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The “mental illness” paradigm—an insidious cancer:  I find it interesting to turn the “medical model” language of “mental illness” back onto itself and consider this entire “mental illness” paradigm as acting like an insidious cancer (the difference in my use of the term “cancer” here being that I’m readily acknowledging that this is just a metaphor). Cancer is essentially what occurs when a cell of an organism “forgets” its role as a member of a larger whole and turns against the organism, becoming consumed only with its own reproduction. Using this metaphor, we can say the “mental illness” paradigm fosters this turning one part of a whole against itself. We see this taking place interpersonally between members of our society as we develop ever increasing fear of those labelled “mentally ill,” and we see this taking place intrapersonally as we develop ever increasing fear and suspicion of our own “unusual” or “extreme” subjective experiences. We see signs of this cancer spreading throughout nearly every branch of contemporary Western society—our schools and education systems, our media, our government policies, our way of trying to make sense of ourselves and others’ experiences and behavior, and of course our health care systems. We also notice that this type of cancer thrives particularly well on a diet of greed, fear and ignorance—greed (enormous financial incentive to many in the pharmaceutical and mental health industries), fear (especially our fear of uncertainty, preferring an understanding that is clear although flawed to having to make some peace with mystery and the unknown), and ignorance (just think of the daily bombardment by massive amounts of misinformation coming at us from almost every angle).

So mental illness isn’t just about happiness: Mental illness kills. Sometimes by suicide, of which mental illness is a principal cause. But most of the excess deaths among the mentally ill are caused by diseases such as cardiovascular disease or cancer.  In a sense, mental illness amplifies the risk or lethality of physical health problems. This occurs for many reasons.  Mentally ill people are more likely to develop tobacco, alcohol, and substance abuse addictions. Mentally ill people also experience high levels of stress from the loss of jobs, marriages, and families. Chronic diseases such as diabetes require intensive daily self-care routines and mental illness undermines a patient’s ability to carry these out.

Another way to enhance the body's response to cold-fighting remedies is to ensure that you feel loved: Social support reduces vulnerability to all types of illness, including colds and flu, by cutting stress. In fact, when exposed to a virus, parents are about half as likely to develop a cold as exposed non-parents. And the bigger a parent's brood, the stronger her resistance, a Psychosomatic Medicine report showed. (Scientists think that social support, not just increased immunity thanks to constant exposure, is behind the effect.) Even if you do succumb, feeling understood and cared for, either by your doctor or by family and friends, can reduce the severity of your symptoms. A study by Barrett and his colleagues found that people who felt that their physicians were more empathetic had slightly shorter, milder colds as well as greater immune responses.

"The kind of remedies and comfort measures your grandmother used -- in my family, it was honey and lemon juice in warm water -- has a big impact on cold symptoms," says Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland. Since these reassuring associations are built during childhood and are probably at least partly subconscious, it doesn't matter whether Mom or Grandma is actually there to administer the remedy. "Pills might help," she says, "but mind-body approaches are a critical tool in symptom management."

huff.use('threeup', function(t){ t.init({ frame: '#threeup_top_wrapper', content: '#threeup_content', node: '.threeup_entries', left: '#threeup_left_nav', right: '#threeup_right_nav', vertical: 'Culture', entry: '912044', version: '2' }); }) Charles Shaw Author, 'Exile Nation' GET UPDATES FROM Charles Shaw Like 5 Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction Posted: 7/31/11 02:00 PM ET React HPFacebookVoteV2.init(912044, 'Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction', 'I did not know Amy Winehouse. I never met her, never heard any of her music, and was not a \\\"fan.\\\" None of that seemed to matter when forming an opinion of her. What I did know about her was what I felt I was permitted to know, that she was a prodigious musical talent who, not surprisingly, had an even more prodigious penchant for substances, and her life was a 24-hour train wreck that was parsed out neatly in...', 'http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-shaw/chasing-amy-prohibition-t_b_912044.html', 'http:///images/icons/huffpostbigicon.jpg', 'Please join me at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/">Huffington Post</a>!', 'blog', ["Amazing","Inspiring","Funny","Scary","Hot","Crazy","Important","Weird"]); Amazing Inspiring Funny Scary Hot Crazy Important Weird Read more Amy Winehouse , Addiction , Prohibition , Culture News #news_entries #ad_sharebox_260x60 img {padding:0px;margin:0px} if(typeof ad_overrides == 'undefined' || ad_overrides.spots && jQuery.inArray('sharebox_260x60',ad_overrides.spots) > -1) { htmlAdWH("93315635", "260", "60","f"); var debugadcode = ''; document.write(debugadcode); } if(typeof social_campaign != 'undefined' && jQuery('.print-link')[0].href.indexOf(social_campaign) == -1 ) { var _print_href = jQuery('.print-link')[0].href; jQuery('.print-link').attr( 'href' , _print_href + '&comm_ref=' + social_campaign ) } share this story http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?action=like&api_key=4d965afccc4d86c598dbf5d94fb34a7c&amp

This attitude, and paradigm, has got to change if we are ever to get to a saner, more compassionate (and yes, potentially profitable) Post-Prohibition society. The first step, as Amy's friend, the British actor Russell Brand, wrote in the Guardian, is to end the criminalization of use: We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn't even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call. Addiction is not "a crime or a romantic affection," Brand concludes, "but a disease that will kill." Let's speak frankly here. Prohibition is as guilty for the death of Amy Winehouse as her addiction. Because when Amy used drugs she wasn't just indulging, she was breaking the law. There's a huge social stigma behind breaking the law, and it usually means unwanted attention, fear, hiding and lying. In The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs, Dr. Julie Holland, a psychatrist and emergency physician, explains that the hiding and lying of illegal and prohibited drug use leads to a pervasive feeling of shame, and that shame creates more of the intensely negative feelings and emotional states that lead to self-medication as a means of escape. This cycle is then reinfoirced over and over until it becomes hard-wired. "The way our drug policy is set up," she concludes, "it's turning us into addicts." Now imagine the pressure borne down upon a celebrity of Amy Winehouse's stature, struggling with a very public addiction. How can anyone in her position find the peace and solace, or simply the space, necessary to heal? Addiction takes years to overcome, you can't just stuff someone in rehab for 30 days, and then send them back out on tour, and expect them to be cured. Perhaps we still shove addicts into our collective shadow because we're afraid of addiction and we're afraid of losing control, and as a means of reinforcing control in ourselves, we project this fear onto those who we perceive as having lost control, and thus, are in violation of the social contract and deserving of punishment. We warehouse them so we don't have to look at them, and thus, don't have to look at ourselves.

We can stop this from happening. When those who are suffering are finally viewed with the compassion they deserve, rather than with the derision they receive. And when there is no longer any profit to be gained from their immiseration, then we will have taken that final necessary step to break the nefarious back of Prohibition, and move us slowly along into a saner, more rational world, one that would have helped Amy Winehouse and millions like her, instead of recklessly chasing her into her own grave.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America's future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2 percent of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion—$17,000 for every U.S. household—with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50 percent.Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America's macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the U.S. The Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.

Addiction, says Maté, is nothing more than an attempt to self-medicate emotional pain.

The only difference between the identified addict and the rest of us is a matter of degrees.

Maté points to a host of studies that clearly show how neural circuitry is developed in early childhood. Human babies, more than any other mammals, do most of their maturing outside the womb, which means that their environment plays a larger role in brain development than in any other species. Factor in an abusive, or  at least  stressful, childhood environment and you’ve produced impaired brain circuitry – a brain that seeks the feel-good endorphins  and stimulating dopamine that it is unable or poorly able to produce on its own. A brain that experiences the first rush of heroin as a “warm, soft hug,” as a 27-year-old sex trade worker described it to Maté.

Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected. 2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad. 3. God created America and gave it a special purpose. 4. Our health-care system is the best there is. 5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone. 6. America is the greatest country in the world. 7. Tax rates are too high. 8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us. 9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright. 10. Everybody else wishes they were American.

But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.The attacks were supposed to have signalled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. Bush talked about ridding the world of evil, columnists wrote of “World War Three,” and almost all Americans felt that, in their private lives and in the national life, nothing would ever be the same. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.

The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country. By the time of the Japanese surrender, the Great Depression was over and America had been transformed. This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th. On the interstate south of Mount Airy, there’s a recruiting billboard with the famous image of marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the slogan “For Our Nation. For Us All.” In recent years, “For Us All” has been a fantasy. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.

“We are at war against terror.” Those were fateful words. Defining the enemy by its tactic was a strange conceptual diversion that immediately made the focus too narrow (what about the ideology behind the terror?) and too broad (were we at war with all terrorists and their supporters everywhere?). The President could have said, “We are at war against Al Qaeda,” but he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his rhetoric, in an attempt to overpower any ambiguities. Freedom was at war with fear, he told the country, and he would not rest until the final victory. In short, the new world of 2001 looked very much like the bygone worlds of 1861 and 1941. The President took inspiration from a painting, in the White House Treaty Room, depicting Lincoln on board a steamship with Generals Grant and Sherman: it reminded Bush of Lincoln’s “clarity of purpose.” The size of the undertaking seemed to give Bush a new comfort. His entire sense of the job came to depend on being a war President.