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James Goodman

William Rivers Pitt | The United States of Aftermath - 0 views

truth-out.org/...the-united-states-of-aftermath

united states society politics war iraq 9_11 economy

shared by James Goodman on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 02 Mar 13
     
    A year after the attacks of September 11, Osama bin Laden had gone from being enemy #1 to being Mr. Who Cares About Him, and six months after that, "Shock and Awe" was unleashed. Maddow and her friends in the "news" media will, in the coming weeks, give us their various interpretations on how it came to happen, but none of them will bother to delve into the question of why it happened. The answer to that is too simple, and cuts too close to the bone: the war in Iraq cost more than three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000.00) to execute. Every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every MRE eaten, every helicopter shot down, every missile fired, every truck destroyed by an IED, every oil well guarded, every uniform worn, and every body bag filled translated into a slice of that money going to a company connected to the PNAC members of the Bush administration, who lied us into that war as an expression of their personal principles and in fulfillment of their dreams. Halliburton, KBR, United Defense, the Carlyle Group, independent military contractors like Blackwater and a crowd of American oil companies are still counting the riches they earned from their participation in the carnage.
James Goodman

Gabor Maté: Why We're a Culture of Addicts | Spirituality & Health Magazine - 0 views

spiritualityhealth.com/...C3%A9-why-were-culture-addicts

psychology culture spirituality health society politics

shared by James Goodman on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • 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.
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  • It’s the adversity that creates this impaired development, says Maté, not the genetics emphasized by the medical community.
  • And our response to addicts – criminalization, marginalization, ostracism – piles on that adversity, fueling the addictive behavior.
  • “[Prevention] needs to begin in the crib, and even before then,” Maté writes in Hungry Ghosts, “in the social recognition that nothing is more important for the future of our culture than the way children develop.”
  • What’s more, Maté, unlike many of his medical counterparts, factors into our potential for recovery – even transformation – “something else in us and about us: it is called by many names, ‘spirit’ being the most democratic and least denominational.”
  • The Illusion of choice We’d like to think that addicts have a choice, that they can just choose to stop—even if it’s hard. But Maté insists that the ability to choose is limited by the addict’s physiology and personal history.
  • “The more you’re driven by unconscious mechanisms, because of earlier defensive reaction to trauma, the less choice you actually have,” he says. “Most people have much less choice in things than we actually recognize.”
  • But, he writes, “I’ve come to see addiction not as a discrete, solid entity – a case of Either you’ve got it or you don’t got it – but as a subtle and extensive continuum.” Unless we become fully aware of the drivers of our addiction, he says, we’ll continue to live a life in which “choice” is an illusion.
  • “All addictions, whether to drugs or to behaviors such as compulsive sexual acting out, involve the same brain circuits, the same brain chemicals and evoke the same emotional dynamics,” he says. “Behavior addictions trigger substances internally. So (behavior addicts) are substance addicts.”
  • Or, as he writes in Hungry Ghosts, “Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
  • Compassion for the addict — and ourselves Responding to addiction requires us not only to care for the body and mind but also the soul, Maté says. The spiritual element of his practice is critical, he says, not only to understand the  hard-core street addict but also our own struggle.
  • “We lack compassion for the addict precisely because we are addicted ourselves in ways we don’t want to accept and because we lack self-compassion,” he says. And so we treat the addict as an “other” – this criminal, this person making poor choices – to whom we can feel superior.
  • “Compassion is understanding,” he says. “And to understand is to forgive.” We need, he says, to turn compassion into policy. “To . . . point the finger at that street-corner drug addict who’s in that position because of that early trauma is blind to say the very least,” Maté said in a 2010 talk at Reed College. “I think that if we developed a more compassionate view of addiction and a more deep understanding of the addict and if we recognized the similarities between the ostracized addict at the social periphery and the rest of society and if we did so with compassion both for them and for the rest of us we would not only have more efficient, more successful drugtreatment programs, we would also have a better society.”
James Goodman

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

psychology culture research americans social anthropology society psychiatry america health

shared by James Goodman on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 28 Feb 13
     
    "Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically. That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces. "
James Goodman

Sleep Loss Alters Genes While Raising Risk of Disease - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-raising-risk-of-disease.html

sleep genes disease science

shared by James Goodman on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 26 Feb 13
     
    Just a week of inadequate sleep can alter the activity of hundreds of genes, which may help scientists explain how wakeful nights can lead to ailments such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
James Goodman

The Nothing Cure | Whole Living - 0 views

www.wholeliving.com/...nothing-cure

society science children health psychology placebo

shared by James Goodman on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • 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."
  • James Goodman on 19 Nov 12
     
    "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.""
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