Don't Google, Scroogle

Okay, so this blog is powered by Google...I wonder if they will let me keep it up if I'm critical of google, after all I just took adsense off of my blog . I had a whopping 56 cents in my account, on hold unless I gave them tax information and bank information. I'm not as rich as google but even I don't need 56 cents that bad. Then I took the google search bar off of my page. Sure not all that many people read my blog, heck, I hardly even look at it, still it's the principal of the thing.

What they did to Furious Seasons is wrong!

And there are some other concerns as written about in Slate and by The Last Psychiatrist.

So Scroogle!

on the road

Same Data, different Spin

The same data that had SAMSHA proclaiming that "Depression exacts a high price from workers and from their employers, costing the U.S. workplace an estimated $36.6 billion per year in lost productivity," shows up on Marketwatch in as an article entitled "The 10 worst jobs in America Low pay, no benefits put these workers in a tough spot."

What does it say about our nation when the "government mental health site" blames the workers and the business site blames the businesses?

Things are about to get better...

More on Serotonin

I just love this Clinical Psych piece: Ghosts, Goblins, and Serotonin: Boo!

Charity Girls, etc.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing in the Sandy Springs library and discovered the book Charity Girls, by Michael Lowenthal. It reminded me of a topic near and dear to my heart, wrongful civil commitment and forced treatment of people labeled mentally ill.

Charity Girls is not about wrongful civil commitment but it is about wrongful imprisonment of women. It's a true story. Here's a blurb from a review: Supported by an act of Congress, military leaders and social reformers during World War I detained and quarantined some 15,000 young women, without hearings or judicial oversight, in an effort to protect soldiers.

And from Lowenthal: "during the First World War, some 15,000 American women were incarcerated in reformatories and detention homes—often for months at a time, with no charge of a crime, no trial, no legal recourse—while they received forcible medical treatment for venereal disease."

Many of the detained women were prostitutes, but a great number of them weren't; they were "charity girls," those who "picked up" men for the sheer fun of it and for the attendant perks of nights on the town—and who, by our contemporary standards, were doing nothing illicit or even unusual. Social standards change, but I don't believe the human heart does. I couldn't stop imagining what these charity girls had felt: girls who had the very same hopes and sexual urges as we do now, but who were made, for having those urges, to feel wicked."

Huh! It's a good book and a scary one, and yes I can't help but post another picture of my dog. He keeps me going

by the mid-1990s the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression had been scientifically tested and rejected

Wow, I wake up this morning and, after walking the dog, making coffee, checking for email from the boss man, find this Rockin piece at Furious Seasons.

Finally reality is coming home to roost. SSRI's, SNRI's don't correct imbalances in your brain...but that's really the tip of the iceberg and I hope this one keeps melting.

By the way, one of many problems with psychiatrists is that psychiatry really is the easiest specialty in medicine, where the med students with the lowest grades and the weakest test scores end up. Oh and the ones that got caught working while impaired (that's high on drugs folks) back when they were real doctors.

And there's a good New York Times piece that adds more to the idea that thyroid problems may cause psychiatric symptoms.

It still concerns me that some phrinks will label someone with an abnormal thyroid as bipolar , depressed, or who knows what, and treat the abnormal thyroid levels as symptom of the purported mental illness, while some will say that the bipolar diagnosis or other psychiatric diagnosis was given incorrectly to someone who needed thyroid medicine.

Things I was wrong about

1. It's not only the good that die young - if you disagree, just wait, you'll change your mind in a few years;

2. All of the people who voted for W really do have organic brain damage, they just do;

3. Taco Salad is not a health or diet food;

4. Cats....

this list is by no means intended to be exhaustive