heygiraffe

Perhaps the government should declare a War On Crises.

> The People's * is a prefix used by totalitarian governments.

Indeed. And so are words like "homeland".

The last ~2 decades have seen a widespread change in ideas about the relationship between the U.S. federal govt. and the people. As a result, practices that were once restricted to highly repressive states are now merely a bit controversial in the U.S. And then we also have these ways of naming things that you & I noted.

So I wonder: could it be that thinking more like a totalitarian somehow naturally leads one to talk more like a totalitarian?

Thanks for the reply.

> Finally, the education for licensed therapist varies WILDLY, and there are a lot of really bad ones.

I hear you there. I had some iffy experiences early on. But a few years ago I found a really good one. He retired, but recommended someone else to me, who also turned out to be really good. I'm seeing him these days.

Maybe what needs to happen is for the norm to be that psychiatrists who see the general public (so not people like you, perhaps) do so in the context of a joint practice that includes various counsellor/therapist types as well. The approach could be that each patient is a client of the practice, with the various specialists contributing their expertise as needed.

(Maybe that already happens a lot. I couldn't say.)

Any chance you could answer some questions? I'll get to them after a couple of (relevant) anecdotes.

I was diagnosed with depression by a psychologist. I got a referral to a psychiatrist, and I was told that the psychiatrist would probably want to do his own assessment of where I was at & what kind of therapy would best benefit me.

Nope. It was, "You've got such & such diagnosis; let's try such & such drug. Bye!" Some years later, I was treated by another psychiatrist. Same deal.

Second, I've read a fair amount about various psychoactive drugs. One thing I've noted in the literature is that often drugs are only found to be effective when used in combination with other kinds of therapy: counseling, etc. So if I am taking a psychoactive drug regularly to treat some condition, then I always get regular counseling for that condition as well.

I have mentioned this practice of mine to both psychiatrists, and both indicated their approval. But in both cases, counseling was never mentioned until I brought it up. I'm thinking that, if I were a psychiatrist, then I might insist that my patients get regular counseling in addition to my treatment. To avoid even recommending it strikes me (in my highly inexpert opinion) as an awful practice, possibly rendering psychiatric treatment ineffective. One might even call it a violation of professional ethics.

So, my questions.

1. Would you say my experiences related above are typical?

2. Would you say that these experiences point out problems (with the two psychiatrists at least, and with the profession as a whole, if the answer to #1 is "yes")?

3. If these are problems, then what do we do about them?

This article is absurd.

> No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words.

Be real. There are whole books devoted to this topic. And there are whole sections in bookstores devoted to such books. There are magazines that have been talking about these things in every single issue for decades.

"How to change your behavior to get ahead in business" is an enormous business. And historically it has catered mostly to men. It tells them how to dress, who to meet, how to talk, etc., etc.

Maybe the author needs to read a few business books?

> "That person [in the majority group] cannot speak for the underrepresented group," Quinton said. "They are not part of that group. [But] they can observe unfair practices and unconscious biases and call that out for the broader community."

I'm concerned with the idea implicitly presented here: that no man can speak for women, but that any woman can speak for all women.

Honestly, that's ridiculous.

> A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due.

I'm sure that's an important component of it. But it is not the whole story.

For example, incidence of clinical depression peaks in the late 40s. This page has a graph:

http://www.medicographia.com/2010/10/the-timing-of-depressio...

(I've seen more detailed graphs, but I can't find any right now.)

Also, I read about a study that showed that predictions of husbands having extramarital affairs could be made more accurately based on the age of the wife than on the age of the husband. The authors hypothesized that husbands looking elsewhere for sex, was, in part, a natural response to the wife going through menopause. (I can't find the study now.)

I believe studies have generally shown married men, on the whole, to be happier than unmarried men. I'm not sure about women, nor about how children affect things.

Regardless, you are not an outlier. Huge numbers of people with families are happy about it. It's fashionable for men in their 20s to talk about marriage entirely in terms of loss of freedom, but that doesn't mean their ideas are in accord with reality.

> Of all the people at a multiethnic women’s college who could hold the school’s “diversity” seat, the least fitting one was a white man.

I don't know about the "white" part, but putting a man in such a seat would seem to be more appropriate than putting a woman in it.

Doesn't anyone else remember what "diversity" means?

Lately we've seen a number of well written, compelling articles about reforming the U.S. criminal justice system. There was one not long ago about a woman who moved to a poor inner-city neighborhood for a while and wrote about it. Here is another one.

But these articles always have a missing piece: why are there so many crimes committed? In the above-mentioned article, it was noted that many of the woman's neighbors would never call the police, as to do so would result in a check on possible warrants for their arrest. But with no further explanation, you've just lost the hordes of right-leaning American suburban whites. They'll think, "There are no warrants out for my arrest, because I don't go around committing crimes. Why can't these people do the same?"

Similarly, this article discusses the case of "petty thief" Roderick Johnson, who was used as a sex slave in prison, and raped daily for a year and a half. And then:

> After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a repeat offender, he got nineteen years.

And my proverbial suburban white thinks, "If you don't want to be a sex slave, then stop pulling armed robberies of gas stations, ya moron!" And a long overdue discussion has been nipped in the bud.

This issue desperately needs to be addressed. The left isn't going to fix this problem on its own. We need broad societal support. But as it is, half the population of the U.S. has an easy argument allowing them to dismiss proposals from articles like this one.

Perhaps we should interpret this article in this way: The government wants to be able to track everyone, all the time. And here's a justification that will let this idea slip past your defenses.

Something to think about.

So now Al Jazeera is kowtowing to the almighty surveillance state, too? This is depressing.

Or rather:

Uh, there is a use for semicolons; just use semicolons as they were intended. I don't think the medium nor the age matters; and if you don't know how to use them, then either look it up or don't use them, please.

FTFY. :-)

This is a worthwhile article, and it makes some good points.

But I must say that, as usual in her writing, Dziura rubs me the wrong way with her assumptions--implicit, but obvious--that sexism is only about men harming women, only whites are racist, and so on. Am I not allowed to feel rage, too, when I go to pick up my son at his school, and I watch mothers breeze past the "All Visitors Must Check In" sign, while I'm the one who gets a wary "May I help you sir?"

Well, but it was a friend who was attacked; not her. We probably would not think it was inconsistent for a man whose female friend was attacked at a conference to remark that he felt comfortable in the tech community. But the writer is not allowed to think that way, which is some of what I think she is complaining about.

> ... the author doesn't mind being demeaned by men---when they dismiss her ideas because she's a woman, she just laughs it off ....

Or perhaps she was feeling superior, not laughing it off. Here was this guy putting down her proposal on the basis of gender, and then she comes back with an implementation. So it could have been an I-showed-him kind of thing.

Wow, this hits awfully close to home. A few quick thoughts:

- Calling 911 was the right thing to do. Never doubt it.

- Loving a suicidal person might just be the most frustrating thing there is. It isn't just you.

- Please keep us posted, at least for a little while. Forget the negative comments. This won't make the front page, I imagine, so no one has to read it who doesn't want to.

I've quoted your comment on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1fz6ba/creator_of_...

I can remove this if it is a problem.