Danish Media a step ahead on 911

What's happening with Al Franken?

Will the United States Senate finally get a dose of well needed left-leaning comedy? Voters in Minnesota thought they had made their intentions known back in November, but since then after multiple recounts comedian Al Franken's lead in the race over Republican Norm Coleman has hovered just around 200 votes. With such a narrow margin Coleman took the case to court to challenge thousands of votes. Things have not gone well for him and the outcome seems so far unchanged. Coleman has repeatedly challenged the validity of the vote asking for a new election, but the court so far has rejected such requests.

The court case has now wrapped up and it is expected that Franken will prevail. However it is also expected that Coleman will appeal the case to both the Minnesota Supreme Court and also the United States Supreme Court. It is not expected that either appeal will be successful as courts feel reluctant to overturn election results in the aftermath of the controversial Bush v. Gore Supreme court decision of 2000.

So it is likely that Al Franken will become Minnesota's junior Senator, but probably not until late April or even May.

Artistic revival in Detroit

With the average price of a house in the motor-city hovering at $7,500 and reports of some going for as low a $600, starving artists have flocked to the city. Out of the economic ashes of this once prosperous city artists are reportedly taking over some communities, buying homes and retro-fitting them with environmentally sound sources of energy such as solar panels. It has also been reported that they are starting community arts centres.

Some consider this to be a risky endeavour as many neighborhoods of condemned or abandoned homes have become over-run with crime and violence.

Condoms spread AIDS: Pope says.

Pope Benedict XVI embarking on a trip to Africa today remarked on the AIDS issue to reporters, "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

When will the Catholic Church leave the dark-ages behind?

Debunking 911 Debunking

Please enjoy David Ray Griffin's eloquent and funny lecture as he pulls apart any claim to empiricism made by supporters of the "official conspiracy theory."

The happiness delusion.

In my thinking about anti-depressant medication and why so many people are taking it, it is impossible to ignore the giant corporate marketing machines that push these drugs, not just straightforwardly to the consumer, but more insidiously through doctors and medical institutions. Clearly, marketing campaigns of these multi-billion dollar businesses will go a long way in creating demand for their product. No where is this better evidenced than in what is, in the pharmaceutical industry, referred to as off-label prescription. This is where a drug is used by a physician, usually prompted by the drug-maker, to treat a condition or ailment, for which the drug was not governmentally approved. This is fairly standard stuff in the world of western medicine and is not always such a bad thing. The problem arises when the drug companies, begin themselves to have undue influence over what in fact is a diagnosable condition or ailment.

Take, for example, shyness. In his 2008 book, Shyness: How normal behaviour became an illness, author Christopher Lane traces the modern history of shyness from the point of view of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Shyness first appears as a mental disorder in DSM III in 1980, but is said to be rare. In 1994, when DSM IV was published it was then referred to as, "social anxiety disorder" and found to be extremely common. In 1999 GlaxoSmithKine, the pharmaceutical giant responsible for producing the anti-depressant drug Paxil received permission, after extensive lobbying, to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. Lane quotes Barry Brand, Paxil's Marketing director saying, "Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder."

More troubling than these marketing campaigns is the consumer demand that fuels them. We have, perhaps as a result of the great self-discovery movements of the last 40 years, become a society obsessed with personal happiness. The expectation that an individual should be happy most of the time is a new western construct, which seems both unrealistic as well as narcissistic. The world is not and has never been a happy place. Life is for most people a painful and difficult journey with many peaks and valleys along the way. That is not to say the world is not full of great beauty or that there will not be moments of great happiness in a persons life, but a desire for personal fulfillment seems to me a more mature approach to life.

Call me a grump if you like, but when people tell me they don't follow the news of the day because it depresses them I can't help but think, this is the world you live in. There are lots of terrible things happening in it. Your choice is either to engage in that world or else to pretend it is something it isn't. The same sentiment is also often found in people's attitudes towards politics. They can't stand to watch the endless squabbling of politicians, nit-picking over one issue or another. Again I feel like a grump when I think, what do they think democracy is? This is how humans live together. We argue, in some cases violently, and hopefully, eventually we find a compromise that usually neither side feels all that great about, but we move forward. We live with it. If you don't like arguments, maybe you should give North Korea a try.

A depressed world?

Drug	Brand	Class	2007 Prescriptions (in millions)
Sertraline	Zoloft	SSRI	29.652
Escitalopram	Lexapro	SSRI	27.023
Fluoxetine	Prozac	SSRI	22.266
Bupropion	Wellbutrin, Budeprion, Zyban	NDRI	20.184
Paroxetine	Paxil	SSRI	18.141
Venlafaxine	Effexor	SNRI	17.200
Citalopram	Celexa	SSRI	16.246
Trazodone	Desyrel		15.473
Amitriptyline	Elavil	TCA	13.462
Duloxetine	Cymbalta	SNRI	12.551
Mirtazapine	Remeron	tetracyclic	5.129
Nortriptyline	Pamelor	TCA	3.105
Imipramine	Tofranil	TCA	1.524

Why are so many of us depressed? The numbers above paint a staggering picture, and they are only based on prescriptions filled for the most common anti-depressant medications in the United States. Certainly there are many other people who either go untreated by choice or choose other forms of treatment. What does it mean, that so many millions around the world are medicated for this ailment? Is depression really this prevalent? What is depression? Unraveling this mystery in all its complexities seems at times more a philosophical question than a medical one.

I was a teenager full of inward anger, self-loathing, lacking confidence, often shy and feeling disillusioned with the world. Was I depressed? Apparently so. How quickly (fifteen minutes actually) did it take my family doctor to fill a prescription for fluoxetine 20 mg, better known as Prozac? Certainly I thought I was depressed, and my fears seemed to be corroborated by my doctor, but was that my only motivation for beginning treatment?

In his landmark 1993 book Listening to Prozac, author and psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer writes gleefully of patients on Prozac who were, " better than well" becoming, "socially attractive... not so much cured of illness as transformed." Kramer gave a name to this seemingly magical effect. He called it, "cosmetic psychopharmacology." Painfully shy introspective people could now become socially assertive go getters. What makes these sorts of magical transformations different than having a few stiff drinks or doing a line of cocaine? On a certain level the answer seems clear. Most doctors will tell you that, in general, anti-depressant medications are well tolerated and while they do have side-effects, their risks are largely out-weighed by their obvious benefits. This is a point of much contention.

Clearly, there are people in such psychological distress that medication is their only life-line. I have known some of them myself and I am thankful that for them these options exist. More troubling are the millions much like myself who have never been severely or suicidally depressed. Why are these hundreds of millions of people around the world using drugs on a daily basis to boost their moods or perhaps as Kramer asserts, to transform themselves?