In discussions with my wife (who is a psychologist), I have often said that I believe 85% of the American population is mentally ill. It looks like I may have lowballed it.
From the article
"Living in America will drive you insane — literally" on Salon....
"For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness."
"The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from 1 in 184 Americans to 1 in 76. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades."
"We discovered two astonishing things about the rate of depression across the century. The first was there is now between ten and twenty times as much of it as there was fifty years ago. And the second is that it has become a young person’s problem. When I first started working in depression thirty years ago. . . the average age of which the first onset of depression occurred was 29.5. . . .Now the average age is between 14 and 15."
"In 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400% in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44 years. By 2008, 23% of women ages 40–59 years were taking antidepressants."
The article goes on to point out unreasonable expectations, over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders and attendant over-medication, social isolation and the pathologizing of normal behaviors as driving this epidemic.
We have a problem. What are we going to do about it? Use the opportunity to profit financially, as we're doing now, or fix it.
It's been done in rats, but now brain-to-brain interfacing has been accomplished in humans.
The controversy over genetically modified organisms has been raging on for quite awhile now. Now comes an article in the New York Times on how that controversy is affecting the Philippines and the introduction of Golden Rice.
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I saw this on Slashdot this morning and knew I had to post it. It is an Ebay auction for a fake space rock/surveillance satellite developed for Lockheed Skunkworks. Here's an interesting quote from the auction's description.
Pommes Frites are a Belgian snack food delicacy. They are not your standard run-of-the mill french fry. If you've had them you know the difference. Premium fresh fried potatoes, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside and topped with a variety of sauces from mayo and ketchup to exotic peanut satay. And although you can find them in New York City (123 2nd Ave), they are mostly found in Europe and of course, Belgium.
The rich really are different than you and me. An article in TIME's Health and Family website reports on a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that shows that the wealthy have a sense of self-importance that is blown out of proportion to that of folks not so well off.
I have often joked that in 50 thousand years climate scientists will discover that air conditioning caused global warming, since air conditioners create more heat than they do cold during operation. The joke goes, that as things got hotter, people turned up their air conditioning, releasing more heat and causing people to turn up their air conditioners even more. A vicious circle!
Can't have a flying car? Well don't despair, because it looks like the jetpack is just around the corner!
This article from MIT's Technology Review discusses the discovery of twelve nearby asteroids that could be captured using current rocket technology and then nudged into Earth orbits so that they could be mined. It seems that it is possible to do this by changing their velocity by less than 500 meters per second.
Are you trying to find out how much of your DNA is neanderthal? Asian? African? Native American? European?
Untold millions of ticks are preparing to hatch next month from their eggs. Most winter ticks die in the cold weather, but with warmer weather they don't die, they multiply. Ticks lay their eggs in February and March and a single female tick lays up to 3000 eggs.
A recent study suggests that human language might be much older than is currently thought, perhaps dating back as far as half a million years.
There's more at the website Colossal.
In discussions with my wife (who is a psychologist), I have often said that I believe 85% of the American population is mentally ill. It looks like I may have lowballed it.
According to a new study in the journal Science, a warming planet is related to an increase of civil violence. Drawing from archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, and psychology the study's author's shows that when the temperature goes up, so do the tempers. They found that for every degree of temperature rise there is a 4% rise in interpersonal violence and that poorer populations are more vulnerable to this effect.
