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James Goodman

Kid's Eating Problems Could Warn of Mental Issues | Psych Central News - 0 views

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    The presence of multiple mental health issues in association with an eating disorder is not a surprise. "Many factors are associated with the development and persistence of eating disorders," Meilleur said. The results of this study indicate that 22.7 percent of the children identify having been mocked or insulted for his or her appearance as a trigger event to the modification of their behaviors. "For some children, bullying can initiate or reinforce boy image preoccupations and possibly lead to a change in eating behavior." Indeed, 95 percent of the children in the study had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4 percent were afraid of putting on weight, and 46.6 percent described themselves as "fat." "These behaviors reflect the clinical presentations we observe in adolescents and support findings that body image is a preoccupation for some children as early as elementary school," Meilleur explained. The study also proves that eating disorders are not a "girl problem" as boys in the same age group were found to be similar to girls in most cases. The one exception to the similarity between boys and girls is that social isolation was more prevalent and lasted longer among boys. "The profound similarity between boys and girls supports, in our opinion, the hypothesis that common psychological and physical factors linked, amongst other things, to the developmental period, are involved in the development of an eating disorder," Meilleur said.
James Goodman

Lady Psychopaths Welcome - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids." Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative - wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague - I'll take the former. If "Gone Girl" is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself onto the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art - not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people's prior ideological assumptions. Art says "Think," not "You're right."
James Goodman

What We're (Not) Eating: A Potential Danger Of Gluten-Free - Meghan Casserly - Girl Fri... - 0 views

  • It’s no wonder, then, that the young cheerleaders found the increasingly prevalent condition of gluten sensitivities the perfect cover for what turned out to be very real cases of anorexia. By the end of the school year, two out of the three girls were in treatment for eating disorders and the third was taken out of school by her parents.
  • Julie Dorfman, director of Nutrition at Philadelphia’s Renfrew Center, the country’s first residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, is not surprised. “With the eating disordered population, I’d say that 110% of them are using intolerances or food ‘problems’ as a means to avoid eating these foods in a socially acceptable way. Gluten just happens to be the fad right now.”
  • Stacey Rosenfeld, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in eating disorders is in the camp of those who believe that using medical or pseudo-medical reasons for restrictive diets is often a cover-up for disordered eating.  “Nobody wants to be called out on an eating disorder or obsessive eating,” she says, “so anything they can do to hide it, they will.”
James Goodman

Teenage Sex - The Sleepover Question - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Here, we see teenagers as helpless victims beset by raging hormones and believe parents should protect them from urges they cannot control. Matters aren’t helped by the stereotype that all boys want the same thing, and all girls want love and cuddling. This compounds the burden on parents to steer teenage children away from relationships that will do more harm than good. The Dutch parents I interviewed regard teenagers, girls and boys, as capable of falling in love, and of reasonably assessing their own readiness for sex. Dutch parents like Natalie’s talk to their children about sex and its unintended consequences and urge them to use contraceptives and practice safe sex. Cultural differences about teenage sex are more complicated than clichéd images of puritanical Americans and permissive Europeans. Normalizing ideas about teenage sex in fact allows the Dutch to exert more control over their children.
James Goodman

Choosing a Pronoun - He, She or Other - After Curfew - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.
  • “You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”
  • P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”
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  • Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, “it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,” said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. “These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ‘You don’t know me by looking at me. Assume nothing.’ ”
  • Dr. Savin-Williams, who is also the author of the book “The New Gay Teenager,” went on to list some of the new adjectives young people use to describe themselves: “bi-curious,” “heteroflexible,” “polyamorous” and even “wiggly.”
  • The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. Last year, a preschool in Sweden, appropriately called Egalia, opened with the goal of eliminating all gender bias by referring to the children as “friends,” instead of girls and boys, as well as avoiding all gender-specific pronouns.
James Goodman

Charles Shaw: Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction - 0 views

  • 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.
James Goodman

When Did the US Begin Sacrificing Freedom and Democracy for Corporate Governance and We... - 0 views

  • In our wildest madness we dream of an equilibrium we have lost.-Albert Camus
  • The other day at the doctor's office, I picked up a typical fashion magazine left opened on the coffee table for something to do.  The cover highlighted a young actress half-naked and doing her best to look sexy, which is not unusual in a commercial society that promotes women as sex objects. 
  • It is also considered normal by today's standards for an eleven-year-old girl to believe that the sexier she is-the more valued and appreciated she will be in our society. As for the boys, they're occupied for hours playing violent video games that give them the thrill of exploding humans with powerful weapons in the pursuit of joyful killing.
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  • I'm old enough to remember when young Americans questioned established norms, when they wanted to practice a sort of hip stoicism by realizing that less is more.  We never if rarely hear about the virtue of moderation in our political discussions or from the entertainment media world of film and sensational news.
  • J.S. Mill wrote in his classic essay On Liberty that "everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship."  In a commercial society, there is no room for spiritual growth, for rational criticism, for the cultivation of well-developed human beings. You know something's gone terribly wrong when a young child is told through media reinforcement that he will be valued on the lack or gain of wealth and materialism, and she on sex appeal, not by the content of his/her character.
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