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