Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
How not to bring up your kids!
An article by a Chinese mother on how Chinese Kids are brought up.
This article is awful...the mother seems brutal and I don't think anyone should try to emulate this model, Chinese or not! Children don't need to be armed for the future they need to be nurtured and prepared...for the challenges ahead with self confidence, lots of love and support...
This article is awful...the mother seems brutal and I don't think anyone should try to emulate this model, Chinese or not! Children don't need to be armed for the future they need to be nurtured and prepared...for the challenges ahead with self confidence, lots of love and support...
Letter from the child mind institute NYu about mental illness
The three people who wrestled Jared Loughner to the ground and disarmed him outside a supermarket in Tucson this Saturday are being hailed as heroes, and rightly so. They prevented further loss of life at the hands of the 22-year-old, who had, in little more than an instant, killed six people and wounded more than a dozen others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. These 2 men and a 61-year-old woman saw a chance to intercede, and they made the most of it.
But there are others in this story who could have, and I believe would have, been heroes if they had the knowledge and tools they needed to stop Jared Loughner’s descent into mental illness before it cost the lives of his victims, not to speak of his own life.
Our hearts go out to those affected by this tragedy, as well as their families and loved ones. It’s particularly painful to read the accounts of college students and professors who noticed Loughner’s bizarre and frightening behavior, shared their fears with others, but didn’t see a way to get Loughner effective help when his downward slide could have been stopped.
On the first day of class one student wrote to a friend that another student in the class was so disruptive he scared her. “Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon." A week later she wrote, “We have a seriously disturbed student in the class. They are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can't do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door."
It’s terrible to imagine a student actually sitting by the door of her classroom because she was so afraid of another obviously mentally ill student—and outrageous that it took more than a single day to resolve the situation. In fact, it took three or four weeks before her concerned professor, and others who had Loughner in their classes, were able to have him removed. But they weren’t able to get him help. Pima Community College required that Loughner undergo an evaluation if he wanted to re-enroll; he refused.
What his professors didn’t do is acknowledge that he was a risk to both himself and others, and call the police. College administrators, or neighbors, or friends, for that matter, wouldn’t look the other way if a young man they knew was bleeding, or going into a diabetic coma. They would immediately dial 911. And the kind of psychotic breakdown Loughner was demonstrating is no less severe, no less demanding of immediate treatment. And it gives no shortage of warning, either. Schizophrenia, if that’s what this is—or any of the other psychiatric disorders that can lead to psychosis—doesn’t develop overnight. There are warning signs, and those signs didn’t prompt the intervention they should have.
Why? Because people have little understanding and a lot of fear when it comes to psychiatric disorders. If you’re on a subway car and someone faints, or has a seizure, half the people on the car will come to his aid, or call 911, or pull the emergency cord. But if someone is acting delusional or disturbing on a subway car, people will look away, move to the other end of the car, or change to the next car as soon as they can.
And mentally ill people, especially those with paranoid delusions, are also at risk of slipping into the alternative universe of the internet, where all kinds of extreme rants seem to offer evidence for their fantasies. For Loughner this included a radical right-winger who argues that the government uses grammar to control people, and only an alternate “truth language” can offer escape. It wouldn’t be that surprising if he also gave literal credence to the violent rhetoric that permeates politics these days—especially in Arizona.
How many times does this have to happen—think Virginia Tech—before we recognize how pervasive mental illness is in the college-age population, and cut through legal and emotional barriers to getting treatment as soon as symptoms develop? The first signs of 75% of all psychiatric disorders appear by the age of 24.
We need a plan for giving mental health care parity with other medical care in terms of access, in terms of quality, and in terms of moral responsibility.
Part of what needs to be addressed is stigma—the general fear and unease surrounding psychiatric illness, particularly disorders like schizophrenia. Take, for instance, Steve Kornacki’s conclusion on Salon, after evaluating Loughner’s political musings: “My hunch is that Lougnher is just basically crazy, and that his political thinking isn’t particularly coherent or organized.”
While I can’t disagree that his political thinking appears incoherent, what this sentiment misses is that there is no such thing as “basically crazy.” If Loughner is indeed afflicted with schizophrenia that does not mean that this tragedy had to happen. While the vast majority of people who suffer with schizophrenia are not violent, the disorder can lead to the sort of disastrous violence we saw on Saturday if left untreated.
We don’t know exactly why this happened, but the truth is that early intervention improves the outlook for anyone with a psychiatric disorder. So what can we do? Reduce stigma through improved education, so both those with a mental illness and the people around them will not hesitate to seek or facilitate treatment. Improve access to the best evidence-based interventions. Praise those who would be heroes by helping someone get the psychiatric care he needs before it becomes a tragedy.
With my warmest regards,
Harold S. Koplewicz, MD
President
But there are others in this story who could have, and I believe would have, been heroes if they had the knowledge and tools they needed to stop Jared Loughner’s descent into mental illness before it cost the lives of his victims, not to speak of his own life.
Our hearts go out to those affected by this tragedy, as well as their families and loved ones. It’s particularly painful to read the accounts of college students and professors who noticed Loughner’s bizarre and frightening behavior, shared their fears with others, but didn’t see a way to get Loughner effective help when his downward slide could have been stopped.
On the first day of class one student wrote to a friend that another student in the class was so disruptive he scared her. “Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon." A week later she wrote, “We have a seriously disturbed student in the class. They are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can't do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door."
It’s terrible to imagine a student actually sitting by the door of her classroom because she was so afraid of another obviously mentally ill student—and outrageous that it took more than a single day to resolve the situation. In fact, it took three or four weeks before her concerned professor, and others who had Loughner in their classes, were able to have him removed. But they weren’t able to get him help. Pima Community College required that Loughner undergo an evaluation if he wanted to re-enroll; he refused.
What his professors didn’t do is acknowledge that he was a risk to both himself and others, and call the police. College administrators, or neighbors, or friends, for that matter, wouldn’t look the other way if a young man they knew was bleeding, or going into a diabetic coma. They would immediately dial 911. And the kind of psychotic breakdown Loughner was demonstrating is no less severe, no less demanding of immediate treatment. And it gives no shortage of warning, either. Schizophrenia, if that’s what this is—or any of the other psychiatric disorders that can lead to psychosis—doesn’t develop overnight. There are warning signs, and those signs didn’t prompt the intervention they should have.
Why? Because people have little understanding and a lot of fear when it comes to psychiatric disorders. If you’re on a subway car and someone faints, or has a seizure, half the people on the car will come to his aid, or call 911, or pull the emergency cord. But if someone is acting delusional or disturbing on a subway car, people will look away, move to the other end of the car, or change to the next car as soon as they can.
And mentally ill people, especially those with paranoid delusions, are also at risk of slipping into the alternative universe of the internet, where all kinds of extreme rants seem to offer evidence for their fantasies. For Loughner this included a radical right-winger who argues that the government uses grammar to control people, and only an alternate “truth language” can offer escape. It wouldn’t be that surprising if he also gave literal credence to the violent rhetoric that permeates politics these days—especially in Arizona.
How many times does this have to happen—think Virginia Tech—before we recognize how pervasive mental illness is in the college-age population, and cut through legal and emotional barriers to getting treatment as soon as symptoms develop? The first signs of 75% of all psychiatric disorders appear by the age of 24.
We need a plan for giving mental health care parity with other medical care in terms of access, in terms of quality, and in terms of moral responsibility.
Part of what needs to be addressed is stigma—the general fear and unease surrounding psychiatric illness, particularly disorders like schizophrenia. Take, for instance, Steve Kornacki’s conclusion on Salon, after evaluating Loughner’s political musings: “My hunch is that Lougnher is just basically crazy, and that his political thinking isn’t particularly coherent or organized.”
While I can’t disagree that his political thinking appears incoherent, what this sentiment misses is that there is no such thing as “basically crazy.” If Loughner is indeed afflicted with schizophrenia that does not mean that this tragedy had to happen. While the vast majority of people who suffer with schizophrenia are not violent, the disorder can lead to the sort of disastrous violence we saw on Saturday if left untreated.
We don’t know exactly why this happened, but the truth is that early intervention improves the outlook for anyone with a psychiatric disorder. So what can we do? Reduce stigma through improved education, so both those with a mental illness and the people around them will not hesitate to seek or facilitate treatment. Improve access to the best evidence-based interventions. Praise those who would be heroes by helping someone get the psychiatric care he needs before it becomes a tragedy.
With my warmest regards,
Harold S. Koplewicz, MD
President
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Shehrbano Taseer in the NYT op-ed
By SHEHRBANO TASEER
Published: January 8, 2011
RECOMMEND
TWITTER
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
PRINT
REPRINTS
SHARE
Lahore, Pakistan
TWENTY-SEVEN. That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him. Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated on Tuesday — my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday — outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.
The guard accused of the killing, Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his car after lunch, Mr. Qadri opened fire.
Mr. Qadri and his supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
My father’s life was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.
One particularly brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he was dead. She never believed that.
Determined, she made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.
He often quoted verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz. Especially as governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were lynched by a mob last August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket match.
After 86 members of the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore last May, to the great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the homeless and building shelters.
My father believed that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by General Zia have been frequently misused and ought to be changed. His views were widely misrepresented to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the blasphemy law was what drove Mr. Qadri to kill him.
There are those who say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week two leading conservative politicians — former Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan — have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they want amendments to prevent misuse.
To say that there was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?
It may sound odd, but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands, improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential. He lived and died for Pakistan. To honor his memory, those who share that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice. We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.
Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan.
Published: January 8, 2011
RECOMMEND
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
REPRINTS
SHARE
Lahore, Pakistan
TWENTY-SEVEN. That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him. Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated on Tuesday — my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday — outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.
The guard accused of the killing, Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his car after lunch, Mr. Qadri opened fire.
Mr. Qadri and his supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
My father’s life was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.
One particularly brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he was dead. She never believed that.
Determined, she made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.
He often quoted verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz. Especially as governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were lynched by a mob last August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket match.
After 86 members of the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore last May, to the great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the homeless and building shelters.
My father believed that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by General Zia have been frequently misused and ought to be changed. His views were widely misrepresented to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the blasphemy law was what drove Mr. Qadri to kill him.
There are those who say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week two leading conservative politicians — former Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan — have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they want amendments to prevent misuse.
To say that there was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?
It may sound odd, but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands, improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential. He lived and died for Pakistan. To honor his memory, those who share that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice. We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.
Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
I suggest that every one of you should try - oh! not for long, just for one hour a day - to say nothing but the absolutely indispensable wor...
-
Who and What Is Buddha, Really? What's Your Reaction: Amazing Inspiring Funny Scary Hot Crazy Important Weird Read More: Buddha , Budd...
-
Sivananda's Message of the Day for Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Kindness does not consist in gifts, but in gentleness and generosity. -- S...
