s patient. Instead of asking for his diagnosis, I gauged his impulsivity, anger, feelings of vengeance and suicidality, and evaluated for active use of substances that alter mood and impair judgment. Most importantly, I wanted to know if he had access to a weapon. Possessing a weapon is essential to carry a destructive plan to completion - and firearms make it easier to cause destruction on a large scale.

Instead of defaulting to mental illness as the reason for mass shootings, we can look at countries with far fewer gun deaths and mass shootings. Since Australia instituted a massive gun buyback program in the 90s, firearm deaths reduced by half, and no mass killings have occurred since then.

In addition to a buyback program, UK Parliament passed legislation to ban private ownership of certain firearms and to require owners to register their weapons. The number of gun homicides in the U.S. is now more than quadruple in comparison to the UK.

It is obvious on a global scale that more firearm ownerships closely correlate with more firearm deaths. However, there is a deeply entrenched culture of guns in the U.S. Attempts to legislate gun ownership are often noted as an infringement of rights - but reducing gun violence is not the same as promoting gun control.

Stronger firearm policies reduce firearm deaths. But since that is so challenging to implement, research can be part of the solution by engaging local communities to better understand complex gun culture and build knowledge of best practices for gun safety.

Furthermore, there needs to be more federal funds than what was allocated after a partial repeal of the Dickey Amendment. Ultimately, everyday citizens and the highest levels of government need to come together on legislation that reasonably controls gun access and ownership.

Relying on mental health professionals to prevent mass shooters is an exercise in futility that will not save lives or prevent the heartache and trauma caused by mass shootings.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Aniyizhai Annamalai.

President Biden has declared an end to the COVID-19 national emergency, but people living with long COVID say the pandemic is far from over. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly one in five people infected with COVID-19 go on to experience symptoms of long COVID. We speak to science writer Ryan Prior about the movement to expand research and resources for those with long COVID, and his own experience living with the chronic illness. Prior is the author of The Long Haul and writes the “Patient Revolution” for Psychology Today.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Mental health illness is a modern-day tragedy of global proportions; while individual patterns and circumstances vary, widespread interwoven causes within contemporary society function as major trigger of unhappiness, low self-esteem and discontent. Values, so-called, socio-economic and educational methodologies, including competition, comparison and conformity, the relentless agitation of desire, the importance of ‘success’ and focus on pleasure, all create insecurity, discontent and division; and where there is division of any kind, within the individual or society, conflict inevitably follows.

In June 2022 the World Health Organization (WHO) published its most detailed report on the topic: ‘The World mental health report: Transforming mental health for all’, designed, “To inspire and inform better mental health for everyone everywhere.” The data shows that around one billion people suffer from some form of mental health illness, or one in eight of us; “a staggering figure” [rising annually] which the UN agency rightly illustrates, “is even more worrying, if you consider that it includes around one in seven teenagers.”

Shocking as they are, these figures serve as little more than pointers to the scale of the problem. Most people do not live in developed countries with relatively well-resourced health services, but in poor or desperately poor nations, where little research is carried out and where there is often no mental health support. WHO report that, “around half the world’s population lives in countries where there is just one psychiatrist to serve 200,000 or more people.”

Where treatment is available, it is often unaffordable or inaccessible; consequentially “most people with diagnosed mental health conditions go completely untreated,” and so they suffer, often agonizingly, and in many cases for decades. Mental health illness destroys lives, feeding employment, education and relationship issues or failures; alcohol and drug addiction, and in extreme cases self-harm and suicide. According to WHO (2019 figure), every 40 seconds, of every day, someone somewhere in the world dies of suicide, many more attempt it; among under 25 year olds it’s one of the leading causes of death.

A perpetual state of agitation

Parallel with growing awareness of mental health, there is a good deal of talk in western nations now (commonplace in the Orient for eons) about meditation; and the Buddhist inspired discipline of mindfulness; of focusing completely on the task or activity at hand.

Meditation (from the Sanskrit dhyana) is, strictly speaking, not an activity or a practice: it is a direct experience of reality, in which the division between experiencer and experience has ceased to be. However, what is commonly regarded as mediation is more often than not some form of concentration or visualization exercise. Concentration on the breath, on an imagined form or a particular word/form of words – a mantra of some kind. All of which, whilst perhaps not qualifying as ‘meditation’, is extremely positive for mental fitness.

In the same way that physical health requires our active engagement (exercise, diet, sleep etc.), if we are to create a healthy mind, particularly given the enormous stresses and demands of life, we need to take responsibility for it. To pay attention to the activity of the mind and learn to focus. This means becoming aware of the movement of thoughts, which much of the time takes place unconsciously and is saturated in conditioning. Psychological/sociological conditioning is ubiquitous; beginning from birth – before in fact – and continuing relentlessly until, or unless we wake up and realize that what we take to be ‘I’ or ‘me’, is nothing more than a conditioned structure, an image, built around a set of accumulated ideas; opinions and views – about the world, other people and ourselves, poured into the mind and unconsciously absorbed.

Such constructs are inherently inhibiting and divisive, adding to the erroneous belief that we are separate, from one another, from the natural environment, and from that which we call God. The socio-economic ideology of the age strengthens this sense of separation; cruel, violent and unjust it denies compassion, promoting values based on selfishness, personal ambition/achievement at the expense of the collective good, and the health of the natural world. Economic insecurity is, for the majority, the daily reality, how to pay the rent/mortgage, for instance, and avoid destitution; separation and isolation creates an environment in which fear, most commonly experienced as anxiety or stress, can and does flourish.

Consumerism, which constitutes the life blood of the economic system, is offered as a way to alleviate the inflicted pain. Poisonous on numerous levels it requires discontent and desire to be constantly maintained, ensuring that the mind is kept in a perpetual state of agitation; driven by longing, moving from one feeling induced thought to another, never settled. In order to move beyond the endless buffeting of fluctuating, often painful feelings and transient thoughts, we need to create mental fitness and strengthen the mind. A powerful way of doing this is through meditation and mindfulness.

The impact of meditation on stress

Over the years various studies have been conducted investigating the impact of meditation. In October 2022, Practical Psychology discussed research showing “that meditation can help thicken the prefrontal cortex of the brain,……[which], not only increases our ability to complete tasks…but also reduces aging in the brain.” In addition, “Meditation reduces chatter in the monkey mind. We stop focusing on our problems and start observing what is happening around us,” thus reducing mental agitation; a 2020 study undertaken by the Center for Healthy Minds (CHM) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a Buddhist monk, found that his brain was ‘eight years younger’ than his 41 years; adding “to a growing pile of evidence that meditative practice may be associated with slowed biological ageing… [which] makes sense biologically, because stress is a thing that causes ageing,” and meditation helps to reduce stress.

New research, reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which looked at the impact of meditation on the gut health of 37 Tibetan Buddhist monks, and 19 secular residents, revealed that gut bacteria associated with the alleviation of mental illness “in the monks differed substantially from those of their secular neighbors……suggesting that meditation can influence certain bacteria that may have a role in mental health.”

Becoming mentally aware, learning to consciously work with the mind, to focus on the task at hand, and not allowing the mind to wander off; strengthening and expanding one’s ability to concentrate, facilities mental fitness, reduces the impact of daily stress and worry, and, as the Buddha taught, creates joy: “it is a great good to control the mind; a mind self-controlled [focused] is a source of great joy.” The simple act of sitting quietly for 15 minutes or so, once or twice a day, shifting our focus away from the external chaos and turning within, has been demonstrated (by CHM and others) to aid this process.

Like all exercise regimes, discipline and consistency is needed, but once a rhythm of reflection is established, it quickly becomes part of the daily routine. In choiceless observation, the great Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti maintained, “every form of conditioning is dissolved,” allowing transformation within the brain to take place; healing, in which, as the study on the 41 year old monk demonstrated, the brain cells themselves are rejuvenated, allowing clarity of mind and action to spontaneously come about.

The world we are living in, with its constant noise, demands and pressures; the destructive ideologies, divisions and unjust systems, works against such inner quiet and mental well-being. Indeed, contentment and unconditional happiness is the enemy of the dominant corrupt economic paradigm, founded and reliant as it is on consumerism and desire. Constant longing is its aim and is the guarantee for misery, depression and anxiety/stress. Within such a mentally and physically unhealthy environment, it is crucial that individually we recognize the dangers, which are real and potent, and, where possible and within our own limitations, act to safeguard our own well-being, mental and physical, and of course, the two are inextricably connected.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams' Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.

"This 'compassionate' approach neglects the demands of the vulnerable communities he's claiming to help."

"If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation," states a city document.

While the mayor framed the plan to forcibly remove people with severe mental illness from streets and subways as a compassionate policy for those "in urgent need of treatment," motivated by a "moral obligation" to act, critics called the former New York Police Department captain's plan ineffective and harmful.

After Adams unveiled the directive at a Tuesday press conference, Harvey Rosenthal, chief executive of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services and a longtime critic of involuntary confinement, told The New York Times that "the mayor talked about a 'trauma-informed approach,' but coercion is itself traumatic."

The mayor's approach, Rosenthal said, relies on "the same failed system that's overburdened and can't address the people they already have now."

"New Yorkers will see this plan for what it is: a draconian attempt to say the Adams' administration is tackling a problem, while only making it worse," said Jawanza Williams, director of organizing at VOCAL-NY. "Mayor Adams is using progressive language around care and compassion to distract from his continued budget cuts to services and agency staff, while fueling the NYPD budget."

"This 'compassionate' approach neglects the demands of the vulnerable communities he's claiming to help: permanent housing, equitable access to public health tools, and investments in community services that meet people where they are," Williams continued. "If the Adams administration actually cared about helping people experiencing mental health crises, Daniel's Law would be at the top of his legislative agenda, and he would halt his austerity budget measures immediately. Anything less, will only do more harm."

The proposed state law—named for Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man who died in 2020 after being restrained by Rochester, New York police while experiencing a mental health crisis—would create trained response units to deescalate such emergencies instead of armed officers.

Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at the NYC-based Coalition for the Homeless, asserted Tuesday that "rather than further involving police in mental health responses and urging city workers to involuntarily transport more people to hospitals, the administration should focus on expanding access to voluntary inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care, offering individual hotel rooms to all unsheltered people, and cutting through red tape that has left far too many permanent supportive housing units sitting vacant."

Highlighting that many New Yorkers can't access psychiatric treatment even if they are seeking it out, Simone said that "Mayor Adams needs to focus on repairing our broken mental health system and prioritize bringing access to quality voluntary care and affordable, permanent housing with support services to New Yorkers who need it the most."

NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman noted that Adams' new plan may also violate state and federal restrictions on detaining people with mental illness. She declared that "the mayor is playing fast and loose with the legal rights of New Yorkers and is not dedicating the resources necessary to address the mental health crises that affect our communities."

"Forcing people into treatment is a failed strategy for connecting people to long-term treatment and care," Lieberman stressed. "The decades-old practice of sweeping deep-seated problems out of public view may play well for the politicians, but the problems will persist—for vulnerable people in desperate need of government services and for New Yorkers."

Adams' effort to "police away homelessness and sweep individuals out of sight'' is a page from the failed playbook of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, she added. "With no real plan for housing, services, or supports, the administration is choosing handcuffs and coercion."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Public health experts in the United States are warning of a possible “tripledemic” of respiratory illness this winter: an increase in COVID cases, an early flu season and a surge in cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Hospitals in some parts of the U.S. are already seeing a surge in cases of RSV, which usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms but can be very serious for infants. Many respiratory illnesses are “coming back with a vengeance” after ebbing over the last two years due to pandemic mitigation efforts says pediatrician Dr. Christina Propst. She urges parents of infants to continue to avoid crowds, practice good hygiene and keep up-to-date on children’s vaccinations in order to slow the spread of RSV. “It is really important to take these common sense precautions to keep children safe and really to keep our healthcare system afloat at this point,” says Propst.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

One of eight West Papuan activists who raised the banned Morning Star flag of independence in a protest last December has died.

Zode Hilapok’s death was confirmed by a relative, Christianus Dogopia, who said that since being detained, Hilapok’s health had been deteriorating.

Dogopia said that on 12 December 2021 his relative began experiencing symptoms of illness, feeling fatigued and sleepy.

• READ MORE: TAPOL’s Condolences upon the Death of Zode Hilapok
• Other Morning Star flag protests

At that time, Hilapok lost weight dramatically.

“At that time he ate only rice, without side dishes, or with vegetables but in small portions. Otherwise, his stomach hurt or he would become nauseated. His bowel movements were bloody,” Dogopia said.

Hilapok and seven friends, all aged between 18 and 29, were arrested by police on December 1, 2021, when they marched in front of the Papua police headquarters carrying Morning Star flags and banners.

The flag is considered a symbol of the West Papua struggle for independence and has been strictly banned by the Indonesian authorities with jail sentences of up to 15 years for offenders.

The treason case against Zode Hilapok was never tried because he was ill.

He died at Yowari Hospital on October 22.

In August, the other seven were found guilty of treason and sentenced to 10 months in prison from the day they were detained.

They were released in September.

Hilapok’s death comes after a West Papuan leader, Buchtar Tabuni, was arrested by Indonesian police.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 19, joining nearly 1.5 other million Americans who have the chronic illness that can cause the immune system to attack itself. This disease requires many doctor's visits, and the treatment is similar to getting treated for cancer. It's very time-intensive, and it completely disrupts your everyday life—and most of us do not have the protection of paid leave policies that ensure we get the time we need to take care of ourselves.

My health worsened, until I eventually passed out at work one day. I was being forced to prioritize a paycheck over my own health.

That's because the United States is one of the only countries in the world without a federal paid leave policy.

As a result of my chronic illness, I regularly feel extreme fatigue and intense muscle pain. It can feel like completing a full-body workout—without doing anything at all. This was a big challenge for me earlier in my career—I didn't know which days were going to hit me the hardest, but I also didn't have access to paid leave. I really wanted to be a good employee and a good worker, but at the end of the day, my health just kept getting in the way.

Eventually, I stopped even going to doctor's appointments because my bills began piling up, and I needed to take care of my daughter. Even though my supervisor used to work as a nurse and was incredibly understanding, there was only so much she could do. At the end of the day my job didn't offer paid time off, and I needed to pay my bills. This led to more complications. My health worsened, until I eventually passed out at work one day. I was being forced to prioritize a paycheck over my own health.

A lack of paid leave and the security and support it provides can leave you feeling helpless. The United States has a history of not embracing policies that support our families and, in particular, women; and that's acutely felt now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. Our government refuses to enact enormously popular, common sense paid leave policies, even as our rights are eroded.

It turns out I wasn't the only person who was fed up with having to choose between work and health. I got involved with Mothering Justice, a grassroots policy advocacy organization for mothers of color in America, and started regularly advocating for paid sick leave policies. I started sharing my story and journey to help people realize that we shouldn't have to prioritize our jobs over our health. In turn, I learned from many other people who had similar stories to mine, and it felt incredibly gratifying to know I wasn't the only person who was struggling with this.

Eventually, I started working for Mothering Justice full-time and found the support I needed to be the best version of myself while advocating for policies that would help families across America. Knowing that I now have access to paid time off whenever my chronic illness gets the better of me has made a significant impact on my life. My doctor even noted a change in my blood pressure, and I've felt a new purpose and passion. Every single day, I use that passion and purpose as fuel to advocate for everyone who is impacted by a lack of paid leave in their lives. 

Pain and sickness are universal, and no one is safe from it. I'm in a better position now than I was earlier in my life, but I will continue to fight until everyone has access to universal paid time off. Everyone deserves the opportunity to live a healthy life and take care of themselves. It's long past time for our elected officials in Congress to step up and pass a comprehensive federal paid leave policy that provides every single working individual in America with paid family and sick leave.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Christina Hayes.

In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.” He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the “mechanization of birth,” how the lack of social services for parents has led to “a massive abandonment of infants,” and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

"If you care about mental health, expand Medicaid."

So said Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, in a tweet last week that went viral. O'Rourke was responding to events in recent weeks that included a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black people dead at the hands of a white supremacist, and a mass shooting at a majority-Latino elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead in the third-deadliest school shooting in United States history. 

The tragedies could have been prevented by more stringent gun laws, but Republican politicians have resisted calls for gun reform, even as mass shootings and threats have continued to occur almost daily. Instead, GOP elected officials like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—who O'Rourke notably called out for hypocrisy in the days after the Uvalde shooting—have blamed the recent mass shootings on mental illness.

"We, as a state, we, as a society, need to do a better job with mental health," Abbott said after the Uvalde shooting. "Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period."

Yet Abbott has refused to champion measures that would improve access to mental health care for Texans, like Medicaid expansion. To date, the state's Republican-controlled legislature has refused to expand the joint federal-state health care program for low-income people under the Affordable Care Act, along with 11 other states, a total of eight of them in the South. The Republican-controlled North Carolina state Senate recently passed a bill to expand Medicaid in the state, but state House Speaker Tim Moore (R) said there's little appetite for Medicaid expansion in his chamber.

As it stands now, Texas is the state that has the nation's biggest coverage gap. An estimated 771,000 residents are ineligible for Medicaid but also ineligible for premium subsidies to offset the cost of private coverage, making it difficult for them to access mental health care. Nationwide, most of those who fall in the coverage gap live in the South, and 60% are people of color.

Medicaid is the nation's top payer for mental health and substance use care, covering more than one in four adults with serious mental health issues, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In states that have expanded the program, people are more likely to have access to care and are less likely to skip medications due to cost. Additionally, research has found a link between Medicaid expansion and decreased suicide rates; suicidality has been found to be a strong predictor of mass shootings.

However, mental health advocates are raising concerns about politicians' efforts to link mass shootings to mental illness. This week, 60 national organizations including the American Psychiatric Association and the National Alliance on Mental Illness issued a statement condemning "false and harmful attempts" to link gun violence to mental illness:

Attempts to connect mental illness to mass shootings are a distraction that inflicts enormous damage by taking attention from solutions that could actually prevent such events. This perpetuates a false narrative that encourages stigmatization of and discrimination against the millions of Americans living with mental health conditions who are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. In fact, persons with mental illness account for a very small portion of gun violence. While mental health conditions are common in countries across the globe, the United States is the only country where mass shootings have become disturbingly commonplace. In fact, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States. Not coincidentally, the U.S. is also alone in making firearms widely available with few restrictions.

Gun violence is a public health crisis, and the trauma and fear caused by mass shootings significantly worsen Americans' mental health. A large majority of adults in the United States experience stress associated with mass shootings, and a third of U.S. adults say that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. Moreover, research has shown that victims and members of affected communities experience increases in posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, and other signs of psychological concerns. Other studies have found that, after previous mass shootings, youth felt less safe and more fearful. These findings, many of which are unsurprising, make it all the more important to take urgent action to prevent these shootings, particularly in light of our nation's ongoing youth mental health crisis.

While the organizations say they welcome continued bipartisan efforts to improve the nation's mental health and substance abuse systems, they note that the epidemic of gun violence requires policymakers to promote gun safety.

But increasing access to mental health care through Medicaid expansion would undoubtedly help the survivors of mass shootings and the wider communities traumatized by such events. It would also help reduce racial disparities in who can access care related to such shootings. While over 97% of perpetrators of mass shootings are men, Black people are overrepresented, accounting for just over 13% of the U.S. population but 21% of mass shooters. White people make up 76% of the U.S. population and 52% of mass shooters, while Latinos make up over 18% of the U.S. population and 8% of mass shooters. However, three-quarters of the victims of mass shootings—defined as those that leave four or more people injured or dead — are Black, meaning Black communities across the South and nation bear a disproportionately heavy trauma burden related to such shootings.

As mental health advocate David Kendrick Jr. noted following the Buffalo grocery store massacre, mass shooting survivors suffer mental wounds resembling those of war survivors. And people who survived previous atrocities like the Charleston Church Massacre have been re-traumatized by the recent shootings and might also be in need of care that can be difficult to access; South Carolina is also among the states where lawmakers have refused to expand Medicaid.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Rebekah Barber.

Branch of The Priory in Hove. Photograph Source: The Voice of Hassocks – CC0

My son Henry was admitted to a Priory mental health hospital in February 2002 after he tried to swim across Newhaven harbour and was rescued from the freezing water by fishermen. Doctors made the diagnosis that he was in an early phase of schizophrenia, a condition described by one medical authority as being to mental illness what cancer is to physical sickness.

I thought again about the experiences of my wife and myself at that time on seeing trenchant criticisms in a recent inquest and in a newspaper investigation into the inadequate care given by the Priory Group, Britain’s largest private provider of psychiatric care, which receives £400m from the NHS for its services.

My own memory of the facility where Henry had a room is not particularly negative or positive – though I did make friends with a man whose deeply troubled son had been able to get out of the building and suffered crippling injuries when he jumped from the top of a multistorey car park.

A cover for individual and governmental inaction

But I am not going to repeat the endless horror stories about the mistreatment and neglect of the mentally ill in Britain, copious though the evidence is of culpable failures. I fear, however, that one effect of this dismal picture is to numb people into feeling that nothing much can be done given the intractable nature of the illness and the more general meltdown of the institutions supposedly dealing with it.

Talk of a “broken mental health system”, a “culture” that accepts blunders and “institutionalised” shortcomings has a fine denunciatory ring to it. But in practice these jeremiads provide a cover for individual and governmental inaction, since problems seem too big to be resolved except by vastly expensive root-and-branch reforms, which are not going to happen, while blame for avoidable misery and deaths is spread too thin for anybody to be held responsible for them.

Not nearly enough is done for the mentally ill, but this does not mean that nothing can be done by individuals or communally. Horrendous problems face any family affected by psychosis and these are exacerbated by ignorance.

A state of shock

This was certainly true of my wife and I when Henry had his original breakdown, leading us to make a number of mistakes – details of which are worth recounting because many others will face similar dilemmas.

We wanted Henry to stay in the Priory because it appeared to be user-friendly and we dreaded NHS facilities which we feared might be like 19th century lunatic asylums. Henry was in the Priory because the NHS had no bed for him when he was rescued from drowning. But when one did become available, we turned it down because we were in a state of shock and willing to spend any money we had to do what we could to protect Henry and make him better.

I only took on board that this was a mistake when I rang up Marjorie Wallace, the founder and chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, to ask for advice. She said that there were no silver bullets when it comes to dealing with psychosis, though she knew of desperate families bankrupting themselves by paying for expensive treatments for loved ones in private clinics in pursuit of imaginary cure-all treatments. “Unfortunately, they don’t exist,” Marjorie told me. “Whatever you do, stick to the National Health Service.”

Strains on the family

We took her advice, but in those early months I made the mistake of resigning as a correspondent on The Independent to devote all efforts to helping Henry recover. The flaw was that I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family. An element of sympathetic magic probably crept in here, reflecting a subconscious feeling on my part that if I sacrificed my professional career this would somehow help my son.

Another explanation for this decision was that I did not fully understand that coping with mental illness is a long-haul business with no place for self-destructive gestures. I was still confusing full-blown psychosis, from which recovery is likely to be slow and arduous, with neuroses and mental ill health, for which therapies exist with varying levels of effectiveness.

In practice, few therapies help until a person is stable on medication. Such drugs have a bad reputation because they control but do not cure mental illness and have side effects, though these are generally less toxic than they were 50 or more years ago.

Looking back, our mistake we made during Henry’s illness which had the worst impact on him was not to realise over five or six years that he was mostly not taking his medication and that doctors and nurses were not insisting that he did so. His covertly spitting out the pills could have been avoided by giving them to him in dilute form and making sure he did not sick them up.

Why did the doctors and nurses not do something so much in Henry’s interests and in theirs – since his recovery would have freed up hospital beds? At that time there was a reaction against compulsion in mental hospitals and an over-reliance on free compliance, though those suffering from severe mental illness are scarcely in a position to make rational decisions in their own interests. Monitoring compliance is hard and time-consuming work and it was only when the chief doctor at a hospital made sure that staff did this that Henry began to recover.

More of a slogan than a policy

The run-down and under-resourced nature of the mental health service explains many of these failings. Though there are many good doctors and nurses working in it, there are also poor ones and, above all else, an overall shortage of qualified medical staff. The old mental asylum system was run down, but not enough was put in its place aside from “care in the community”, which was more of a slogan than a policy.

Fragmentation of the system is extreme and staff turnover is high. One of our more useful activities as parents was liaising between different groups of doctors, nurses and hospitals to tell them what others were doing or had done. We had decided early on not to quarrel with any of the medical staff, regardless of what we felt about some of them, so we could remain in friendly contact with all of them.

“Care in the community” means, in practice, care by the family and a lot can be done to make this more effective. Relatives and friends usually want to help, but they are often ignorant about mental illness and what they can do – which is frequently a lot more than they think. They need to be kept informed, possibly through a WhatsApp group, and loosely organised, to visit the person and sustain them while they get better.

Further Thoughts

I have written this rather personal account of some of the experiences of my wife Jan and myself in coping with the mental illness of our son Henry. The occasion for this is a well-publicised coroner’s inquest into the death of a patient at a Priory Group facility and a more wide-ranging newspaper investigation into the failings of the company.

I have been intending to write a piece like this for some time because I see a lot of ill-informed or out of date commentary about mental illness everywhere in the media and in speeches by well-meaning royals that show very limited understanding of its causes, course, treatment and outcome.

Condemnation of the British and American mental health systems is well deserved but often shows scant understanding of their workings. Occasionally individuals, usually with sick children, ask me for advice but in the course of talking to them it becomes clear that they are looking for “a silver bullet” or a cure-all treatment that does not exist. This has made many people vulnerable to harmful fads, fashions and pseudo-science that can have devastating consequences such as lobotomies, electric shocks and other tortures.

I am conscious that panaceas do not work and of the shocking number of the people whom Henry knew when passing through the mental health system who have since died – often by suicide – and how few have fully recovered. Henry has done far better than most, but the shadow of what happened to him never vanishes entirely.

Beneath the Radar

For all the wall-to-wall reportage about the war in Ukraine in the Western media, it remains very difficult to know what is happening at the top of the Russian state. What do the decision-makers really think about President Putin’s decision to go to war on 24 February? And what do they think now of the way he has conducted that war?

Difficult to get such information in a semi-monarchical system, but this article, claiming good sources in the Russian security services, argues that there is anger and consequent divisions about the way in which Putin is fighting his “special military operation” without fully mobilising Russian military resources to fight a total war.

Certainly, Russian tactics and strategy have been shambolic so far, and this article, while generally citing anonymous sources, may be correct in its insights. The next month should give us a clearer idea of what is really going on.

Cockburn’s Picks

For further insight into mental illness and the pitfalls into which those studying and treating it have fallen, it is worth reading this mea culpa by the eminent psychiatrist Sir Robin Murray about the critical mistakes he has made during a career focused on studying schizophrenia.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Branch of The Priory in Hove. Photograph Source: The Voice of Hassocks – CC0

My son Henry was admitted to a Priory mental health hospital in February 2002 after he tried to swim across Newhaven harbour and was rescued from the freezing water by fishermen. Doctors made the diagnosis that he was in an early phase of schizophrenia, a condition described by one medical authority as being to mental illness what cancer is to physical sickness.

I thought again about the experiences of my wife and myself at that time on seeing trenchant criticisms in a recent inquest and in a newspaper investigation into the inadequate care given by the Priory Group, Britain’s largest private provider of psychiatric care, which receives £400m from the NHS for its services.

My own memory of the facility where Henry had a room is not particularly negative or positive – though I did make friends with a man whose deeply troubled son had been able to get out of the building and suffered crippling injuries when he jumped from the top of a multistorey car park.

A cover for individual and governmental inaction

But I am not going to repeat the endless horror stories about the mistreatment and neglect of the mentally ill in Britain, copious though the evidence is of culpable failures. I fear, however, that one effect of this dismal picture is to numb people into feeling that nothing much can be done given the intractable nature of the illness and the more general meltdown of the institutions supposedly dealing with it.

Talk of a “broken mental health system”, a “culture” that accepts blunders and “institutionalised” shortcomings has a fine denunciatory ring to it. But in practice these jeremiads provide a cover for individual and governmental inaction, since problems seem too big to be resolved except by vastly expensive root-and-branch reforms, which are not going to happen, while blame for avoidable misery and deaths is spread too thin for anybody to be held responsible for them.

Not nearly enough is done for the mentally ill, but this does not mean that nothing can be done by individuals or communally. Horrendous problems face any family affected by psychosis and these are exacerbated by ignorance.

A state of shock

This was certainly true of my wife and I when Henry had his original breakdown, leading us to make a number of mistakes – details of which are worth recounting because many others will face similar dilemmas.

We wanted Henry to stay in the Priory because it appeared to be user-friendly and we dreaded NHS facilities which we feared might be like 19th century lunatic asylums. Henry was in the Priory because the NHS had no bed for him when he was rescued from drowning. But when one did become available, we turned it down because we were in a state of shock and willing to spend any money we had to do what we could to protect Henry and make him better.

I only took on board that this was a mistake when I rang up Marjorie Wallace, the founder and chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, to ask for advice. She said that there were no silver bullets when it comes to dealing with psychosis, though she knew of desperate families bankrupting themselves by paying for expensive treatments for loved ones in private clinics in pursuit of imaginary cure-all treatments. “Unfortunately, they don’t exist,” Marjorie told me. “Whatever you do, stick to the National Health Service.”

Strains on the family

We took her advice, but in those early months I made the mistake of resigning as a correspondent on The Independent to devote all efforts to helping Henry recover. The flaw was that I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family. An element of sympathetic magic probably crept in here, reflecting a subconscious feeling on my part that if I sacrificed my professional career this would somehow help my son.

Another explanation for this decision was that I did not fully understand that coping with mental illness is a long-haul business with no place for self-destructive gestures. I was still confusing full-blown psychosis, from which recovery is likely to be slow and arduous, with neuroses and mental ill health, for which therapies exist with varying levels of effectiveness.

In practice, few therapies help until a person is stable on medication. Such drugs have a bad reputation because they control but do not cure mental illness and have side effects, though these are generally less toxic than they were 50 or more years ago.

Looking back, our mistake we made during Henry’s illness which had the worst impact on him was not to realise over five or six years that he was mostly not taking his medication and that doctors and nurses were not insisting that he did so. His covertly spitting out the pills could have been avoided by giving them to him in dilute form and making sure he did not sick them up.

Why did the doctors and nurses not do something so much in Henry’s interests and in theirs – since his recovery would have freed up hospital beds? At that time there was a reaction against compulsion in mental hospitals and an over-reliance on free compliance, though those suffering from severe mental illness are scarcely in a position to make rational decisions in their own interests. Monitoring compliance is hard and time-consuming work and it was only when the chief doctor at a hospital made sure that staff did this that Henry began to recover.

More of a slogan than a policy

The run-down and under-resourced nature of the mental health service explains many of these failings. Though there are many good doctors and nurses working in it, there are also poor ones and, above all else, an overall shortage of qualified medical staff. The old mental asylum system was run down, but not enough was put in its place aside from “care in the community”, which was more of a slogan than a policy.

Fragmentation of the system is extreme and staff turnover is high. One of our more useful activities as parents was liaising between different groups of doctors, nurses and hospitals to tell them what others were doing or had done. We had decided early on not to quarrel with any of the medical staff, regardless of what we felt about some of them, so we could remain in friendly contact with all of them.

“Care in the community” means, in practice, care by the family and a lot can be done to make this more effective. Relatives and friends usually want to help, but they are often ignorant about mental illness and what they can do – which is frequently a lot more than they think. They need to be kept informed, possibly through a WhatsApp group, and loosely organised, to visit the person and sustain them while they get better.

Further Thoughts

I have written this rather personal account of some of the experiences of my wife Jan and myself in coping with the mental illness of our son Henry. The occasion for this is a well-publicised coroner’s inquest into the death of a patient at a Priory Group facility and a more wide-ranging newspaper investigation into the failings of the company.

I have been intending to write a piece like this for some time because I see a lot of ill-informed or out of date commentary about mental illness everywhere in the media and in speeches by well-meaning royals that show very limited understanding of its causes, course, treatment and outcome.

Condemnation of the British and American mental health systems is well deserved but often shows scant understanding of their workings. Occasionally individuals, usually with sick children, ask me for advice but in the course of talking to them it becomes clear that they are looking for “a silver bullet” or a cure-all treatment that does not exist. This has made many people vulnerable to harmful fads, fashions and pseudo-science that can have devastating consequences such as lobotomies, electric shocks and other tortures.

I am conscious that panaceas do not work and of the shocking number of the people whom Henry knew when passing through the mental health system who have since died – often by suicide – and how few have fully recovered. Henry has done far better than most, but the shadow of what happened to him never vanishes entirely.

Beneath the Radar

For all the wall-to-wall reportage about the war in Ukraine in the Western media, it remains very difficult to know what is happening at the top of the Russian state. What do the decision-makers really think about President Putin’s decision to go to war on 24 February? And what do they think now of the way he has conducted that war?

Difficult to get such information in a semi-monarchical system, but this article, claiming good sources in the Russian security services, argues that there is anger and consequent divisions about the way in which Putin is fighting his “special military operation” without fully mobilising Russian military resources to fight a total war.

Certainly, Russian tactics and strategy have been shambolic so far, and this article, while generally citing anonymous sources, may be correct in its insights. The next month should give us a clearer idea of what is really going on.

Cockburn’s Picks

For further insight into mental illness and the pitfalls into which those studying and treating it have fallen, it is worth reading this mea culpa by the eminent psychiatrist Sir Robin Murray about the critical mistakes he has made during a career focused on studying schizophrenia.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Image Source: Gutenberg Encyclopedia – CC BY-SA 3.0

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our entire society.

Acceptance of the idea that a chemical imbalance causes depression transformed the public’s comfort level about taking antidepressants. With a belief that a chemical imbalance caused their depression, accompanied by repeatedly hearing that Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance,” it seemed irresponsible not to take these antidepressants.

So between 1988 (when the first of the SSRIs, Prozac, hit the market) and 2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. By 2013, 16.7 percent of American adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs; and a 2022 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey (March 30-April 11) reported 23.5 percent of American adults (29.6 percent women) “took prescription medication for mental health.” Among children, Psychology Today reported in 2021: “In the USA, 1 in 12 children are on psychiatric drugs, including 1.2 percent of pre-schoolers and 12.9 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.”

If you knew that psychiatric drugs—similar to other psychotropic substances such as marijuana and alcohol—merely “take the edge off” rather than correct a chemical imbalances, would you be more hesitant about using them, and more reluctant to give them to your children? Drug companies certainly believe you would be less inclined if you knew the truth, and that is why we were early on flooded with commercials about how antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance.”

So, when exactly did psychiatry discard its chemical imbalance theory? While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Pies is not the highest-ranking psychiatrist to acknowledge the invalidity of the chemical imbalance theory.

Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

The jettisoning of the chemical imbalance theory should have been uncontroversial twenty-five years ago, when it became clear to research scientists that it was a disproved hypothesis. In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” But how many Americans heard about this?

In a 2007 survey, 84.7 percent of 262 undergraduates believed it “likely” that chemical imbalances cause depression. While I cannot locate a more recent survey, my experience with patients, the media, and even many doctors is that the majority of them continue to believe in the chemical imbalance theory of depression.

Somewhat analogously, a 2015 survey reported that 42 percent of all Americans—and 51 percent of Republicans—continue to believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. Once attached to a belief, it is difficult for many people to let go of it. Carl Sagan, a fierce advocate of skeptical inquiry, observed, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Ronald Pies claimed in the Psychiatric Times in 2014 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists, fulfilled its obligation to inform the general public with a 2000 public statement that begins: “The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers.” Pies did acknowledge that psychiatry should have been clearer and louder, “Shouldn’t psychiatrists in positions of influence have made greater efforts to knock down the chemical imbalance hypothesis, and to present a more sophisticated understanding of mental illness to the general public? Probably so.”

Don’t feel like you were not paying attention if you did not know that psychiatry has long discarded the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. It was news to National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel, and she is the granddaughter of psychiatrist John Spiegel, a former president of the APA.

In her 2012 NPR story, Spiegel recounts how as a depressed teenager, she and her parents were told the following by a Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist about her depression: “It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then, Spiegel tells us, the psychiatrist handed her mother a prescription for Prozac.

As a journalist, Spiegel did some digging. She talked to Joseph Coyle, Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience and editor of one of psychiatry’s most prestigious journals, who told her: “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. . . . It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”

Spiegel tried to discover why psychiatry has not made greater efforts at publicizing its jettisoning of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Alan Frazer, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told her that framing depression as a chemical imbalance has allowed patients to feel better about taking a drug and to “feel better about themselves, if there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency, and the drug was correcting it.”

Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?

Trust is important in all of healthcare, but it is absolutely vital in helping someone with depression. In my three decades plus as a practicing clinical psychologist, my experience is that depression is a reaction to loss and other pains, and a loss of trust is one of those pains. Thus, discovering that one has misplaced trust in a doctor can make one’s depression worse.

Primum non nocere—first do no harm—should be common sense for any healthcare professional, but perhaps a regular reminder is necessary.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

Image Source: Gutenberg Encyclopedia – CC BY-SA 3.0

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our entire society.

Acceptance of the idea that a chemical imbalance causes depression transformed the public’s comfort level about taking antidepressants. With a belief that a chemical imbalance caused their depression, accompanied by repeatedly hearing that Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance,” it seemed irresponsible not to take these antidepressants.

So between 1988 (when the first of the SSRIs, Prozac, hit the market) and 2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. By 2013, 16.7 percent of American adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs; and a 2022 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey (March 30-April 11) reported 23.5 percent of American adults (29.6 percent women) “took prescription medication for mental health.” Among children, Psychology Today reported in 2021: “In the USA, 1 in 12 children are on psychiatric drugs, including 1.2 percent of pre-schoolers and 12.9 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.”

If you knew that psychiatric drugs—similar to other psychotropic substances such as marijuana and alcohol—merely “take the edge off” rather than correct a chemical imbalances, would you be more hesitant about using them, and more reluctant to give them to your children? Drug companies certainly believe you would be less inclined if you knew the truth, and that is why we were early on flooded with commercials about how antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance.”

So, when exactly did psychiatry discard its chemical imbalance theory? While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Pies is not the highest-ranking psychiatrist to acknowledge the invalidity of the chemical imbalance theory.

Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

The jettisoning of the chemical imbalance theory should have been uncontroversial twenty-five years ago, when it became clear to research scientists that it was a disproved hypothesis. In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” But how many Americans heard about this?

In a 2007 survey, 84.7 percent of 262 undergraduates believed it “likely” that chemical imbalances cause depression. While I cannot locate a more recent survey, my experience with patients, the media, and even many doctors is that the majority of them continue to believe in the chemical imbalance theory of depression.

Somewhat analogously, a 2015 survey reported that 42 percent of all Americans—and 51 percent of Republicans—continue to believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. Once attached to a belief, it is difficult for many people to let go of it. Carl Sagan, a fierce advocate of skeptical inquiry, observed, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Ronald Pies claimed in the Psychiatric Times in 2014 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists, fulfilled its obligation to inform the general public with a 2000 public statement that begins: “The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers.” Pies did acknowledge that psychiatry should have been clearer and louder, “Shouldn’t psychiatrists in positions of influence have made greater efforts to knock down the chemical imbalance hypothesis, and to present a more sophisticated understanding of mental illness to the general public? Probably so.”

Don’t feel like you were not paying attention if you did not know that psychiatry has long discarded the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. It was news to National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel, and she is the granddaughter of psychiatrist John Spiegel, a former president of the APA.

In her 2012 NPR story, Spiegel recounts how as a depressed teenager, she and her parents were told the following by a Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist about her depression: “It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then, Spiegel tells us, the psychiatrist handed her mother a prescription for Prozac.

As a journalist, Spiegel did some digging. She talked to Joseph Coyle, Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience and editor of one of psychiatry’s most prestigious journals, who told her: “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. . . . It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”

Spiegel tried to discover why psychiatry has not made greater efforts at publicizing its jettisoning of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Alan Frazer, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told her that framing depression as a chemical imbalance has allowed patients to feel better about taking a drug and to “feel better about themselves, if there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency, and the drug was correcting it.”

Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?

Trust is important in all of healthcare, but it is absolutely vital in helping someone with depression. In my three decades plus as a practicing clinical psychologist, my experience is that depression is a reaction to loss and other pains, and a loss of trust is one of those pains. Thus, discovering that one has misplaced trust in a doctor can make one’s depression worse.

Primum non nocere—first do no harm—should be common sense for any healthcare professional, but perhaps a regular reminder is necessary.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Such portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda.

The implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense. If one believes that Putin is a “madman,” the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation.

If Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Yet another implication is that if Putin’s defects made Russia’s invasion unavoidable, then regime change may be necessary to resolve the conflict.

‘Increasingly insane’

Western media have for years been debating whether Putin is insane (Extra!, 5/14; FAIR.org, 2/12/15) or merely pretending to be—speculation that has only intensified in recent weeks:

• Guardian (2/24/22): “Decision to Invade Ukraine Raises Questions Over Putin’s ‘Sense of Reality’”

• Daily Beast (3/1/22): “The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane”

• Vanity Fair (3/1/22): “Report: An ‘Increasingly Frustrated’ Putin, a Madman With Nuclear Weapons, Is Lashing Out at His Inner Circle”

• New York (3/4/22): “Putin’s War Looks Increasingly Insane”

Guardian (2/24/22) : “A member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping told France Inter radio…he thought Putin had gone mad.”

The Guardian report (2/24/22) cited concerns raised in European official circles about Putin’s mental state:

They worry about a 69-year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.

Even when other media analysts argued that Putin’s alleged mental illness was merely a ruse to wrest concessions from the west, this was not presented as a rationale for negotiating with him, but rather as a reason to reject de-escalation and diplomacy. Forbes (3/1/22) claimed that although Putin is “obviously capable of massive errors in judgment,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that “he’s lost his marbles,” as Putin has only “gotten this far by being calculating and cunning.” Forbes‘ Michael Krepon went on to explain that the “mad man theory only works when the threatener is convincingly mad,” and that Western countries should proceed to call Putin’s bluff: “Help Ukrainians with military, economic and humanitarian assistance,” he urged, rather than pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Russia.

‘Detached from reality’

Daily Beast (3/1/22): There is a lot of talk in the West about Russian President Vladimir Putin being mentally unhinged.”

In the Daily Beast (3/1/22), Amy Knight, a historian of Russia and the USSR, displayed a remarkable ability to read Putin’s mind, discerning the real motivations of someone she describes as possibly “detached from reality.” She attributed Putin’s decision to invade to a feeling of insecurity over his “hold on power,” because he “knows that he was not democratically elected to the presidency in 2018, or even in 2012, because serious contenders were barred from participating.”

This alleged feeling of “insecurity” has apparently driven Putin to hate “democratic states on his country’s border,” because he doesn’t “want his people to get ideas.” Knight claimed that all Putin’s rhetoric about “the West destroying Russian values and NATO threatening Russia with nuclear weapons” merely “camouflages his intense fear of democratic aspirations in his own country.” Strangely, although Knight speculates about Putin’s possible insanity, she also provides largely rational explanations for Putin’s actions, because if a leader is afraid they weren’t legitimately elected, they might opt to launch a war to generate a “rally ’round the flag” effect, as George W. Bush did. This undermines the suggestion that Putin is an irrational actor.

Knight suggested that Putin was more dangerous than Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev or Joseph Stalin, or even Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Khrushchev, she wrote, was someone who wasn’t “consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials,” and “had to consider the views of fellow Politburo members” instead of making key decisions on his own, like Putin allegedly does.

One of Khrushchev’s decisions, jointly made or otherwise, was launching the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which kept that country in the Warsaw Pact at the cost of several thousand lives. That invasion does not seem obviously different in kind from Putin’s attempt to keep Ukraine from leaving what Russia considers to be its sphere of influence.

‘Reason is not going to work’

Other Western media headlines offered quite specific, though varying, evaluations of Putin’s mental state from a distance. (This sometimes also happens with domestic figures like former President Donald Trump.) A few instances:

• Atlantic (4/15/14): “Vladimir Putin, Narcissist?”
• Independent (2/1/15): “President Putin Is a Dangerous Psychopath—Reason Is Not Going to Work With Him”
• USA Today (2/4/15): “Pentagon 2008 Study Claims Putin Has Asperger’s Syndrome”
• Sun (2/28/22): “Vladimir Putin Is Egocentric, Narcissistic & Exhibits Key Traits of a Psychopath”
• Fox News (3/2/22): “Russian President Vladimir Putin Has Features of a Psychopath: Expert”

These diagnoses from afar have been going on for a long time. In 2014, psychotherapist Joseph Burgo (Atlantic, 4/15/14) argued that “Putin may or may not be a clinical narcissist,” because it’s “impossible actually to diagnose the man at a distance.” Nevertheless, Burgo encouraged the US foreign policy establishment to assume he is a narcissist, in order to help “mitigate risk in the ways it deals with him.”

USA Today (2/4/15) quoted a Pentagon report: “Project neurologists confirm this research project’s earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex.”

In 2015, USA Today (2/4/15) reported on a 2008 study from a Pentagon think tank that theorized that Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, an “autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions.” It speculated that Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy,” although the report acknowledged that it couldn’t prove the theory because they weren’t able to conduct a brain scan on the Russian president.

The 2008 study was based on “movement pattern analysis,” essentially watching videos of Putin’s body movements to gain clues on how he makes decisions and reacts to events. Further reporting on the study (Guardian, 2/5/15) noted that the authors don’t claim to make a diagnosis, because that would be impossible based on so little evidence. The work was primarily inspired by Brenda Connors, a former State Department official, professional dancer and “movement patterns analysis” expert at the US Naval War College.

Psychologist Pete Etchells (Guardian, 2/7/15) mocked the Pentagon study because the methodology of using movement pattern analysis to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome is “so generic as to be meaningless,” and that trying to “figure out someone’s state of mind based solely on how they move is a hugely subjective endeavor, easily prone to misinterpretation.” He also noted that it is not possible to diagnose whether people are on the autism spectrum with brain scans.

Some writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as “Putinology”—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives. It is a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99).

‘Violation of ethical rules’ 

Some contemporary attempts to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by psychoanalyzing Putin make sweeping judgments about his mental state, even while insisting that a professional diagnosis would be necessary to confirm their speculative perceptions of him.

Fox News‘ expert (3/2/22) is not violating ethical rules because when he refers to Putin as a “psychopath,” he’s not “diagnos[ing] a public figure who he has not personally examined,” but rather “assess[ing] Putin’s actions in the framework of a personality type.”

Fox News (3/2/22; reposted by Yahoo!, 3/2/22) cited forensic psychiatrist Dr. Ziv Cohen, who averred it would be a “violation of his profession’s ethical rules to diagnose a public figure he has not personally examined.” He went on to seemingly violate those ethics by opining that diplomatic negotiations with a “psychopath” like Putin were pointless:

“He’s not crazy,” Cohen said. “He’s charming, calculated and manipulative. With psychopaths, you cannot develop a common understanding. You cannot have agreements with them. They really only respond to superior power, to a credible threat of force.”

Fox actually cited one other source, Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer for Russia, who noted that “other psychiatrists have evaluated Putin’s mental stability and concluded he is a typical authoritarian with no anomalies,” and that Putin’s actions “reflect Russian cultural norms and standards of behavior.” Koffler argued that the comparisons being made between Putin and figures like Stalin and Hitler are exaggerated, yet Fox only included Dr. Cohen’s pathologized opinion in its headline: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has Features of a Psychopath: Expert.”

Psychologist Emma Kenny claimed for the British tabloid Sun (2/26/22) that although she’s “unable to bring him to the consulting room for assessment,” she nevertheless feels comfortable making declarations like:

Putin continues to manufacture an “alpha male” persona. He is incredibly egocentric, and has a confidence and arrogance he does not try to hide…. Emotions such as guilt and shame do not seem to ­register with him—another key example of a potentially ­psychopathic nature.

As of this writing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hasn’t attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon, likely due to the US sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainian government. This silence on both the diplomatic and military fronts risks further escalation instead of a quick negotiated end to the war.

The Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a  convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22). Recent negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul were hailed by both parties as constructive, with Russia vowing to reduce military activity around Kyiv and northern Ukraine as a result (NPR, 3/29/22). It’s important not to let US officials subvert peace negotiations between the two parties on the evidence-free grounds that negotiations with Russia are pointless.

The post Depicting Putin as ‘Madman’ Eliminates Need for Diplomacy appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Joshua Cho.

My own pain and illness did, which is an amazing thing about pain, that you don’t think about it until you have to. And then when you have to, you really have to. It stops the other conversations and makes itself very known. Pain came into my life like a shock. Even though I’d grown up with a sick parent, even if you know other people. Once you actually experience pain, it’s like a comedy. You can’t even believe people are going around in pain. Like, what? And that came into my life in 2015.

It’s amazing that other people can’t feel your pain. You’re having a conversation or working, or in front of your students or whatever you’re doing, and somebody’s stabbing you in the foot or something, and it’s a very odd sensation to just be the personal kind of caretaker, or tender, to something that nobody else can see. Especially with these more invisible illnesses. And it’s a comedy. It’s hilarious that there’s this whole other story going on that you’re just sort of managing or is consuming you while there are so many—I would have to say very comedic multiplicities happening that feel outstanding.

It seems like a really difficult thing to translate into language. Are there other writers on illness or pain or disability who you admire?

So many. Yeah. I really love Denton Welch’s A Voice Through a Cloud. He was meant to be a painter, but then got into this horrific bicycling accident and ended up writing these novel-memoirs about his pain and his extreme sensitivity. And then he struggles so much with that moment in illness where you’re supposed to be so communal. You’re supposed to lean on others. You’re supposed to be so docile and taken in by what your needs are. And he didn’t want to be that way. He was not that much of a people person. And what does it mean to not like people that much, but then to need them so much? I love writers who are kind of grumpy and he was just such a good grump about what was going on.

And I really love how Samantha Irby talks about chronic illness. She writes these comedic essays about growing up with a mom with multiple sclerosis, which is something I grew up with. I teach a narrative medicine class, and I start with some of her essays and it’s the perfect place to start. She just really welcomes people to be human.

You’ve mentioned comedy a few times, and you approach your protagonist’s illness with humor. Where do you think that impulse comes from for you?

I think that it is true that I have humor, and oftentimes, just in my life, like to tell funny stories. I have a self-deprecating style of being. But honestly the experience of—not writing this book, but publishing this book, has been a revelation to me: that I am a funny writer. I did not know that, which is very funny, but even while I was talking to Danielle and Marty, the publishers of Dorothy, and I increasingly saw that the marketing around it was going to be about it being a comedy, I was sort of confused. I was like, “Oh, okay. That’s an interesting angle. This is all really serious though.”

I think that if I am being humorous, it’s coming from me being committed to being deadly serious and being willing to say what’s serious to me. I feel very serious about everything. But also, I don’t feel protective of that. I think it’s good to laugh, but I wasn’t making jokes.

And I think that Revenge has a few different origin stories. I think that’s true of any writing project. You could think of different moments when it began. But one of them is the silliest moment ever, where I got way too stoned on some hot chocolate or some chocolate or whatever. And I was so out-of-my-mind stoned for like eight hours, and my partner was walking me through being alive. And then I finally was coming down enough to sort of just be okay.

I don’t even think I was diagnosed at this time with rheumatoid arthritis. I was just in bewildering pain going to work every day. I was working at a bookstore. I could hardly carry the books. I was just really bewildered by pain and fear. It was such a hard time. I finally found somebody who would sell me some edibles. But I was doing everything at this moment to try to…I don’t know, I was in a lot of screaming pain.

And I’m sitting there just feeling so silly, finally coming down a little bit from being so stoned, and I’m just in the bed, and I all of a sudden I just think that my feet are Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, who are two of my favorite characters in literature. And I just start putting on the silliest little puppet show with them talking to each other, and it was just silly. And my feet were—I could hardly walk. And I was devastated and really scared. And it was just such a good moment to be silly with my feet, because I was really scared of my feet from what was happening to them. And so that’s very funny, but it’s arrived at through kind of desperation.

I really enjoyed the dissonance in the book between the craft advice that the narrator gave her students and her students’ lived experiences.

The book has all kinds of nonfiction in it. And I was working as an adjunct at an arts college in Philadelphia for a while. And yeah, I mean teaching is a very, very humorous and just lastingly humbling experience, and whatever you think you’re doing in the classroom, or directing people toward, there’s just something amazing happening that you don’t understand that’s also happening, or eight million things that are also happening. And it’s such a comedy.

Teaching is buffoonery. You just put forward these ideas you have, or that your professors in graduate school had that you want to have now. And students are so wonderfully undercutting, and they are wonderfully undercutting because they’re amazing in their thinking and they have all these thoughts that are not yours, but also the university experience is undercutting because people are in massive debt and it’s not quite working and there are just other things in the classroom that will always undercut your ideas about literature. You just have to be so humble and think of it as maybe a comedy, but hopefully a redeeming comedy. I think it’s redeeming to all be there together doing whatever we’re doing.

Working with students who are of this younger generation, Generation Z, they’re quick in places that I’m not quick. They’re aware of things in a quicker way than I am. They have a different temporality to them entirely. Their impatience is really interesting. Where are they impatient? Where are they even willing?

And I find myself writing toward my students. I don’t think my students are the perfect audience for my work. But I need their impatience. Their impatience helps me understand what I need to say and what I shouldn’t say, and how quick I need to be, or when I need to put things deeply on the ground so that everybody can be okay with it or know what I’m saying. Their quickness… I don’t know if it’s quickness. Impatience. Something. Something about writing into that group or somehow thinking of them, holding them in mind, holding their attention and what they can and are willing to attend to in mind, somehow has helped my writing quite a lot.

You also write about adjuncting specifically. And you mentioned that you have worked as an adjunct. How has that precarious work affected your writing?

Adjuncting is…god, what is adjuncting? It’s very grossly underpaid labor. You’re doing something so special. And so giving and you’re holding up the university. In almost every instance that’s true. You’re holding up the university. You’re holding that college up with your energy.

I was adjuncting in Philly, and it was really unstable labor. I never knew if I was going to be offered the classes. I was fortunately on Obamacare, and this was the first leg of Obamacare where it wasn’t bad yet. So it was pretty good, the Obamacare. I don’t know how I would’ve been an adjunct without Obamacare. It would’ve been a complete impossibility.

I was having a really good time in a lot of ways, but I think I was privileged enough to be adjuncting, too. I didn’t have college loans. I wasn’t in debt. Which is horrible to say. I don’t think adjuncts are privileged, but it’s just an impossible situation.

That reminds me of a quote from your book from the character Ray: “It’s a privilege to be a good person or even to seem like one.”

Yeah. And Ray’s language in the book is Ray’s language transcribed, and that’s something that Ray deeply believes.

I wanted to ask: what is your relationship to the categories of memoir versus autofiction versus novels from life? Are you interested in those categories? Or not so much?

I have some interest in that. I think I don’t really relate to memoir-writing because I think of memoir as being a very sincere or earnest space of wanting to convey something that has happened, or tell out a truth of some kind. Whereas I think more meta spaces, like an autofiction space, are more upfront in saying, “I’m using maybe my name and maybe nonfiction things or things that come from life. I’m putting my name in the mix, or something about my biography is in the mix here, but I’m using it to do something I want to do with literature. I’m playing with my biography.”

There’s something sort of insincere about autofiction that I really require. And I mean, there’s all kinds of sincere heartbreak and real tenderness coming from me in the book. But to be able to use your biography to play, that is a very redeeming, helpful, healing thing to do. So I like that mode a lot more than, “Let me use my biography to tell or to profess or to confess.”

How do you manage to maintain space in your life for writing?

I think the point of these interviews is in part to acknowledge people’s labor and the disarray of work options and ways of survival available to you as a creative of person. That just becomes really a bombarding thing in one’s life. And you feel fear and panic and shame a lot of the times. And then, add on top of that just the internet and social media and things that take our attention or make us feel kind of worried and ashamed and panicked.

As a concrete example, when I was starting to write Revenge of the Scapegoat and I felt quite a little amount of space in my life, I just felt bombarded by all of these other kinds of emotions that were not creative emotions or things that were really going to help me. And I couldn’t write, and I hadn’t been writing for a long time, for me. I just felt pretty stalled and blocked. And one of the first things that I started doing that allowed me to write again was that I would meditate in a chair in my room, and I would meditate for 20 minutes, and I would just do this mindfulness meditation with my eyes open, just calmly staring at the corner of my bed.

What is something you wish someone told you when you began to make art?

That’s a really cool question, because I think we all have different traumas of what people did tell us when we began making art. So it’s really fun to think of a corrective. Okay, I have an answer that I feel very certain of, but it’s not that cool of an answer. It’s not really good, but it is what I wish. It’s so genuinely what I wish.

One of my regrets in my writing life is that I was not exposed to the writers who I really, really use and need and liberate me as a writer very early. I didn’t have a particular writing teacher who just saw me and knew that I needed to read these particular books, and it would’ve been so awesome if somebody had recommended these writers to meet earlier, because I think I would’ve loved to be a younger reader of these writers. It would’ve been such a perfect hit, and it would’ve really liberated me from some of the stuff that I was exposed to at that time, which was a little more traditional.

And I’m specifically thinking, one of my regrets in life is that I wasn’t a young reader of Dennis Cooper. And I wish I read him in high school. I wish I was around with some of his work. I wish somebody had handed me that, and I feel the same way about Violette Leduc. She’s somebody I discovered only recently, and I should have been reading her when I was young. It would’ve been really instructive. Just her freedom of personality and the way she expresses that in her sentences. I mean, I’m happy to know her now. You can’t change fate or timing, or maybe it was the right time to meet new books, but I just think that I would’ve been more radically open at a younger age, given more permission.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maddie Crum.

The post Is Psychiatry a Mental Illness? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Swanson.

NEW YORK — U.S. health officials warned Tuesday that the burgeoning coronavirus is certain to spread more widely in the country at some point, even as their counterparts in Europe and Asia scrambled to contain new outbreaks of the illness.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a call with reporters.

The CDC’s call for Americans to be prepared added new urgency to response efforts that, until this week, focused on a disease largely confined to China, where it apparently originated, and neighboring countries.

In other developments Tuesday:

— New clusters of the illness popped up far from China, causing increased concerns for officials in some of the wealthiest nations in Europe and Asia, as well as in countries with far fewer resources. But many remained uncertain about how best to contain it.

The new outbreaks were reported in places as far-flung as Italy and Iran, France and Algeria, and Spain’s Canary Islands. The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain said it had 17 cases, including a school bus driver who had transported students as recently as Sunday.

In Iran, the head of the country’s virus task force, who just a day earlier had urged the public not to overreact about the spread of the disease, tested positive himself. The official, Iraj Harirchi, posted a new video online, promising authorities would bring the virus under control within weeks.

But a ministry spokesman, Kianoush Jahanpour, said it could take at least until the Persian New Year’s holiday on March 20, or as long as late April, to contain the disease. “We don’t expect a miracle in the short term,” he said.

— Officials in South Korea said they were racing to contain an outbreak that has grown to nearly 1,000 cases.

“It’s a matter of speed and time: We must create a clear turning point within this week,” President Moon Jae-in said. In the largest cluster, in the city of Daegu and nearby towns, many shops remained closed Tuesday and activity in some neighborhoods came to a near standstill.

On a U.S. military base in Daegu, the center of infections in South Korea, officials said a 61-year-old widow of a U.S. service member had also been infected. It was the first known case among people related to the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the country.

— The virus’ toll continued to mount, even as Chinese officials reported a slowing in the number of new cases. As of Tuesday, the spread of the illness had sickened some 80,000 people worldwide and caused about 2,700 deaths.

The vast majority of those infections remain in China, where 518 new cases were reported Tuesday and another 71 deaths, 68 of them in the central city of Wuhan, where the epidemic was first detected in December. The updates bring mainland China’s totals to 77,780 cases and 2,666 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

WHO said the fatality rate was between 2% and 4% in Wuhan and 0.7% elsewhere in China.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, the WHO envoy who led a team just back from China, told reporters Tuesday the reason for the large discrepancy was partly because the disease hit Wuhan early and fast, when “people didn’t know what we were dealing with, were learning how to treat this.”

At the beginning of the outbreak, “people were finding severe disease, that’s why the alarm bell went off,” Aylward said. But now with more aggressive testing, mild cases are being diagnosed and isolated.

— In Italy’s north, where more than 200 people were sickened, a dozen towns were sealed off and police wearing face masks patrolled. Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza huddled in Rome with counterparts from bordering countries — France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia — as well as with those from Germany and Croatia, two countries whose citizens are among frequent visitors to Italy. Among the shared points of view emerging from the meeting, Speranza told reporters, was this one: “Closing borders is inappropriate” as a response. Italian officials reported 322 cases of the virus, including 11 deaths.

Croatia and Austria reported their first cases of the virus. And an Italian doctor staying at a hotel in the Canary Islands tested positive for the virus, prompting the quarantine of hundreds of guests.

Croatia, Hungary and Ireland advised against traveling to Italy’s affected area, one of a number of government moves seeking to limit further exposure.

— The virus’ spread fueled apprehension in world financial markets. In the U.S., stock indexes piled on a second consecutive day of losses, falling more than 3 percent. Investor fears that the outbreak will slow the world economy drove increased demand for low-risk U.S. government bonds.

“It’s the combination of South Korea, Japan, Italy and even Iran” reporting virus cases, said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management. “That really woke up the market, that these four places in different places around the globe can go from low concern to high concern in a matter of days and that we could potentially wake up a week from now and it could be five to 10 additional places.”

European markets also fell. The Euro Stoxx index lost 2.1%. Markets in Asia were mixed.

— Uncertainty remained over how best to stem the spread of the illness. Italy had taken Europe’s most stringent preventative measures against COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and yet became home to the biggest outbreak outside Asia. Experts in Japan, with one of the world’s most sophisticated health systems, acknowledged the country’s handling of the virus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship was flawed and could have allowed the problem to magnify.

Japanese officials said they would urge a change to the country’s deeply ingrained work culture in a bid to stem the illness. The government urged employers to allow workers to telecommute and have more flexible hours, simple moves Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed hope could help control the spread.

Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea. Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky in Bangkok, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Lauran Neergaard in Washington, Mike Stobbe and Stan Choe in New York, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES — The U.S. has five confirmed cases of the new virus from China, all among people who traveled to the city at the center of the outbreak, health officials said Sunday.

Two new cases were reported Sunday — one in Los Angeles County in California and the other in Maricopa County, Arizona. The latter case was someone with ties to Arizona State University who did not live in school housing, state health officials said.

Officials with the Arizona Department of Health Service didn’t immediately release the gender or age of the Maricopa County patient, but said the person wasn’t severely ill and was in isolation to keep the illness from spreading.

The three previously reported cases were a patient in Orange County, California; a man in his 30s in Washington state; and a woman in her 60s from Chicago.

The virus can cause fever, coughing, wheezing and pneumonia. It is a member of the coronavirus family that’s a close cousin to the deadly SARS and MERS viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past.

Dozens of people have died from the virus in China, which has issued massive travel bans in hard-hit sections of that country to try to stem spread of the virus. The U.S. consulate in Wuhan announced Sunday that it would evacuate its personnel and some private citizens aboard a charter flight.

The U.S. patients generally have been reported to be in good condition and were hospitalized in isolation for monitoring.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects many more Americans to be diagnosed with the newly discovered virus, which is believed to have an incubation period of about two weeks, as worldwide the number of confirmed cases nears 2,000. The CDC is screening passengers on direct and connecting flights from Wuhan at five major airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

CDC officials noted Sunday that more than two dozen people who had been suspected of having the illness ended up testing negative.

Guidance from the CDC advises that people who have had casual contact with the patient are at “minimal risk” for developing infection.

BEIJING — China’s leader on Saturday called the accelerating spread of a new virus a grave situation, as cities from the outbreak’s epicenter in central China to Hong Kong scrambled to contain an illness that has infected more than 1,200 people and killed 41.

President Xi Jinping’s remarks, reported by state broadcaster CCTV, came at a meeting of Communist Party leaders convened on Lunar New Year — the country’s biggest holiday whose celebrations have been muted — and underlined the government’s urgent, expanding efforts to control the outbreak.

Travel agencies have been told to halt all group tours, the state-owned English-language China Daily newspaper reported, citing the China Association of Travel Services.

Millions of people traveling during the holiday have fueled the spread of the outbreak nationwide and overseas after it began in the city of Wuhan in central China. The vast majority of the infections and all the deaths have been in mainland China, but fresh cases are popping up.

Australia and Malaysia reported their first cases Saturday — four each —and Japan, its third. France confirmed three cases Friday, the first in Europe, and the U.S. identified its second, a woman in Chicago who had returned from China.

In the heart of the outbreak where 11 million residents are already on lockdown, Wuhan banned most vehicle use, including private cars, in downtown areas starting Sunday, state media reported. Only authorized vehicles would be permitted, the reports said.

The city will assign 6,000 taxis to neighborhoods, under the management of resident committees, to help people get around if they need to, China Daily said.

In Hong Kong, leader Carrie Lam said her government will raise its response level to emergency, the highest one, and close primary and secondary schools for two more weeks on top of next week’s Lunar New Year holiday. They will reopen Feb. 17.

Lam said direct flights and trains from Wuhan would be blocked.

In a sign of the growing strain on Wuhan’s health care system, the official Xinhua news agency reported that the city planned to build a second makeshift hospital with about 1,000 beds. The city has said another hospital was expected to be completed Feb. 3.

The new virus comes from a large family of what are known as coronaviruses, some causing nothing worse than a cold. It causes cold- and flu-like symptoms, including cough and fever, and in more severe cases, shortness of breath. It can worsen to pneumonia, which can be fatal.

China cut off trains, planes and other links to Wuhan on Wednesday, as well as public transportation within the city, and has steadily expanded a lockdown to 16 surrounding cities with a combined population of more than 50 million — greater than that of New York, London, Paris and Moscow combined.

China’s biggest holiday, Lunar New Year, unfolded Saturday in the shadow of the virus. Authorities canceled a host of events, and closed major tourist destinations and movie theaters.

Temples locked their doors, Beijing’s Forbidden City and Shanghai Disneyland closed, and people canceled restaurant reservations ahead of the holiday, normally a time of family reunions, sightseeing trips and other festivities in the country of 1.4 billion people.

“We originally planned to go back to my wife’s hometown and bought train tickets to depart this afternoon,” said Li Mengbin, who was on a stroll near the closed Forbidden City. “We ended up canceling. But I’m still happy to celebrate the new year in Beijing, which I hadn’t for several years.”

Temples and parks were decorated with red streamers, paper lanterns and booths, but some places started dismantling the decor.

People in China wore medical masks to public places like grocery stores, where workers dispensed hand sanitizer to customers. Some parts of the country had checkpoints for temperature readings and made masks mandatory.

The National Health Commission reported a jump in the number of infected people, to 1,287. The latest tally, from 29 provinces and cities across China, included 237 patients in serious condition.

Of the 41 deaths, 39 have been in Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital city. Most of the deaths have been older patients, though a 36-year-old man in Hubei died this week.

French automaker PSA Group says it will evacuate its employees from Wuhan, quarantine them and then bring them to France. The Foreign Ministry said it was working on “eventual options” to evacuate French citizens from Wuhan “who want to leave.” It didn’t elaborate.

The National Health Commission said it is bringing in medical teams to help handle the outbreak, a day after videos circulating online showed throngs of frantic people in masks lined up for examinations and complaints that family members had been turned away at hospitals that were at capacity.

The Chinese military dispatched 450 medical staff, some with experience in past outbreaks, including SARS and Ebola, who arrived in Wuhan late Friday to help treat many patients hospitalized with viral pneumonia, Xinhua reported.

Xinhua also said medical supplies are being rushed to the city, including 14,000 protective suits, 110,000 pairs of gloves and masks and goggles.

The rapid increase in reported deaths and illnesses does not necessarily mean the crisis is getting worse but could reflect better monitoring and reporting of the virus.

It is not clear how lethal the new coronavirus is or even whether it is as dangerous as the ordinary flu, which kills tens of thousands of people every year in the U.S. alone.

Associated Press researcher Henry Hou and video journalist Dake Kang contributed to this report.

BEIJING — Chinese health authorities urged people in the city of Wuhan to avoid crowds and public gatherings, after warning that a new viral illness that has infected more than 400 people and killed at least 17 could spread further.

The appeal came as the World Health Organization convened a group of independent experts to advise whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

The number of new cases has risen sharply in China, the center of the outbreak. Seventeen people have died, all in Hubei province, since the outbreak emerged in its provincial capital of Wuhan late last month, officials announced Wednesday night. They said the province has confirmed 444 cases there.

“There has already been human-to-human transmission and infection of medical workers,” Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said at a news conference with health experts. “Evidence has shown that the disease has been transmitted through the respiratory tract and there is the possibility of viral mutation.”

The illness comes from a newly identified type of coronavirus, a family of viruses that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-2003 and killed about 800 people. Some experts have drawn parallels between the new coronavirus and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that does not spread very easily among humans and is thought to be carried by camels.

But WHO’s Asia office tweeted this week that “there may now be sustained human-to-human transmission,” which raises the possibility that the epidemic is spreading more easily and may no longer require an animal source to spark infections, as officials initially reported.

Authorities in Thailand on Wednesday confirmed four cases, a Thai national and three Chinese visitors. Japan, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan have all reported one case each. All of the illnesses were of people from Wuhan or who recently traveled there.

“The situation is under control here,” Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters, saying there are no reports of the infection spreading to others. “We checked all of them: taxi drivers, people who wheeled the wheelchairs for the patients, doctors and nurses who worked around them.”

Macao, a former Portuguese colony that is a semi-autonomous Chinese city, reported one case Wednesday.

Some experts said they believe the threshold for the outbreak to be declared an international emergency had been reached.

Dr. Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford University, said there were three criteria for such a determination: the outbreak must be an extraordinary event, there must be a risk of international spread and a globally coordinated response is required.

“In my opinion, those three criteria have been met,” he said.

In response to the U.S. case, President Donald Trump said: “We do have a plan, and we think it’s going to be handled very well. We’ve already handled it very well. … we’re in very good shape, and I think China’s in very good shape also.”

In Wuhan, pharmacies limited sales of face masks to one package per customer as people lined up to buy them. Residents said they were not overly concerned as long as they took preventive measures.

“As an adult, I am not too worried about the disease,” Yang Bin, the father of a 7-year-old, said after buying a mask. “I think we are more worried about our kids. … It would be unacceptable to the parents if they got sick.”

Medical workers in protective suits could be seen carrying supplies and stretchers into Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some of the patients are being treated.

Travel agencies that organize trips to North Korea said the country has banned foreign tourists because of the outbreak. Most tourists to North Korea are either Chinese or travel to the country through neighboring China. North Korea also closed its borders in 2003 during the SARS scare.

Other countries have stepped up screening measures for travelers from China, especially those arriving from Wuhan. Worries have been heightened by the Lunar New Year holiday rush, when millions of Chinese travel at home and abroad.

Officials said it was too early to compare the new virus with SARS or MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, in terms of how lethal it might be. They attributed the spike in new cases to improvements in detection and monitoring.

“We are still in the process of learning more about this disease,” Gao Fu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said at the news conference.

Gao said officials are working on the assumption that the outbreak resulted from human exposure to wild animals being sold illegally at a food market in Wuhan and that the virus is mutating. Mutations can make it spread faster or make people sicker.

Jiao Yahui, a health commission official, said the disease “will continue to develop. It has developed different features compared with the early stage, and the prevention and precautionary measures need to change accordingly.”

One veteran of the SARS outbreak said that while there are some similarities in the new virus — namely its origins in China and the link to animals — the current outbreak appears much milder.

Dr. David Heymann, who headed WHO’s global response to SARS in 2003, said the new virus appears dangerous for older people with other health conditions, but doesn’t seem nearly as infectious as SARS.

“It looks like it doesn’t transmit through the air very easily and probably transmits through close contact,” he said. “That was not the case with SARS.”

Health officials confirmed earlier this week that the disease can be spread between humans after finding two infected people in Guangdong province in southern China who had not been to Wuhan.

Fifteen medical workers also tested positive for the virus, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has said. Fourteen of them — one doctor and 13 nurses — were infected by a patient who had been hospitalized for neurosurgery but also had the coronavirus.

“This is a very profound lesson, which is that there must not be any cracks in our prevention and control,” Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said about the infections of the medical workers in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.

Experts worry in particular when health workers are sickened in outbreaks by new viruses, because it can suggest the disease is becoming more transmissible and because spread in hospitals can often amplify the epidemic.

The Lunar New Year is a time when many Chinese return to their hometowns to visit family. Li, the health commission official, said measures were being taken to monitor and detect infected people from Wuhan, and that people should avoid going to the city, and people from the city should stay put for now.

Associated Press journalists Dake Kang and Emily Wang in Wuhan, China; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Bangkok, Thailand; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Maria Cheng in London; Yanan Wang in Beijing and Alice Fung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.