Wednesday, December 31, 2008

 

Breaking up is hard to do, unless you have brittle bones

I've been laid up since last week. I slipped on the ice around here and broke my pelvis and my hip. I had a nice visit over at St Charles Hospital. It's a pretty pleasant (considering) place with a cheery staff. There are a lot of lot-worse hospitals.

So I haven't written anything; the good things about pain meds are that, a, they knock down pain, and b, they let you realize you do have an attention span because the meds destroy it. True existential living, spasm to spasm, pill to pill. Even, now, where I'm thinking out the vicodin with straight Tylenol, it's difficult to stay focused. Kinda fun to try, though.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

 

A Bridge over the River Devisive

There's been an on-going flap around these parts over naming a bridge—a small one—over the Deschutes River. It's been known as the Portland Avenue Bridge for as long as I can remember. Some local peace-activists have urged the city to name it the "Peace Bridge," since we already have one named after a military hero.

You might have thought, from the uproar, that it would named the Karl Marx Bridge or something like that. Jesus: every half-drunk old legionaire ranted and raved about how subversive and un-American it would be to name something after Peace. One of the local TV stations (KTVZ.com) has an on-line forum and the froth flew like spittle from a rabid dog. Someone said they would never drive over a bridge that so dishonors our brave fighting... You know. Nothing like a little war to stir up the bar-room patriots.

The city council, since most of them are going out of office, stepped bravely forward and announced the bridge would be renamed the "Peace Bridge." The new city council, composed of folks heavily backed by business, will probably rename it something the "Free Market Memorial Bridge," and put up a toll booth to benefit the Chamber of Commerce.

Small cities are so much fun.

Friday, December 19, 2008

 
We need to be more aware of heroes. We got villains coming out of the wood-work, but good people seem to be scarce. Here's a story about one:

The Independent
December 19, 2008
Independent Appeal: The rape victim who took the stigma out of HIV
The victim of an appalling crime when she was nine, Memory Phiri was treated like an outcast. The experience has turned her into an eloquent campaigner against prejudice. Paul Vallely reports

"You can be a hero," said the young woman, looking directly into my eyes. "There is a hero in you." This was not flattery. Memory Phiri believes that anyone can do something of heroic stature, if they so choose. After all, she did.

She does not look an obvious candidate. A diminutive figure, with eyes almost as big as her hooped earrings and feet clad in boots that look as if they came from children's department, she looks like a slip of a schoolgirl as she sits quietly in the green room backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. But she has come a long way from the little village in Zambia, where she was raped when she was only nine, to become one of the world's most persuasive Aids campaigners. Now just 20, she was about to step out on to the stage to address an audience of 4,000 people.

The occasion was a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of VSO, the charity once known as Voluntary Service Overseas, one of the three charities being supported by this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. On stage were the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and a bill of internationally renowned African artists, including Angelique Kidjo. Yet Memory seemed unfazed to be among their number.

Her journey has been extraordinary. Eleven years ago, Memory and her sister, who was 14, had accepted a lift home from a man in a lorry after visiting her sister's dying husband in a Zambian hospital. After dropping her sister off, the man raped the nine-year-old. That same year, her mother died (her father had died when she was seven) and she and her siblings were split up. The boys went to live with their grandma and she was sent to live with an aunt.

When she was 13, her aunt decided she could not afford to keep her and sent her to an orphanage. The City of Hope orphanage just outside the capital, Lusaka, has links with the Zambia Open Community Schools project, which provides a free basic education to 16,000 orphans in a country where, still, a third of children between seven and 13 (mostly girls) do not attend school. VSO provides many of the teachers who volunteer to work in the schools and assists with books, clothing and food.

On arrival at the orphanage, each girl is given a medical check-up. There the Salesian nuns who ran it discovered Memory was HIV-positive. "They didn't tell me immediately," she says. "I was the only one of the 84 girls there who was positive. They discussed among themselves how they should handle the situation." But one of the other pupils, who was washing up in the nuns' kitchen, overheard. Not long after, graffiti appeared on the wall outside her classroom. It read, "Memory Phiri has Aids", she says.

"The other girls right away didn't want to play with me. They even refused to eat with me. I went to see the nun in charge, an Italian named Sister Maria, who sent me to see a counsellor. The counsellor gave me a lot of information about HIV. I thought, 'Why is she telling me all this?' And then it clicked, and I started crying. It was my most saddest moment in life. My grandmother had just died. My two young brothers were eight and 10; who was going to look after them?"

Sister Maria arranged for Memory to meet counsellors who were HIV-positive. "That gave me great courage," Memory says. "I thought, 'If they can live with it then I can'." But the other girls in the orphanage continued to shun and scorn her. At this point, Memory took a courageous step. "With Sister Maria's help, I called them into groups and told them my story. All the girls wept when they heard. They thought that to have HIV must mean you were a prostitute or had been sleeping around with boys." The school bully, who had written the graffiti, apologised to Memory. "A number of girls had been raped too but had never been able to talk about it. They came to me privately and told me their story. It all changed. Everyone was kind to me."

Her HIV counsellors were impressed by the instinctive skill with which she handled her peers. They arranged for her to begin counselling training. She was put on anti-retroviral drugs and her condition began to improve. Her CD4 count – which measures the level of HIV in the blood and helps predict the risk of complications and infections – rose from 104 to 700 (the range in normal adults is between 500 to 1,500 cells per cubic millimetre of blood). Her latest was 1001 as her body continues to respond to the anti-HIV therapy.

"I have to take my medicine at 7am and 7pm, and can't miss by more than 30 minutes," she says. "I have to eat lots of nutritious vegetables. But it is important to feed the mind too; if you say, 'I will die soon', you will; but if you say, 'I will see my children's children' then you take control. When you have a car, it is you who is the driver, and you tell the virus, which is the passenger, where it will go. I feel much healthier now." The advice she gives herself is the same as she now delivers to HIV-positive people the world over.

The process has helped her come to terms with the rape which gave her the virus. "I think it will always be in my mind. He was a stranger but I can remember his face. At first, I had evil thoughts about him. But through the therapies I was trained in as a counsellor I came to see that I am not the problem, he is the problem. I used to feel if I see him I would kill him, but today I would just look at him and nothing else. But it has taken me five or six years to get to that point."

In the process, she became a national figure as the first girl in Zambia to break the news that she had HIV. She became a poster-girl in schools, clinics and hospitals, and attended international conferences in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and New York where she addressed the United Nations "to tell them how people in the rural areas with HIV are still neglected". She added: "I feel proud of myself. By the time I die, I know I'll have had an impact on many people's lives. I've tried to do my best."

Her favourite technique in dealing with children orphaned by HIV, or who have themselves contracted the virus, is what she calls a hero book. "In it, you look back at where you have come from. You write down your happiest moment, your saddest one, and tell the story of someone who has been a hero in your life. Not Superman or even Nelson Mandela. It might be your mother or father, or your auntie, anyone whose courage you admire. A hero is a person who is able to overcome a problem without hurting others." At this point Hugh Masekela, the master of African jazz, a dumpy man in a flat cap, enters the Albert Hall green room. He asks to meet her, and she hugs him casually. "He looks fatter than in his photograph," she says after he has gone. The star is clearly not her hero, so who is? "Sister Maria. She is a very strong lady, very hardworking, full of ideas. She's like my mother, so caring and so kind. She gave me hope when I had no hope."

Through her training, Memory has also been catching up on her education, doing two school years in one for the past seven years. "I am in grade 12 now. Most people in the class are 18 and two years younger than me, but that is OK. Next year, I will begin to train to do accounts and get a job so I can save the money to train to be a doctor," she says, calculating that in four years she will have earned enough to begin her seven-year medical training. She will be a doctor, she says, by the time she is 31. She would like to specialise in paediatrics.

"I know people who are not HIV-positive who have no hope for life. But me, every morning, I smile and say, 'It's a new day and I'm breathing'." Then she adds: "There is a strength in all of us; we just have to find it." Of such stuff heroes are made. You could be a hero too. Do something heroic today.

[iCopyright] © 2008 Independent News and Media. Permission granted for up to 5 copies. All rights reserved.

 
We need to be more aware of heroes. We got villains coming out of the wood-work, but good people seem to be scarce. Here's a story about one:

The Independent
December 19, 2008
Independent Appeal: The rape victim who took the stigma out of HIV
The victim of an appalling crime when she was nine, Memory Phiri was treated like an outcast. The experience has turned her into an eloquent campaigner against prejudice. Paul Vallely reports

"You can be a hero," said the young woman, looking directly into my eyes. "There is a hero in you." This was not flattery. Memory Phiri believes that anyone can do something of heroic stature, if they so choose. After all, she did.

She does not look an obvious candidate. A diminutive figure, with eyes almost as big as her hooped earrings and feet clad in boots that look as if they came from children's department, she looks like a slip of a schoolgirl as she sits quietly in the green room backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. But she has come a long way from the little village in Zambia, where she was raped when she was only nine, to become one of the world's most persuasive Aids campaigners. Now just 20, she was about to step out on to the stage to address an audience of 4,000 people.

The occasion was a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of VSO, the charity once known as Voluntary Service Overseas, one of the three charities being supported by this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. On stage were the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and a bill of internationally renowned African artists, including Angelique Kidjo. Yet Memory seemed unfazed to be among their number.

Her journey has been extraordinary. Eleven years ago, Memory and her sister, who was 14, had accepted a lift home from a man in a lorry after visiting her sister's dying husband in a Zambian hospital. After dropping her sister off, the man raped the nine-year-old. That same year, her mother died (her father had died when she was seven) and she and her siblings were split up. The boys went to live with their grandma and she was sent to live with an aunt.

When she was 13, her aunt decided she could not afford to keep her and sent her to an orphanage. The City of Hope orphanage just outside the capital, Lusaka, has links with the Zambia Open Community Schools project, which provides a free basic education to 16,000 orphans in a country where, still, a third of children between seven and 13 (mostly girls) do not attend school. VSO provides many of the teachers who volunteer to work in the schools and assists with books, clothing and food.

On arrival at the orphanage, each girl is given a medical check-up. There the Salesian nuns who ran it discovered Memory was HIV-positive. "They didn't tell me immediately," she says. "I was the only one of the 84 girls there who was positive. They discussed among themselves how they should handle the situation." But one of the other pupils, who was washing up in the nuns' kitchen, overheard. Not long after, graffiti appeared on the wall outside her classroom. It read, "Memory Phiri has Aids", she says.

"The other girls right away didn't want to play with me. They even refused to eat with me. I went to see the nun in charge, an Italian named Sister Maria, who sent me to see a counsellor. The counsellor gave me a lot of information about HIV. I thought, 'Why is she telling me all this?' And then it clicked, and I started crying. It was my most saddest moment in life. My grandmother had just died. My two young brothers were eight and 10; who was going to look after them?"

Sister Maria arranged for Memory to meet counsellors who were HIV-positive. "That gave me great courage," Memory says. "I thought, 'If they can live with it then I can'." But the other girls in the orphanage continued to shun and scorn her. At this point, Memory took a courageous step. "With Sister Maria's help, I called them into groups and told them my story. All the girls wept when they heard. They thought that to have HIV must mean you were a prostitute or had been sleeping around with boys." The school bully, who had written the graffiti, apologised to Memory. "A number of girls had been raped too but had never been able to talk about it. They came to me privately and told me their story. It all changed. Everyone was kind to me."

Her HIV counsellors were impressed by the instinctive skill with which she handled her peers. They arranged for her to begin counselling training. She was put on anti-retroviral drugs and her condition began to improve. Her CD4 count – which measures the level of HIV in the blood and helps predict the risk of complications and infections – rose from 104 to 700 (the range in normal adults is between 500 to 1,500 cells per cubic millimetre of blood). Her latest was 1001 as her body continues to respond to the anti-HIV therapy.

"I have to take my medicine at 7am and 7pm, and can't miss by more than 30 minutes," she says. "I have to eat lots of nutritious vegetables. But it is important to feed the mind too; if you say, 'I will die soon', you will; but if you say, 'I will see my children's children' then you take control. When you have a car, it is you who is the driver, and you tell the virus, which is the passenger, where it will go. I feel much healthier now." The advice she gives herself is the same as she now delivers to HIV-positive people the world over.

The process has helped her come to terms with the rape which gave her the virus. "I think it will always be in my mind. He was a stranger but I can remember his face. At first, I had evil thoughts about him. But through the therapies I was trained in as a counsellor I came to see that I am not the problem, he is the problem. I used to feel if I see him I would kill him, but today I would just look at him and nothing else. But it has taken me five or six years to get to that point."

In the process, she became a national figure as the first girl in Zambia to break the news that she had HIV. She became a poster-girl in schools, clinics and hospitals, and attended international conferences in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and New York where she addressed the United Nations "to tell them how people in the rural areas with HIV are still neglected". She added: "I feel proud of myself. By the time I die, I know I'll have had an impact on many people's lives. I've tried to do my best."

Her favourite technique in dealing with children orphaned by HIV, or who have themselves contracted the virus, is what she calls a hero book. "In it, you look back at where you have come from. You write down your happiest moment, your saddest one, and tell the story of someone who has been a hero in your life. Not Superman or even Nelson Mandela. It might be your mother or father, or your auntie, anyone whose courage you admire. A hero is a person who is able to overcome a problem without hurting others." At this point Hugh Masekela, the master of African jazz, a dumpy man in a flat cap, enters the Albert Hall green room. He asks to meet her, and she hugs him casually. "He looks fatter than in his photograph," she says after he has gone. The star is clearly not her hero, so who is? "Sister Maria. She is a very strong lady, very hardworking, full of ideas. She's like my mother, so caring and so kind. She gave me hope when I had no hope."

Through her training, Memory has also been catching up on her education, doing two school years in one for the past seven years. "I am in grade 12 now. Most people in the class are 18 and two years younger than me, but that is OK. Next year, I will begin to train to do accounts and get a job so I can save the money to train to be a doctor," she says, calculating that in four years she will have earned enough to begin her seven-year medical training. She will be a doctor, she says, by the time she is 31. She would like to specialise in paediatrics.

"I know people who are not HIV-positive who have no hope for life. But me, every morning, I smile and say, 'It's a new day and I'm breathing'." Then she adds: "There is a strength in all of us; we just have to find it." Of such stuff heroes are made. You could be a hero too. Do something heroic today.

[iCopyright] © 2008 Independent News and Media. Permission granted for up to 5 copies. All rights reserved.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

 

Obama-of-the-left?

It was only a few months back that the right wingers were ranting on about how Obama was some sort of far-left covert terrorist-symp or something like that. Pals with ex-weatherpersons and ominously angry black preachers... And now we have a cabinet that's about as radical as the Osmonds, a notably stupid reactionary evangelist to do the invocation at the inaugural and god only knows what's next. Seriously, were people so out of the political loop they thought the Illinois Democratic Machine would hand us a flaming liberal? I guess so. For what it's worth, why the hell is there a preacher at the inaugural in the first place?

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

 

A little perspective on freedom and torture:

Here:


Monday, December 15, 2008

 

Bush gets free shoes!

He said they were size 10s, but who knows?

How much evidence needs to accumluate—hell, pile up!—before people finally get it through their heads that we are not welcome in Iraq? Not only are we not welcome, we are thoroughly rejected. We invaded the country, obliterated the fragile working infrastructure, and nearly blasted it back to the Stone Age. We are occupiers, as welcome as Nazi troops in, say, France in 1943. Sure, a certain number of French people enjoyed having the Germans in their nation, but not enough to count. After the German occupation was broken, remember, those who had welcomed the occupiers were beaten, disgraced, and in many cases, shot. Occupying troops are seldom loved.

At last, though, a direct picture of the anger toward Americans in that ass-kicked country.

You mean they don't like us? Jesus. Things are about to the point where America is the only country that loves America. We've moved beyond being a rogue state: we're almost a pariah state. It didn't take long, did it? In my life-time we went from being a beacon of freedom (more or less, depending on who was looking) to a symbol of tyranny.

Bush needs a lot more shoes thrown at him. As well as some warrants for his arrest.

An update on Firedoglake reports that the reporter who threw the shoes has been imprisoned and severely beaten. http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/15/shoe-thrower-being-tortured/#more-35044

Saturday, December 13, 2008

 

For what it's worth dept., room 3,457

Happy to see Prineville's decision to violate their own procedures and yank the Sherman Alexie book is making the national news. At one time, 100 or so years back, Prinveville was the scene of one of the archetypal western stories: cattle ranchers versus sheep. Prineville was home to a group called "The Crook County Sheep-shooters Association." Of course nobody was ever busted for the hundreds and hundreds of sheep that were killed by the cattle-ranchers.

Last night we were discussing Prineville's glorious history of tolerance and intelligence with a friend of our's. She said, "Well, you know, they found a new use for sheep over there: wool."

Thursday, December 11, 2008

 

Sherman Alexie v. Central Oregon

Of all the younger writers out there, my favorite is Sherman Alexie. He's funny, insightful, touching, and has a great easy-reading style. The only novel of his I haven't read is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

High school kids over in Prineville have been reading it, though. Until now. A parent got upset because it talks about masturbation (!). We know young people masturbate (hell, so do us old people, too), but we don't want young people to know that other young people... You know what I mean. It is, well, a stupid move. If I was rich, I'd buy a bunch of copies and stand just off the high school grounds and give the copies away. Jesus.

Censorship is such a strange control trip. People think that by censoring ideas or books or music they can control other people...maybe they just want attention, you think? I didn't consider that. Demanding books get removed from schools is a fine way to get your name in the papers and on TV...hmm. Anyhow, censorship doesn't work: we all know that. The bigger the fuss you make about something, the more people will want to see or read or hear what it is you're upset about. And young people have a mission to upset their elders: it's part of the job description of being young. I expect a lot more Prineville kids will read Alexie's book now that before.

The superintendent of schools over there, a guy named Shultz, constructed a lovely sentence about the book: "It's unfortunate those kind of graphics have to be used in a book that has good lessons to learn." I guess he means "it'll learn you some lessons," but I'm not sure. It's a quaint and probably dumb usage.

So, tomorrow, I'll go buy me a banned book. It's kind of my patriotic duty.

 

A little head cold to clear the sinuses...

I'm happy to report the end of an obnoxious head cold.

I believe I picked it up over Thanksgiving, up in Anacortes, WA. I gobbled Vitamin C tablets and held it at bay for a week or so. Last Friday I went into my doctor's and got an anti-flu shot. Saturday we found a stray dog—a Silky terrier—and brought it home. Sunday morning I tried to get one of our cats past the terrier (who regarded the cat like it was another piece of furniture), and I got to spend two hours in the local ER getting my arm sewn up. Monday we found the dog's owner and said good-by to him. Monday evening I started sneezing. The next two days were awful. Today is much better.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

 

Gimme them ol' Halliburton Blues!

Think back: Halliburton. Cheney.

Speaking of corruption in the U.S., the following article—and link—may jog some memories. Maybe it won’t. We’re not the most memory-enabled country in the world. But I don’t know how people got away with this stuff. I don’t know how George Bush I got away with it, let alone Dick Cheney or George II. There’s such contempt for law and decency in the out-going regime it’s hard to imagine it in any semi-civilized society. Bush (both) and Cheney simply behaved badly. Somehow Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other companies had it made clear to them they could do what they wanted in Iraq and elsewhere and nobody would bother them.

(see also, http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2008/10/military_burnpit_102708w/)

Suit claims Halliburton, KBR sickened base
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/12/military_kbr_lawsuit_121508w/
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Dec 4, 2008 14:02:10 EST

A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.
***
“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”
***
“Plaintiff witnessed the open air burn pit in operation at Balad Air Force Base,” the lawsuit states. “On one occasion, he witnessed a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR.”
***
A report from Wil Granger, KBR’s water quality manager for Iraq, states that non-potable water used for showering was not disinfected. “This caused an unknown population to be exposed to potentially harmful water for an undetermined amount of time,” according to the report. The report also stated the problems occurred all across Iraq and were not confined to Balad.

The lawsuit states there was no formalized training for KBR employees in proper water operations, and the company maintained insufficient documentation about water safety. The suit notes that former KBR employees Ben Carter and Ken May testified at a congressional hearing in January 2006 that KBR used contaminated water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Carter testified that he found the water polluted with sewage and that KBR did not chlorinate it.

The lawsuit states the swimming pools at Balad were also filled with unsafe water.
***
“Defendants knowingly and intentionally supplied and served food that was well past its expiration date, in some cases over a year past its expiration date,” the lawsuit states. “Even when it was called to the attention of the KBR food service managers that the food was expired, KBR still served the food to U.S. forces.”

The food included chicken, beef, fish, eggs and dairy products, which caused cases of salmonella poisoning, according to the lawsuit.

“KBR prevented their employees from speaking with government auditors and hid employees from auditors by moving them from bases when an audit was scheduled,” the lawsuit states. “Any employees that spoke with auditors were sent to more dangerous locations in Iraq as punishment.”

The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that “still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.”
***
“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”

According to military regulations, medical waste must be burned in an incinerator to prevent anyone from breathing hazardous fumes.

“On at least one occasion, defendants were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at an open-air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents onto the fire,” the lawsuit states. “The truck caught fire. Defendants’ fraudulent actions were thereby discovered by the military.”

The lawsuit also states that the contractors burned old lithium batteries in the pits, “causing noxious and unsafe blue smoke to drift over the base.”

Military Times has received more than 100 letters from troops saying they were sickened by fumes from the burn pits, which burned plastics, petroleum products, rubber, dining-facility waste and batteries.
***

 

back in the saddle again

So, home again. A nice holiday with friends up in Anacortes, WA. Pretty town; too bad it's so damn' damp up there. A good trip up and back on the train, as well.

And, now, back to business.

Back when I was young, corruption was seen as something in other cultures, other countries. It wasn’t something we had to deal with in America. At least that was how we played it.

Boy, was that a corral-full of bullshit.

The oil companies buy and sell politicians. Various federal agencies regularly get exposed as being corrupt. The White House appoints “watchmen” who sleep on the job. Money from the various narcotics cartels insures a steady flow of illegal drugs into this country. Psychiatrists and psychologists assist in torture. Got a problem with the law? A little green lubrication can help you out... It’s corruption, no other term fits quite so well.

A recent headline said something about 1 out of 5 young people have personality problems. At least the shrinks are telling us that. But it’s what they aren’t telling us that’s really really spooky:


http://www.alternet.org/story/109393/

Renowned Psychiatrists on Drug Company Payrolls
Money from pharmaceutical companies has corrupted much of the psychiatric profession.

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on December 2, 2008

National Public Radio announced on November 21, 2008 that it had fired psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin and would be terminating his program "The Infinite Mind." Goodwin was released after NPR learned that he had received at least $1.3 million from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. In the 2008 ongoing Congressional investigation of psychiatry, Goodwin is the most recent prominent psychiatrist exposed for either unethical or, in some cases, illegal financial relationships with drug companies.
During the last decade, Goodwin's "The Infinite Mind" aired weekly in more than 300 radio markets. The program received major financial support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. "The Infinite Mind" billed itself as "public radio's most honored and listened to health and science program," but on November 21, 2008 the New York Times reported:

In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with bipolar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. "But as we'll be hearing today," Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, "modern treatments -- mood stabilizers in particular -- have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children." That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.

Goodwin claims that NPR was aware of his financial relationship with drug companies, but his show's producer Bill Lichtenstein said that he had called Goodwin earlier this year and asked him "point-blank" if he was receiving funding directly or indirectly from pharmaceutical companies and Goodwin's answer was, "No." While it is not certain as to who is lying in this instance, Goodwin's assertion that not treating children diagnosed with bipolar disorder results in brain damage has no scientific basis; in fact, there is evidence that psychiatric medication can, in some cases, cause brain damage.

This is not the first time Frederick Goodwin's embarrassment of a high-profile employer resulted in his job termination. On February 28, 1992, the New York Times reported the following about Goodwin, "The director of the Federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration resigned today amid a new round of criticism for his comments that appeared to suggest a scientific link between the violent behavior of monkeys and the social problems of inner cities." After Goodwin was forced to resign for what his critics in Congress and the media believed were racist remarks, he was appointed as director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Goodwin has not been psychiatry's only public relations disaster in 2008, as Congressional investigators have exposed several other renowned psychiatrists for improper financial relationships with drug companies. The New York Times on June 8, 2008 reported:

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials ... By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest.

Congressional investigators discovered that two of Biederman's colleagues in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Timothy Wilens and Thomas Spencer, received an additional $2.6 million from drug companies from 2000 to 2007.

Recently, emails inside Johnson & Johnson (manufacturer of the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal) regarding Biederman were made public as a result of suits brought by parents against Johnson & Johnson and other antipsychotic manufacturers, claiming that their children were harmed by these drugs whose risks the companies minimized. The New York Times on November 25, 2008 reported:

In one November 1999 e-mail, John Bruins, a Johnson & Johnson marketing executive, begs his supervisors to approve a $3,000 check to Dr. Biederman in payment for a lecture he gave at the University of Connecticut. "Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around," Mr. Bruins wrote. "He is a very proud national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse." Mr. Bruins wrote that Dr. Biederman was furious after Johnson & Johnson rejected a request that Dr. Biederman had made to receive a $280,000 research grant. "I have never seen someone so angry," Mr. Bruins wrote.

In October 2008, Congressional investigators disclosed that one of psychiatry's most influential researchers, Charles Nemeroff of Emory University, had received more than $2.8 million from drug companies between 2000 to 2007 and had failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and also appeared to have violated federal research rules. And other less prominent psychiatrists researchers with similar ties to drug companies have also been exposed by Congressional investigators.

Earlier in 2008, Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, was particular troubled by what investigators told him about psychiatry's premier professional organization, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), described by the New York Times as "the voice of establishment psychiatry." After he learned that the president-elect of the APA, Alan Schatzberg of Stanford University, had $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company and that the APA itself was heavily dependent on drug-company financing, Grassley wrote a letter to the APA stating, "I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions."

Recent studies reveal some of how drug company money has compromised the objectivity of drug research. Psychological Medicine in November 2006 reported that drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies show positive results for psychiatric drugs 78 percent of the time, while drug studies without pharmaceutical company funding show favorable results only 48 percent of the time. This was discovered after examining 301 articles that were published between 1992 and 2002 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.

Also reported by Psychological Medicine was that the percentage of studies sponsored by drug companies increased from 25% in 1992 to 57% in 2002. Currently, it is increasingly rare for a drug study not to be funded by the drug's manufacturer.

Why are so many doctors unaware of just how poorly antidepressants have actually fared in studies? The New England Journal of Medicine (January 17, 2008) reviewed both published and unpublished antidepressant studies registered with the FDA between 1987 and 2004 on twelve antidepressants, and it reported that most studies with negative results were never published in journals. While 94 percent of antidepressant studies published in journals show antidepressants to be more effective than placebos, only 51 percent of all registered studies were determined by the FDA to show antidepressants superior to placebos.

The damage to the general public caused by drug company corruption of psychiatry goes beyond the cover up of the ineffectiveness and dangers of drugs. Drug company corruption of psychiatry has also resulted in a disregard of non-drug solutions for emotional and behavioral difficulties. In response to his corruption charges, former NPR host Frederick Goodwin told the New York Times that because he consults for so many drug makers at once that he has no particular bias, "These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out." Using Goodwin's logic, if a politician is on the take from every oil corporation, then that politician has no conflict of interest with regard to energy policy.

Even before the extensive media coverage of the 2008 Congressional investigations of psychiatry, a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that the American public had relatively low confidence in psychiatrists' honesty and ethics. When Americans were asked about the "honesty and ethical standards" of several professions, only 38 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of psychiatrists, much lower than the 69 percent positive rating for other medical doctors (nurses topped the list of professionals with an 84 percent positive rating).

When Gallup published the results of it its honesty and ethical standards poll, the American Psychiatric Association concluded that the problem of Americans' lack of confidence in the honesty and ethics of psychiatrists is not with psychiatrists but with an ignorant American public. Commenting on the Gallup poll, a spokesperson for the APA in the Psychiatric News (an APA publication) concluded that psychiatrists need "to educate the public about who we are and what it is that we do."

How arrogant does an authority need to become before it loses its authority? How corrupt does an authority need to become before it loses its authority? How many times does an authority get to be wrong before it loses its authority? And how many bad apples does it take for Americans to suspect the entire barrel?

The good news is that while Americans often have no choice but to deal with many arrogant, corrupt, ignorant institutions, most adults are not actually forced to hand over their emotional and behavioral problems to establishment psychiatry.
Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).

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