Enough Is Never Enough with Blaming Anti-Vaxxers, Science Babe, January 24, 2015
Let’s get one thing straight; if a blogger with zero medical credentials tries to claim that they have more accurate science than the vast majority of the scientific and medical establishment, they are, on every level, wrong. I promise you, somebody who got their degree at Google University and has a waiver on their website that says “my advice isn’t designed to treat anything” has nothing to lose by giving you terrible advice. A real doctor’s advice doesn’t come with an asterisk. They will give you advice that’s grounded in real science.
Friend in Need: The tragedy of my friend’s life and death is that he lived in a society that left him to deal with it alone, Saul Elbein, Texas Observer, January 21, 2015
It’s become a tired trope to note the stigma attached to mental illness, or to describe depression as a hidden ailment, but it’s tired because it’s true. About the only time there’s a public conversation about depression or mental health is when a famous person, like Robin Williams, kills himself or a disturbed gunman unleashes mass murder on a school. Then we can expect a brief national stock-taking by which we’re all reminded of the issue’s prevalence and the limited scope of mental health coverage in this country. And then everything goes back to normal.
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Silence comes at a price. Taboos about depression and suicide can isolate sufferers further, and that’s a big deal, because much of the pain of depression comes from isolation. In the 1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister laid out a map of the progression of suicidal thoughts that looks like a road passing through many gates, with death at the end. In his Psychological Review article “Suicide as Escape from Self,” Baumeister describes how depressed people can arrive at the idea of suicide without even being aware they were considering it, how their thinking can change incrementally until they arrive at a point at which their very self has become loathsome to them. Once you get to that point, psychologist Jesse Bering wrote in Scientific American, “keeping a suicidal person from completing the act may be as futile as encouraging someone at the very peak of sexual excitement to please kindly refrain from having an orgasm.”
Baumeister’s theory is one of progressive isolation, in which the depressed person feels more and more cut off from society. First comes the feeling that one has fallen short of one’s standards. After that feeling of failure comes its corollary: fault. Bering describes this stage as the suicidal person’s belief that he or she is “enduringly undesirable; there is no hope for change and the core self is perceived as being rotten.” And then the torture starts, a “ceaseless and unforgiving comparison with a preferred self—perhaps an irrecoverable self from a happier past or a goal self that is now seen as impossible to achieve in light of recent events.”
Next come long periods of anxiety or depression. Time seems to telescope; temporary unhappiness and emotional pain seem eternal. Finally comes the “disinhibition” required to do the hard work of killing oneself.
One of the insidious things about depression is that it robs sufferers of the ability to view their lives rationally—it just seems like everything is awful. One of Baumeister’s key points is that the suicidal person is often unaware that her thinking has become progressively distorted, that she has in fact become “suicidal.”
I wish I’d never reported my rape, Kendall Anderson, Salon, January 24, 2015
Ultimately, no charges were filed in my case. The man who raped me was never even brought in for questioning. The “investigation” dragged on for more than six months. During those months, I called the detective repeatedly to find out the status of my case. He rarely returned my calls and eventually stopped returning them altogether until I complained to his supervisor. I did have the opportunity to speak to the district attorney assigned to my case. He told me he could not press charges because there was no way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I had been raped. He said the defense attorney would tear me apart, because I had let the perpetrator into my room and waited two days to report the crime.
Looking back on the experience, it’s clear the police had very little interest in my case. Had I known I would be subjected to inappropriate interrogation, instructions that violated my personal integrity, and lengthy delays, I would never have reported the crime.
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The investigation of my rape took place within the special victims unit of the police department. This means the officer I worked with and his supervisor only investigated crimes like mine and had received training on how to treat rape victims. Yet I still faced an incredibly traumatic and counterproductive investigative process.
