“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags
From an “imbalance of the humors” requiring leeches to a “possession by the devil” requiring whipping or an exorcism onwards to dysfunction to be cured essentially via torture, society’s perspective of mental health and treatment has come a long way to get where it
The story of my “Birthright” trip to Israel, and what I learned looking at Israeli society from the inside, probably requires a little preface about who I am and how I came to go on the trip. I should also probably warn you that
People with psychiatric problems were not always considered fully human: even within the last 100 years problems ranging from epilepsy and schizophrenia to things like dementia, post-traumatic stress, and even childhood misbehavior were treated with shocking cruelty. Humans were chained, heated, cooled, irradiated, shocked,
Life doesn’t always offer us ways of making major changes overnight, either to ourselves or our environments, but it frequently offers us chances to take tiny steps that together can add up to major changes for both ourselves and those around us. 1. Don’t
In yet another strange case where a person has died of “natural causes” (or suicide) while in police custody, Jamycheal Mitchell was found dead in his cell in Portsmouth, Virginia. Initially jailed for stealing a snickers, mountain dew, and a Zebra cake totalling $5,
There is a degree of embedded sexism in the expectations we have, and stories we tell, within our culture. I am not talking about words like “humanity” having man in it, but instead about the idea that a stoic woman would be anything but
It’s now legal for police in North Dakota to fly armed drones with tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, sound cannons, and pepper spray thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist. House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted to allow “less than lethal” weapons, but then a lobbyist
Possibly most of the readers of this text will have come across the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD) with regard to veterans returning home from war zones and having problems with reintegration. Still many people don’t realize that PTSD is also a normal reaction
The great basketball player Lebron James has just committed a magnanimous offer of a free four year college education to at least 1,100 poor minority children. At an average cost of approximately $40,000 (Akron University) per student, this amounts to at least $41,000,000 million
