Month: May 2008

Times Tidbits

Over the last week or so, The New York Times has just had a lot of great material that I wanted to share with you.

First up is a piece on traditional healers and US immigrants entitled “Illegal Farm Workers Get Health Care in Shadows.” Interested in curanderas? Then take a look. Because it includes a video too.

Benedict Carey has a piece “I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.” Tend to fib? “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” says Dr. Richard Gramzow.

Jennifer Senior’s review Chronicle of a Death Foretold covers the new book Blood Matters by Masha Gessen. Gessen is a “previvor,” and writes about her learning and decisions about what to do about her extremely high genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer

The next one is primarily because I know the person who starts the article off! I used to train with Jenny Higgins at Emory, so it’s great to see her as the lead-in for Gina Kolata’s piece on training for triathalons and the difficulties of peak performance.

Carl Zimmer wrote on Lots of Animals Learn, But Smarter Isn’t Better. “Why have most animals remained dumb?” is a good evolutionary question, and it has to do with the costs involved in being smart. Zimmer also addresses how learning as widespread in the animal kingdom, so bye-bye to notions of animals operating primarily by hardwired instincts.

Janet Rae-Dupree had her short and sweet Can You Become A Creature of New Habits? How about making good habits to overcome old habits, and trying to canalize creativity too.

Hurt Girls: The Uneven Playing Field analyzes the higher rates of injury in women’s sports, asking is there an injury epidemic? A Magazine piece, so it’s comprehensive.

Continue reading “Times Tidbits”

Mad Pride

“Mad Pride” Fights A Stigma by Gabrielle Glaser reports on the frank talk, public exposure, and anti-stigma efforts of people who experience “extreme mental states.” Books like Kay Redfield Jamison’s autobiography of bipolar disorder An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and movies like A Beautiful Mind on the mathematician John Nash’s schizophrenia have brought mental illness further into the public light. Now a grass-roots movement is going further: “these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.”

It is a diverse movement, centered on anti-stigma efforts, on quality of life, and on treatment options.

Members of the mad pride movement do not always agree on their aims and intentions. For some, the objective is to continue the destigmatization of mental illness. A vocal, controversial wing rejects the need to treat mental afflictions with psychotropic drugs and seeks alternatives to the shifting, often inconsistent care offered by the medical establishment. Many members of the movement say they are publicly discussing their own struggles to help those with similar conditions and to inform the general public.

Themes such as creating “a new language that resonated with our actual experiences,” better public and medical recognition of the nature of their problems, and being given the same sorts of leeway and freedoms that “normal” people enjoy are what drive the “mad pride” movement. They are at once post-conventional due to their extreme mental states, with behaviors and subjective experiences that society would rather not see (social denial), and want to express themselves and have others understand–such a basic human desire.

Liz Spikol, a bipolar writer in Philadelphia, is one of the emerging voices through her blog at the Philadelphia Weekly and YouTube videos (“trouble spikol” is a good search term). Here’s one to watch.

Nicholas Kristof in Colombia

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote an editorial about Colombia, free trade, and human rights entitled Better Roses Than Cocaine. He argued there that “Some Democrats claim that they are against the pact because Colombia has abused human rights. Those concerns are legitimate — but they shouldn’t be used to punish people like Norma Reynosa, a 35-year-old woman who just may snip the flowers that go into the Mother’s Day bouquet that you buy.”

He notes, “Colombia’s progress has been immense. Assassinations of union members, while still a problem, have fallen 80 percent since 2002. Last year, the murder rate for union members was 4 per 100,000, reaching levels far below the homicide rate for the general public.”

He finishes by writing, “To their credit, a large group of prominent Democrats from previous administrations have strongly endorsed the trade accord, declaring that it is ‘in both our vital national security and economic interests.’ But the presidential candidates aren’t listening. Democrats instinctively criticize Mr. Bush when he harms America’s standing in the world. That’s easy. But a test of intellectual honesty is your willingness to hold your own side to the same standard and to point out pandering in those politicians you normally admire.”

I have written previously on the controversy over free trade and Colombia. And Kristof’s readers responded in volume to his editorial, so check them out as well—lots of good critique. Finally, there was a video that went along with his stay in Colombia, so from the Bogota savannah landscape to the voices, as well as the coverage of these same issues, I recommend a look:

Wine’s Pleasures

This past week Eric Asimov’s Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head? reigned as the number one emailed article at the New York Times. It’s #3 as I write this, and is quite simply a superb article, wrapping so much into 1700 words. Makes me a little jealous, since it’s a great model for what we do here, both in content and style.

Here’s Asimov’s opening hook, “The mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it’s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet.”

Asimov then takes on recent reports of wine that reduced it to expectations and over-rated prices—the “normal people like the cheap stuff in blind taste tastes” kind of thing. “In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.”

Asimov proceeds to do something unusual for most journalists, he digs deeper into the actual data. And what does he find? Significant variation. Sure, novices do like the cheap champagne, but the experts prefer the Dom Perignon. So there is no such thing as the “average oenophile.”

Continue reading “Wine’s Pleasures”

Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?

My Notre Dame students are great! All eight of their group posts are now up. I am so proud of them and the effort that they put into this project.

Already their posts have been read more than 1400 times, and been linked to from sites like Mind Hacks and Sharp Brains and promoted at del.icio.us and Stumble Upon. I hope to see much more as the word continues to gets out.

The eight posts came out of my class on “Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse,” and represent the range of perspectives brought to bear on substance use over the course of the semester. Though I guided each group through multiple revisions, each post represents an argument that the students developed on a particular topic.

I started the series off with Stress and Addiction: The Vicious Cycle, which showed how stress and substance use go hand in hand, reinforcing a cycle of addiction.

Next was The Problem of Post-Conventional Outlaws, which examined how the US Drug War is increasingly at odds with our modern sensibilities of self.

The Genetic and Environmental Bases of Addiction was the third post in the series, an essay that took on both nature and nurture and won!

Fourth came Inequality and Drug Use, providing a clear demonstration on how social status and marginalization feed into worse drug use and even worse outcomes.

The other middle child was Understanding Brain Imaging, a comprehensive presentation of the different imaging technologies used to understand addiction and other mental health problems. Well worth a look!

It’s Our Fault: Denial, Disease and Addiction showed how the social roots of denial and misperceptions about what counts as a disease make for a double whammy against people struggling with alcohol and drug use.

The seventh post was Culture and Learning to Drink: What Age? This one covered debates about the legal drinking age in the United States, with an even-handed consideration of the costs involved and the varied ways we might think more creatively about how better to learn to drink.

Last but most certainly not least, College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes? examined how central gender is to the drinking culture on US college campus, in particular to understanding and doing something about binge drinking.

A great mix of essays! Please enjoy them.

-Daniel Lende

College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes?

By: Carolyn, Andrew, Brandon, and Sarah

Drunk- this five letter word has many connotations, ranging in extremes from positive memories to negative stigmas. For men and women, it is one word that has different meanings, from the number of drinks it takes to get drunk to the behaviors men and women are expected to exhibit while drinking. For college women and men in particular, binge drinking is an area in which they relate quite distinctly with alcohol. Gender norms, rituals and relations often lead to, and perpetuate, binge drinking on campuses nationwide.

Many aspects of college drinking are unique. Tailgating is one of them. Where else can you find people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol early in the morning? At big football schools, tailgating facilitates the social learning of binge drinking as a normal and acceptable behavior. The ritualized drinking associated with tailgating is often the first place where students are introduced to binge drinking. It also sets a precedent of drinking enough alcohol to get drunk and stay drunk for an extended period of time.

In the fall, people tailgate every weekend before football games. In the ritual of tailgating, binge drinking as a socially learned experience is evidenced by the fact that students learn to drink from the very alumni whom they are taught to respect and admire. Across the nation, students only need to leave their dorms to encounter the alumni who have been drinking since early morning. Since this is often a student’s first exposure to binge drinking, students may initially be shocked to find huge crowds of people drinking heavily in parking lots and around campus. The immersion in the football culture, which often depends upon tailgates, will soon numb any hesitation or doubts the student may have.

Tailgating perpetuates binge drinking among the general student population, but its significance varies based on gender. During a typical night out, a college student may consume four or five drinks to “pregame” before the actual party has even started. Many students do not realize that this qualifies as binge drinking, and that it impacts women and men differently.

Continue reading “College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes?”