More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration. Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.
A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“There are too many children getting on too many of these drugs too soon,” Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry and lead researcher in the government-financed study, said.
a music video isn’t something we typically feature on designboom, but this video by arcade fire is an interactive project which combines video, animation and google maps. the video is accessible online and asks viewer to enter the address of their childhood home. once the video begins, multiple windows appear each playing video or showing an aerial view over the address selected. as the video plays out, the scenes change slowly and display the viewer’s home. the project was a collaboration between the canadian rock band and some of the people at google. technically the project utilizes an array of advanced ideas including, choreographed windows, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing and 3d canvas rendering. you can view the tailored video for yourself at the address below.
Christroher Hitchens has a must read post at Slate that nails what the rally in Washington DC was really about titled “White Fright; Glenn Beck’s rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity.” Here is an excerpt:
In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.
Physicians are trained to treat pain as a symptom of injury or disease. But, “as lived experience,” Thernstrom writes, “the disease of pain turns into the individual suffering of illness, an understanding of which requires studying the patient as well as the disease.” What can doctors, pressed for time and responsible for the body, not for the story the patient tells about the body, really do with this knowledge? Thernstrom observed seven pain clinics and listened in on hundreds of interviews between doctors and patients. She describes the method of doctors at Stanford’s pain management clinic as “genius.” They cover five points, placing more emphasis on the patient’s perceptions of the pain than on the underlying pathology. Though the points are relatively simple — what does the patient think caused the pain? what meaning does she derive from it? — they reveal, according to the clinic’s director, whether the patient harbors “sinister ideas of pathology.” A chronic patient who believes that his pain stems from an underlying disease rather than from nerve damage will fare worse than a patient who understands that “although chronic pain feels like an alarm bell, it is often a false alarm signifying only that the alarm system is broken.” One patient, after hearing a resident explain that there was nothing to treat except the pain, said to Thernstrom, “The doctor doesn’t understand my problem.”
People in the U.S. often pride themselves for working more than our European counterparts. Why do we work so much in the first place?
There aren’t any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans famously had more leisure time than the Japanese back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who are in their late 50s or 60s, they will tell you that they take fewer vacations than their parents did. Now why did that change? It wasn’t because of the Pilgrims. People work hard in America, but there was a period where leisure time was increasing. I quoted Linda Bell and Richard Freeman in an article they wrote about what happened during the ‘90s. There was nobody to stop you from working longer. There was no government check, there was no union check as there is on excessive work as there is in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. These institutional checks are gone. So people feel like lab rats: “If I work an extra 10 minutes over the person in the cubicle next to me, then I’m less likely to get laid off.” It’s a very rational response.
Ms. Loden recalled her childhood as bleak and emotionally impoverished. She was born in 1932 in a small town in North Carolina. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother worked in another town, so she was raised by her maternal grandparents, whom she described as religious and not affectionate. In interviews over the years she described spending time as a child hiding behind the kitchen stove, wondering who she was and what she was doing there.
The goal of this site and our work is to identify the many ways we name and treat ourselves, others, and the world around us. On our home page you can find interesting commentary and research about what is going on in homes, schools, consulting rooms, courtrooms, laboratories, workplaces and the culture. As consultants through our agency we help individuals, couples, children and families (re)claim a more stable and sustainable path forward in their lives.
Our dedication is to finding what we call realistic hope and establishing accountability whenever and wherever possible. We look forward to hearing back from you in an effort to build awareness and community around the challenges we must face together and for our children. It is in the spirit of healing that we welcome you.
Katy Gaddess PI, MFT
Investigator, Therapist, Social Worker
Jeff Gaddess PhD, MA
Consultant, Case Analyst, Cultural Mythologist
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