Quotulatiousness

August 2, 2013

First it was bulemia, then anorexia, now it might be “orthorexia”

Filed under: Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

It’s nice to know that people in the richest culture in world history can still manage to make themselves utterly miserable by obsessing about things:

Picture this: After spending the summer indulging in ice cream and cocktails, you decide to embrace healthy eating. You cut out refined sugar and packaged food-the kind of nutrient-free junk on any doctor’s warning list. Wheat and dairy are the next to go.

People compliment you on your weight loss; your energy levels rival those of Jillian Michaels. But soon your innocent health kick takes a strange turn. Certain foods – even fruits and veggies – begin to seem dangerous, even unclean.

Within months, you’ve whittled your list of “acceptable” foods down to almost nothing.

This unhealthy fixation with eating healthfully is called “orthorexia nervosa,” a term coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, a Colorado-based physician, in 1997. Since then, orthorexia rates have spiralled in tandem with society’s insistence upon knowing every last detail about its food.

Orthorexia (derived from the Greek “ortho,” which means “correct”) often begins with a noble impulse – to get fit or eat organic – that grows into a self-destructive obsession where fewer and fewer foods meet the orthorexic’s increasingly high standards.

The result is everything from malnutrition to social anxiety as orthorexics avoid restaurants and their friends’ kitchens. At its most extreme, orthorexia can even act as a gateway to anorexia, says Merryl Bear, director of Toronto’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre.

“The gateway possibility is very real because the principles are so similar,” she explains. “Like anorexics, orthorexics prize being pure and in control above all else.” (Orthorexia is currently classified as a form of disordered eating, not a clinical eating disorder, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.)

Since orthorexics value purity, not weight loss, eating becomes a moral act. “A day filled with wheat grass juice, tofu and quinoa biscuits may come to feel as holy as one spent serving the destitute and homeless,” writes Bratman in his book Health Food Junkies: Overcoming the Obsession With Healthful Eating (2004).

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

Update: Colby Cosh was quick to send me a link to a piece he did on this topic more than a decade ago:

Since becoming a physician, Dr. Bratman has seen many people like his own young self — and some who are worse off — flirting with disaster by depriving their body of vital nutrients. The fads of his youth, far from disappearing, have survived and grown in number: there are even “Breatharians” who believe food to be wholly unnecessary. A few years ago Dr. Bratman coined the phrase “orthorexia” — merging Greek ortho-, meaning righteous, with the stem familiar from “anorexia” — to describe a pathological attachment to dietary theories.

“I never intended the term to be a serious diagnostic entity; you wouldn’t go to a hospital with ‘orthorexia,'” he says. “It’s informal, like ‘workaholic.'” The idea has nonetheless stirred controversy: a Yale University physician sniffed in one critique that “We’ve never had anybody come to our clinic with orthorexia.” Yet fanatical attachment to dietary theories can indeed be hazardous. Macrobiotic diets caused a string of deaths in the 1960s and had to be modified; “metabolic” treatments for cancer, usually involving fasting, occasionally turn disastrous; and vegetarians and vegans must monitor themselves for certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies. In September, an Armenian couple in Surrey, England, were convicted of starving their nine-month-old daughter to death on a “Fruitarian” fruit-only diet.

“People become orthorexic by falling in love with a dietary theory,” says Dr. Bratman. “They run across an idea like macrobiotics or raw-foodism, and embrace it like a religion. We’re not talking about common-sense rules of healthy eating, but theories which reject whole classes of foods and make spontaneous eating [impossible]…There’s a personality type, an obsessive type of person who is prone to embrace them in a quasi-religious way.” This can result in an enticing sense of moral superiority, sometimes coupled with the euphoria associated with partial starvation. But orthorexia also brings crippling feelings of unworthiness after the inevitable slip-ups, when the true believer succumbs to a cookie or a pizza. “There are similarities with anorexia,” he says. “An important one is that anorexics feel like they’ve done something evil when they gain weight, something morally wrong rather than merely unhealthy.” Similarly, the sure sign of an orthorexic is that he associates unhealthy eating with a sense of sin.

July 23, 2013

The rights of the mentally handicapped

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

In the Washington Post, Theresa Vargas covers the struggles of Margaret Jean “Jenny” Hatch, who is fighting a court case to be allowed to take greater control of her own fate.

It wasn’t her turn to talk, but early on during a hearing that will determine the limits of her independence, Margaret Jean Hatch stood up in a Newport News courtroom and cut the judge off in mid-sentence.

“I don’t need guardianship,” she declared. “I don’t want it.”

“Remove her from the courtroom,” the judge demanded.

“Judge, she’s very upset with this,” the woman’s attorney began.

“Don’t do it,” Hatch pleaded.

Hatch, a diminutive blonde known as “Jenny,” learned to read at the age of 6, has volunteered on political campaigns (always for Republicans) and once, after finding a job she wanted, showed up repeatedly until she got it. She also has Down syndrome, an IQ of 52 and tends to shower affection on strangers as well as friends.

The details of Jenny Hatch’s life have come under scrutiny in a complicated guardianship case that is pitting her wishes against those of her parents and testing the rights of adults with disabilities to choose how they live. The 29-year-old wants to move in with friends and continue the life she had, working at a thrift shop and riding her bike everywhere. Her parents want her to remain in a group home, supervised and protected.

H/T to Tyler Cowen, who writes:

On the basis of what I can glean from this article, I vote for Jenny […]

This is a much-neglected issue, and not just for Down Syndrome individuals. At a time when Edward Snowden, drones, and Gitmo are leading many people to reexamine many civil liberties issues, this one ought to be put on the table as well. It needs its Radley Balko. Ask yourself a simple question: if you don’t require guardianship, and yet have been placed under the legal guardianship of another, practically speaking how strong are your rights? What chances of amendment or redress do you really have and in the meantime how can you represent yourself?

Update, 6 August: The Washington Post reports on the outcome of the case.

In a victory for the rights of adults with disabilities, a judge declared Friday that a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome can live the life she wants, rejecting a guardianship request from her parents that would have allowed them to keep her in a group home against her will.

The ruling thrilled Jenny Hatch and her supporters, who included some of the country’s most prominent disability advocates.

“Oh my God,” Hatch said over and over again, shedding tears. “I’m so happy to go home today. I deserve it. It’s over. My God, it’s over.”

[…]

Legally, Hatch’s case came down to two questions: Was she an incapacitated adult in need of a guardian, and, if so, who would best serve in that role — her mother and stepfather, or Morris and Talbert?

But for national experts on the rights of people with disabilities, several of whom testified on Hatch’s behalf, the case was about much more. It was about an individual’s right to choose how to live and the government’s progress in providing the help needed to integrate even those with the most profound needs into the community.

In the end, Newport News Circuit Court Judge David F. Pugh said he believed that Hatch, who has an IQ of about 50, needed a guardian to help her make decisions but that he had also taken into account her preferences. He designated Morris and Talbert her temporary guardians for the next year, with the goal of ultimately helping her achieve more independence.

July 22, 2013

Examining post-traumatic stress disorder

Filed under: Health, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

In the New Yorker, David J. Morris looks at the psychological chameleon we call PTSD:

As it is understood today, post-traumatic stress disorder is a grab bag of symptoms that emerges after experiencing trauma, like nearly dying or having one’s bodily integrity violated. It includes a persistent sense of hypervigilance and recurrent, intrusive memories of past traumatic events. In the worst cases, veterans with P.T.S.D. may hallucinate the voices of dead comrades, enemy combatants, or their commanding officers. A 1995 study of combat veterans with P.T.S.D. published in Traumatology found that sixty-five per cent of subjects reported hearing voices, including command hallucinations that they felt compelled to obey. As the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, put it, “P.T.S.D. can unfortunately mimic virtually any condition in psychiatry.”

But there are a growing number of psychiatrists and researchers who are challenging our understanding of P.T.S.D. — even its very nature as an ailment. Modern psychiatry, they argue, is locked into a mindset that systematically overdiagnoses P.T.S.D. without nurturing veterans’ ability to heal themselves. American culture, meanwhile, vacillates between elevated ideas of hero worship and victimhood in its conception of veterans, which can be destructive to the veterans themselves. One of the chief proponents of this school of thought is Ben Shephard, a leading British historian of military psychiatry. In his provocative book, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, he describes a historical cycle that governs the treatment of war stress: “the problem is at first denied, then exaggerated, then understood, and finally, forgotten.” Shephard claims that the West, and America in particular, are deeply mired in the exaggeration phase of that cycle. These skeptics of the prevailing model of P.T.S.D. were described in Scientific American as a “broad array of experts indeed, giants of psychology, psychiatry and epidemiology.” One of the major tenets of this argument is a fact that, on its face, suggests that P.T.S.D. is a culturally determined phenomenon as well as a medical one: American veterans are 2.5 to four times more likely to be diagnosed with P.T.S.D. than British veterans.

[…]

As Jonathan Shay, the author of Achilles in Vietnam, shows in his follow-up, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, while the problem of returning from war is one of humanity’s oldest struggles, the use of P.T.S.D. to frame a wide variety of traumatic experiences is a relatively recent development. The growing criticism of our current understanding of P.T.S.D. suggests that what was once ignored or treated as a failure of character — the soldier’s weakness — has now been medicalized to the exclusion of discussing its moral and spiritual dimensions. “It feels to me as if the U.S. civilian population has pathologized the veteran experience,” Elliott Woods, an Iraq veteran-turned-reporter, told me not long ago. “One well-intentioned person said to me the other day, ‘I can’t see how anyone could go to Iraq and not come back with P.T.S.D.’

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

June 27, 2013

Progress and regress in the pursuit of care for the mentally ill

Filed under: Government, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:32

In City Journal, James Panero looks at the history of treatment of the mentally ill in America:

If it’s true that “men moralise among ruins,” as Benjamin Disraeli wrote, the ruins of America’s nineteenth-century mental institutions should invite some serious reflection. Built between 1850 and 1900, these crumbling edifices speak to our onetime dedication to caring for the mentally ill. Almost all were designed on the Kirkbride Plan, named for Pennsylvania physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, author of an influential treatise on the role of architecture and landscape in treating mental disorders. Even in their dilapidated state, it’s possible to see how the buildings, which followed a method of care called the “moral treatment,” gave the mentally ill a calming refuge from the gutters, jails, and almshouses that had been the default custodians of society’s “lunatics.”

Unfortunately, in the middle of the twentieth century, as asylums became grossly overcrowded and invasive treatments aroused public concern, the moral treatment came to seem immoral. The eventual result was the process known as deinstitutionalization, which steadily ejected patients from the asylums. Instead of liberating the mentally ill, however, deinstitutionalization left them — like the asylums that once sheltered them — in ruins. Many of today’s mentally ill have returned to pre-Kirkbride conditions and live on society’s margins, either sleeping on the streets or drifting among prisons, jails, welfare hotels, and outpatient facilities. As their diseases go untreated, they do significant harm to themselves and their families. Some go further, terrorizing communities with disorder and violence. Our failure to care for them recalls the inhumane era that preceded the rise of the state institutions. The time has come for new facilities and a new moral treatment.

[. . .]

At a time when the medical science of mental illness was in its infancy, the Kirkbride Plan created alternative, protected worlds for patients. It echoed many of today’s more holistic approaches to treatment by encouraging patients to participate in social activities, games, and crafts. Kirkbride institutions often sported their own baseball diamonds, golf courses, bakeries, bowling alleys, ice cream shops, dairy farms, gardens, and stages for plays and other performances.

But in the twentieth century, a shadow fell over the Kirkbride asylums, as doctors there began using more invasive procedures. The Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel introduced insulin shock therapy, now known as insulin coma therapy, in the 1930s. Electroshock therapy arrived from Italy soon after. Both treatments induced seizures to alter brain chemistry in patients with depression and schizophrenia. In 1949, the Portuguese neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize for developing the frontal lobotomy, which he had invented in 1935. Walter Freeman, a clinical neurologist in Washington, D.C., further popularized the treatment through his own outpatient procedure, which came to be known as the transorbital, or “ice-pick,” lobotomy.

May 22, 2013

The controversy over the DSM-V

Filed under: Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

The science writers at The Economist discuss the American Psychiatric Association’s new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (below the fold because it auto-plays when you load the page):

(more…)

May 12, 2013

Thomas Szasz was no conservative

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In Reason, Jacob Sullum looks at an essay on the late Thomas Szasz that puzzlingly attempts to portray him as a staunch conservative:

In an interesting but puzzling Aeon essay, Cornell historian Holly Case notes the resemblance between contemporary doubts about the scientific foundation of psychiatry and the critique first laid out by Thomas Szasz half a century ago. “It might be that the world has only recently come around to his way of thinking,” Case suggests. Yet she misconstrues an important aspect of Szasz’s thinking by portraying him as “a staunch Republican” and a “conservative,” apparently unaware of his self-proclaimed libertarianism. Szasz, who died last year at the age of 92, was a Reason contributing editor for decades. He described the main motivation for his intellectual career as “my passion against coercion,” which he opposed (outside of situations involving the defense of rights) no matter who was advocating it, left, right, or center. Hence he opposed forced psychiatric treatment, but he also opposed interference in consensual transactions between psychiatrists and voluntary patients. Here he parted company with some left-wing critics of psychiatry.

[. . .]

But Case focuses mainly on common ground between what she views as right-wing and left-wing critics of psychiatry. Beginning in the 1960s, she writes, “Right and left sought to eliminate insanity in order to lionise dissent, legitimise the marginal and condemn the new normal. Few other issues show a convergence of right and left so far-reaching, while still allowing both sides to adhere to their politics and maintain a sense of total opposition.” At the same time, she says “Szasz was conspicuously alone in mounting the barricades from the right,” so she really needs him to be a right-winger. Bending the facts to fit her thesis, she ascribes to Szasz a “distinctively conservative perspective.” That label does not jibe with his opposition to drug prohibition and his forthright defense of the right to suicide, two major themes of his career that Case tellingly ignores. Szasz’s position on physician-assisted suicide combined both of these themes and demonstrated that his perspective was in fact distinctively libertarian. He opposed Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act (later imitated by Washington) because it medicalized a moral decision and required people to meet government-dictated criteria before they could legally end their lives. If the drug laws did not make it difficult for people to obtain substances useful for suicide (such as barbiturates), he said, there would be no need for physician-assisted suicide.

May 6, 2013

QotD: This seems like a bad idea

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

A Florida county sheriff is being given a million dollars to violate the rights of the people who were stupid enough to put him in office.

According to an article by Palm Beach Post staff writers Dara Kam and Stacey Singer, posted Monday, April 29, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw has been awarded $1 million by Florida House and Senate budget leaders for a new “violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado.

It would be bad enough if this particular jackbooted thug planned only to use this ill-gotten tax money for the usual militarized toys — machineguns or armored personnel carriers — the cops are so crazy about today, but Bradshaw reportedly wants to create “prevention intervention units” consisting of “specially trained deputies, mental health professionals, and caseworkers”. which “will respond to citizen calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services”.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government…” the Big-Brotherly Bradshaw bloviated. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?'” Since the cops these days do their knocking with a three-foot concrete-filled section of four-inch diameter steel pipe, with welded rebar handles, Bradshaw’s stupid question tends to answer itelf.

L. Neil Smith, “Cutting the Root of Tyranny”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2013-05-06

April 26, 2013

Minnesota introduces new policy for dealing with veterans

Filed under: Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

You may not hear about this in the mainstream press, but The Duffel Blog digs for the real story:

Officials from the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles have confirmed approval of a new policy making it mandatory for all active-duty and military veterans to register their status with the agency. The move will require all veterans to have a special “Vet” designation on their drivers’ licenses and state identification cards.

The Minn. DMV, which hopes to have the policy implemented by 2015, cites an inherent mental health threat by veterans as their main reason for devising the plan.

“We’ve seen what these savages are capable of all over CNN and MSNBC,” says DMV director, Greg Olson. “Out of all the millions of men and women who have deployed to combat zones this past decade, there are literally a dozen, perhaps even two, who have come home and committed atrocious acts. That’s way too big a chance. We can’t risk having these people hidden in our community and will be making sure they’re easily identifiable to law enforcement personnel and citizens in general.”

The new strategy will most likely result in changed police escalation-of-force procedure when dealing with veterans during routine traffic stops.

According to Olson, law enforcement officers will be given more opportunity to defend themselves against a perceived threat.

“Phase One will consist of the officer identifying an individual’s vet status on his or her driver’s license,” he says. “Once the officer realizes what he or she is dealing with, Phase Two will kick in and they will immediately unsheathe their pistol and drawdown on the potential psychopath. Then, at Phase Three, the officer will be given free reign to search the individual’s vehicle for weapons and dead bodies. If, and only if, the officer doesn’t find anything, then he will subsequently release the veteran and thank them for their service.”

April 24, 2013

QotD: Welcoming the DSM-V appropriately

Filed under: Books, Health, Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The much-awaited arrival of DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) should ensure that every human being is classed as insane. At this point we might be able to start again and consider what psychiatry is for. Genomics is keen to help in the effort by finding the loci that are associated with all sorts of mental disorders. Enter a huge population based study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health: “Our findings show that specific SNPs are associated with a range of psychiatric disorders of childhood onset or adult onset. In particular, variation in calcium-channel activity genes seems to have pleiotropic effects on psychopathology. These results provide evidence relevant to the goal of moving beyond descriptive syndromes in psychiatry, and towards a nosology informed by disease cause.” Hmm. I think that when authors have to use words like “pleiotropic” and “nosology” there is a high chance that they do not know what they are talking about. So before welcoming the marriage of genomics and psychiatry, let us remember that there is a strong history of madness on both sides.

Richard Lehman, “Richard Lehman’s journal review—22 April 2013”, BMJ Group blogs, 2013-04-22

March 29, 2013

Demonizing smokers hasn’t forced them to quit … let’s start sending them to psychiatric care instead

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

When the all the persuasion, “nudging”, shaming, harassment, and legal shenanigans haven’t worked, try taking a leaf out of the old Soviet Union playbook for dealing with dissidents:

Smoking may be a sign of psychiatric illness, experts say. Doctors should routinely consider referring people who smoke to mental health services, in case they need treatment, they add.

The controversial recommendation from the British Lung Foundation, a charity, comes in response to a major report, Smoking and Mental Health, published this week by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists with the Faculty of Public Health. It says that almost one in three cigarettes smoked in Britain today is smoked by someone with a mental disorder. When people with drug and alcohol problems are included the proportion is even higher.

The reason is that smoking rates have more than halved over the past 50 years, but the decline has not happened equally in all parts of society.

“Smoking is increasingly becoming the domain of the most disadvantaged: the poor, homeless, imprisoned and those with mental disorder. This is a damning indictment of UK public health policy and clinical service provision,” the report says.

December 16, 2012

The domestic terror: “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Anarchist Soccer Mom has a story to tell. It’s neither pleasant nor uplifting, but it needs to be told:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan — they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

[. . .]

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

[. . .]

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

H/T to Drew M. for the link.

February 18, 2012

The skeleton of Eugenics rattles in the socialist closet

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

In, of all places, the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland discusses the attraction to Eugenics for mainstream socialists in the 1930s:

It is eugenics, the belief that society’s fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and “moral worth” to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”, even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a “lethal chamber”.

Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with “general defects” should be denied not only the vote, but “civil freedom and fatherhood”. Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes — honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 — was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the “hordes of defectives” be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on “the fit”. Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild.

Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: “The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself.” Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: “Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen’.” That’s Untermenschen in German.

I’m afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign “the eugenists soundly urge”. If it’s any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Lest Canadians get smug about those evil Brits and their morally dubious theories, let us remember that our own sainted Tommy Douglas, first leader of the NDP, wrote his Master’s thesis on the subject of eugenics:

Douglas graduated from Brandon College in 1930, and completed his Master’s degree (M.A.) in Sociology from McMaster University in 1933. His thesis entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family endorsed eugenics.[16] The thesis proposed a system that would have required couples seeking to marry to be certified as mentally and morally fit. Those deemed to be “subnormal” because of low intelligence, moral laxity or venereal disease would be sent to state farms or camps while those judged to be mentally defective or incurably diseased would be sterilized.[17]

Douglas rarely mentioned his thesis later in his life and his government never enacted eugenics policies even though two official reviews of Saskatchewan’s mental health system recommended such a program when he became premier and minister of health.[17] By that time, many people questioned eugenics after Nazi Germany had embraced it to create a “master race”.[18] Instead, Douglas implemented vocational training for the mentally handicapped and therapy for those suffering from mental disorders.[19] (It may be noted that two Canadian provinces, Alberta and British Columbia, had eugenics legislation that imposed forced sterilization. Alberta’s law was first passed in 1928 while B.C. enacted its legislation in 1933.[20] It was not until 1972 that both provinces repealed the legislation.)[21][22]

March 1, 2010

Miami considers new ways to marginalize the homeless

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

Miami has a problem with the homeless, so it has come up with a new and innovative way to address it: making it even more difficult for people to (legally) help feed them.

Miami residents may have to think twice before giving up their leftovers to the homeless.

The Miami City Commission is set to consider a proposal next month that would prohibit unauthorized people and groups from feeding the homeless downtown, an ordinance proponents say will cut down on litter and ensure the safety of the food the homeless do eat.

The Miami Downtown Development Authority recently approved the measure, sending it up to the commission.

Though the change could draw objections, David Karsh, spokesman for Development Authority Chairman Marc Sarnoff, said the rule isn’t a blanket ban. He said that anybody would be able to feed the homeless, but they would have to go through formal training first — amateurs couldn’t just give up part of their lunch to help someone they meet on the street.

I’m sure there are problems . . . few people are homeless voluntarily unless they have other issues (commonly mental health problems). But this proposal appears to be moving in the wrong direction, by discouraging individual efforts to help. Give a homeless man a sandwich and face a $300 fine? Two predictable results 1) fewer ad hoc efforts to help the homeless, and 2) fewer meals for the homeless.

November 24, 2009

Friendly reminder to UK readers: you do not have a right to remain silent

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:28

A fascinating story about a case in Britain where the government’s shiny new powers under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) have been used to jail a schizophrenic man for refusing to divulge the passwords to access his files:

The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.

[. . .]

Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence — a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

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