Blog
You’re Stressing Me Out!
From 1970 to 1980 there were 2,326 academic publications in social sciences with the word “stress” in the title. Between 2000 and 2010 there were 21,750. The enormous rise in “stress related” citations coincides with our current immersion in the health movement that tends to see us as both the cause and solution of our problems. Continue Reading
The Paradox of the Hag
We’ve all seen the picture of the beautiful young woman that contains the old hag, or perhaps it’s the other way around. I guess it depends on what you’re expecting to see. This perceptual sleight of hand is actually a good illustration of a very common marital dynamic called, “opposition”. Continue Reading
Graduate to Elevate
The current findings on high school dropout rates and their effect on quality of life and social issues cannot be ignored. Consider that:
*Every 9 seconds there’s a dropout in America
*A 1% increase in high school graduation would save $1.4 billion in incarceration costs
*High school dropouts earn $500,000 less over their lifetime Continue Reading
Faster Acting Drugs For Depression
Ketamine, known by the street name Special K, is one of the new fast acting drugs being tested for the treatment of depression. Because Ketamine interacts more directly with the receptors that are responsible for normal electrical signal transfer between neurons, it is an appealing alternative to the slower acting SSRI’s, such as Prozac and Zoloft, as well as SNRI’s like Effexor and Cymbalta. Continue Reading
Marketing the Disease, Selling the Medication
The big business of drug revenue is constantly being fed by new and inventive ways of creating markets for drugs to affect. This inventive marketing strategy was developed by SmithKline (today known as GlaxoSmithKline), a British pharmaceutical company, to market their depression drug Paxil in 1991. It has since been adopted by many other pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer in marketing Viagra, and Merck in marketing Zostavax, their drug for Shingles. It’s a very effective strategy, contributing to over 4 billion total prescriptions being written in 2012 and drug spending topping $320 billion. Continue Reading
Self-reflection
A defining differentiation between us and all other living things on this planet is our extraordinary ability for self-reflection. This trait allows us to look at ourselves and evaluate our emotional, physical, and metaphysical states. In its less obvious form, self-reflection strengthens our conscience by helping us identify and enforce our own moral awareness. In its more obvious form, it strengthens our ego by helping us define who we are and what we desire. Self-reflection, however, is not infallible. In his drawing, Hand With Reflecting Sphere, M.C. Escher, Continue Reading
A Call to Cultural Leadership
Last year there were approximately 12,000 gun related homicides in the United States. By now we’ve heard so many stories of senseless drive by shootings, office shootings, and domestic violence that we’ve become numb to their reports. The grim ones hold our attention and then slowly fade away. Aurora and Sandy Hook were different. They held our attention longer and reminded us that Columbine wasn’t an isolated incident. Continue Reading