Brett Walker Untitled, 2005
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Too Big to Fail, but Not Too Big to Subsidize?

Elizabeth Warren has only been in the Senate a short amount of time, but she’s already ruffling feathers. Warren asks the questions that most in DC won’t ask. It’s not polite dinner conversation to ask the political class why the banks are getting a free ride.

Warren’s exchange with Bernanke is really something to see.

The key exchange about too-big-to-fail is at the end of the clip, when Warren brings up the taxpayer financing of Wall Street’s insurance.

Bloomberg did an excellent analysis of the taxpayer financing last week, and concluded that the bank profits that look so large really aren’t there. The bank “profits” match the amount of money that taxpayers fork out for the insurance policies that the banks need in case of trouble. In other words, the banks’ “profit” is pretty much taxpayer funded. As Bloomberg notes:

“The profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”

The amount of “profit” and taxpayer money is about $83 billion per year, which is a stunning amount. As Warren says, if anyone else needs insurance, they pay for it — so why should the banks be subsidized for their insurance costs?

Chris in Paris, Americablog |  Read more:

It’s the Sugar, Folks

Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.

A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.

In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.

The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”

The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).

Allow me to summarize a couple of things that the PLoS One study clarifies. Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.

And as Lustig lucidly wrote in “Fat Chance,” his compelling 2012 book that looked at the causes of our diet-induced health crisis, it’s become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it’s metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of “normal” weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars. This explains why there’s little argument from scientific quarters about the “obesity won’t kill you” studies; technically, they’re correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.

by Mark Bittman, NY Times |  Read more:
Image via: Nutribullet Blog

Groupon Dismisses Chief After a Dismal Quarter

[ed. Groupon CEO's fairwell letter to employees: irreverant and classy. Andrew Mason was dismissed yesterday.]

(This is for Groupon employees, but I'm posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that's hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I'm getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we've shared over the last few months, and I've never seen you working together more effectively as a global company - it's time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don't be - I love Groupon, and I'm terribly proud of what we've created. I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I'll now take some time to decompress (FYI I'm looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I'll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there's one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness - don't waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew

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Image: Johannes Simon/Getty Images for the NY Times

Lorella Paleni. Gnothi Seaton, 2009, oil on canvas
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Rescuing Cesar

On a hazy, hundred-degree morning three summers ago, during the most difficult time in his life, Cesar Millan drove his silver John Deere Gator high up on a ridge that looks out over his Dog Psychology Center – 43 acres of scorched red-dirt hills and rocky ridges north of Los Angeles, with no indoor plumbing, no air-conditioning, and very little shade. He shut off the engine, wiped dust from his face, and sighed. "Tony Robbins has his island in Fiji," he said, with a smile that seemed hopeful but also a little sad. "I have this."

Millan paid $1.3 million for this land, which is just over the hill from Magic Mountain, and called it "my greatest investment, after dog food." He planned to turn the place into a sanctuary for abandoned dogs, as well as an academy where he'll teach the unconventional training methods he introduced on nine seasons of his hugely successful TV series, 'Dog Whisperer'. "In reality," he said, "it's not about training dogs. It's about training the human to learn from dogs."

So far, not much progress had been made. The only permanent structures were a small office with a wooden desk and some plastic furniture, plus a few dog kennels and a murky above-ground pool. Millan had hoped to rescue 60 dogs that summer – "hardcore, aggressive dogs," he told me. "Dogs on death row." But, he admitted, "I'm not ready."

Earlier that year, in a few awful months at the start of 2010, Millan's life turned upside down. In February, his sidekick Daddy, a giant, gentle red pit bull who frequently assisted Millan on the show and whom he calls "my mentor," died of cancer at age 16. A month later, while he was on tour in Europe, his wife of 16 years, Ilusion, informed him she was filing for divorce. As he was reeling from those blows, Millan discovered that while 'Dog Whisperer' had made him one of America's biggest TV stars, a series of bad business deals had left him with very little in the bank to show for it. "I found out I didn't own anything – just T-shirts and touring," he told me recently. "It was the biggest shock in the world."

Millan remembers walking around in a daze, feeling betrayed and very alone. "I am a pack animal," he said. "Everything I did was to keep the pack together. All of a sudden I had no pack." He slept on his brother's couch, spent time in church, and lost so much weight he dropped four pants sizes. Occasionally, he returned home to visit his family in suburban Santa Clarita, a few miles from the ranch. "We were trying to do the whole thing white people do where they come back and visit," he says now, with a bitter laugh. "But it didn't work for me." Millan's two sons, Andre, then 15, and Calvin, 11, blamed him for the separation and refused to speak to him. "They were brainwashed. . . . They believed their life was better without me," he says. During the worst times, even his dogs kept their distance. "Dogs don't follow an unstable leader," he says. "I was very unstable."

That May, in 2010, Millan hit bottom. "It was a spiral," he says. "All the willpower I had, the desire to motivate myself, my kids, all I had achieved - none of that, nothing, mattered."

One day, at his wife's house, he swallowed a bottle of her Xanax and some other pills and got into bed, hoping to end his life. "I thought, If I do a combination, I can die quicker. So I just took all the pills I could find, poof"

"I had so much rage and sadness," he continues. "I went to the other side of me, which is 'fuck it, I'm a failure.'" Millan woke up in the hospital psychiatric ward, where he remained under observation for 72 hours. "Nothing happened!" he says. "I thought, Well shit, that means I'm not supposed to die. I better get back to work."

I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, sweating through a purple polo shirt, with a bottle of Maalox resting on his chest. "I'm still managing the depression, the anger, the insecurity," he told me, "but I am moving forward." A pair of hyperactive huskies belonging to his close friend Jada Pinkett Smith ran through the hills pulling a sled Millan had modified for the rocky terrain. Junior, a sleek, gray three-year-old pit bull he was grooming to take Daddy's place, lay quietly under the bench, watching Millan's every move. "I couldn't have done what I do without Daddy," he said, "and now I can't do it without Junior. There's always a pit bull there supporting me."

Millan is a short, stocky guy – "like a burrito," he says – but he carries himself with a straight back, chest jutted out, a natural alpha. When he arrived in the United States 22 years ago, he knew only a single English word - "OK" - and he still talks in a loose, colloquial SoCal Spanglish, rolling through sentences with mixed-up tenses, calling his dog Blizzard a "Jello Lab," pronouncing buffet with a hard t and sushi as "su-chi." On 'Dog Whisperer,' Millan uses the language deficit to his advantage, putting clients at ease with his always polite, effortlessly funny broken-English banter as he (often painfully) dissects their troubled relationships with their dogs. In person he's just as charming – open, inquisitive, with a quick mind and a slightly rough edge that makes him even more likable. For all his alpha-male poise, Millan also possesses humility, which he says comes with the job. "In my field, working with animals, they detest egotistical people," he says. "Dogs are wise. They don't buy BS. . . . When you are egotistical, you're not grounded. So it's not even an option for me to become disconnected or lose my grounding."

All that summer, Millan spent his days at the ranch, clearing brush, digging roads, and planting trees. "Some people turn to cigarettes and alcohol when they have problems," he said. "I use hard work." When the sadness overwhelmed him, he would hike up the nearly vertical rim of the canyon – rocky, dry scrub thick with rattlesnakes – in heat that reached 115 degrees. If he didn't feel better when he got back down, he'd do it again.

One night, "I was sitting under this tree, right here," he said, pulling up in the Gator next to a giant Buddha statue, "and I was crying. I noticed the dogs started coming over, and they surrounded me. There were, like, 11 dogs all around, and they started to lick my face. Normally I don't like to be licked. I'm afraid of germs, but this was different. I had the sense that these dogs were healing me. From that night, I began to get stronger."

by Jason Fine, Men's Journal |  Read more:

Photo via FanPop

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L'Attirail

When a Bough Breaks

A suburban playground on a cold winter’s day. A man in his early 30s, wearing a beanie, leather jacket and scarf, pushes a toddler on a swing, a dead look in his eyes. On the climbing frame, twins are jostling each other. Their mother stands underneath, hopping from foot to foot, her eyes darting from one girl to the next, issuing warnings, instructions; her voice rises anxiously in pitch. Looking around, I see only one adult smiling, but then she’s talking to her friend; their children are some way off, fighting each other with sticks.

There’s nothing particularly striking here. It could be any day of the week, in any town. And there’s nothing revelatory about the thought of parents secretly wishing they were anywhere else but the local playground, perhaps envying their childless friends; even wondering, during the sleepless nights, or in the aftermath of a fight with a recalcitrant teenager, why they had children at all. What is distinctive of our times is how few parents — still, even in our post-Freudian age — will openly admit to feelings of ambivalence towards their children. In an age where very little — from sex to money — is left a mystery, parental ambivalence remains one of the last taboos. (...)

But first, some definitions. In modern usage, ambivalence is often taken to mean having mixed feelings about something or someone. This, though, is a watering down of the concept. As developed by psychoanalysis, ambivalence refers to the fact that, in a single impulse, we can feel love and hate for the same person. It’s a potent, unpalatable idea; and in the grip of intense ambivalence we can feel overwhelmed and confused, as if a vicious civil war is underway inside us: no wonder we’d rather render it toothless. And yet, as any honest parent will tell you, this is often how it feels. Speak of it, though — as Lionel Shriver did in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), where Eva, the novel’s narrator, openly admits to deeply ambivalent feelings about her son Kevin — and you will face criticism, even ostracism, from those who would rather not believe that parents can ever harbour such feelings. The problem with Eva, of course, was not that she had ambivalent feelings towards her son, but that she dissembled throughout Kevin’s upbringing, pretending, through all her frantic biscuit-making, that all she felt for her cold, unlikeable son was love.

The question is why she, like so many parents, found it so hard to acknowledge her ambivalence, even to herself. Part of the reason must be that we all know — even if we’re not abreast of current statistics — that we live in a society in which shockingly high levels of violence are inflicted on children. According to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, one in four young adults is ‘severely maltreated’ during childhood, whether in the form of sexual, emotional, physical abuse or neglect. It’s a startlingly high figure, by anyone’s reckoning. And, if we acknowledge that we, too, sometimes have less than loving feelings towards our children; if we, too, sometimes have the wish to hurt, even if we are able to restrain ourselves, then does this mean that we too could be abusers? (...)

The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who spent a lifetime working with children and families, understood why the scales of ambivalence might tip more towards hate than love. The baby, he wrote, ‘is a danger to her body in pregnancy and at birth’, he ‘is an interference with her private life’ and he ‘is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave’. He ‘shows disillusionment about her’, he ‘refuses her good food… but eats well with his aunt’; then, having ‘got what he wants he throws her away like orange peel’. He ‘tries to hurt her’, and, ‘after an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger, who says: “Isn’t he sweet?”’

And then there is the effect of the arrival of a third party — however planned and wished for — on a couple’s relationship. Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally… (1989), saw it explosively: the birth of a baby, she once said, was like ‘throwing a hand grenade into a marriage’. Lionel Shriver’s mother felt similarly, warning the author, then in her mid-30s and newly in love, that, should she and her partner decide to have a child, motherhood would ‘completely transform’ their relationship. ‘Though she did not spell it out,’ Shriver has written, ‘there was no question that she meant for the worse’. And yet many couples, finding themselves drifting apart, or fighting, opt to have a baby (or another baby) in the belief that this joint creation will restore their lost unity.

Fortunately, societal expectations are changing, albeit slowly. The feminist movement of the 1960s — typified by such books as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) — overturned long-held received wisdoms that designated motherhood (in the words of the social researcher Mary Georgina Boulton) as ‘intrinsically rewarding and not problematic’ and refocused attention on women’s actual experience of motherhood. Even so, Friedan set the blame for maternal ambivalence at society’s door, rather than acknowledging that, like paternal ambivalence, the very essence of the maternal role is contradictory, and the feelings roused in parents are equally powerful and often confusing.

Even now, when 21st-century mothers admit to ambivalence, as Rachel Cusk bravely did in her memoir A Life’s Work (2001), they are attacked as irresponsible, even unfit to be parents. And so we continue to enter parenthood blindly, relieved and proud that our genes will survive, and oblivious to the unrelenting demands ahead, or that we have unwittingly signed up for a job for life, with no training, pay, prospect of sabbatical leave, change of career or get-out clause. It’s a job that will require endless investment and patience and, if all doesn’t go too badly, one in which we are finally made redundant. Of course there are rewards, but these come fitfully and often when we least expect them.

by Edward Marriott, Aeon | Read more:
Illustration by Frank Adams

Oscar Dominguez (1906-1958): Mulheres (not dated)
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Overwhelmed and Creeped Out

The eligible men are laid out like items on a menu that I can scroll through by flicking my thumb. I haven’t even tapped on a single photo yet when—brrring—a new message appears: “Wassup?” I ignore it and return my attention to the sea of forty-five-year-old men with usernames like “Drunky.” Anyone worth messaging in here? I don’t have much time to think about it—brrring brrrring—because two new messages arrive in the chat window. “Whaat are you up to?” and “hey there.” Ignore; ignore. I’m seeing so many men with questionable facial hair that I double-check my profile to make sure that I haven’t accidentally indicated a preference for goatees. Brrring brrrring brrrrrring. I scream and toss the phone to the other end of the couch, as if this action will repel the men within it. Even though I know these men can’t see my exact location, I feel cornered, overwhelmed.

Blendr is the most high-profile of a series of new location-based dating apps for straight people. It was created by the same folks who made Grindr, the hookup app that’s become ubiquitous in the gay community. In June, Grindr announced it now has four and a half million users (six hundred thousand of them in the U.S.), and that they spend an average of ninety minutes browsing every single day. Contrast Grindr’s success with that of Blendr: the founders weren’t willing to disclose the number of users, opting instead to send me an anodyne statement that they “are thrilled with the pace of Blendr’s growth,” which, they say, “was faster in the first six months of launch than Grindr’s adoption rate during its first six months.” The company declined to say how many of those users are actually, well, using the app. If my own reaction is any indication, it’s no wonder. After my initial session, I only opened the app to show it to friends, scrolling through pages and pages of unappealing men in what resembled a masochistic digital-age performance-art piece titled “Why I’m Single.”

In truth, though, I tried Blendr not to find love, but at the behest of a bevy of Web developers. Around the time that Blendr launched in September, 2011, I wrote a short article declaring that the app was destined to fail. I argued that it didn’t take seriously the concerns of women—safety, proximity, control—even though the founder Joel Simkhai told GQ, “As a gay man, I probably understand straight women more than straight guys do.” Yeah, but probably not enough. Since airing my skepticism, I’ve received an e-mail or Facebook message every couple of months from a male entrepreneur who wants to pick my brain about how to make a location-based dating app appeal to women. “Blendr is generally useless, and there is a huge, untapped market for a hookup app for straights (or everyone other than gay men, really),” one of them wrote to me. “Attitudes towards sex have shifted massively in the past decade or so, not just amongst young people.”

And not just among men. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the founders of every major dating start-up. From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men. This might not seem like a big deal, until you consider one read on why Grindr has been so successful: the app has a “for us by us” appeal to gay men. But when it comes to heterosexual-dating technology, all-male co-founders represent the wants and needs of only half of their target audience. Sure, they can try to focus-group their way out of the problem, but if an app for “straight” people is to get anywhere close to Grindr’s level of success, women have to not just join out of curiosity. They have to actually use it.

by Ann Friedman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Istvan Banyai

Reposts

[ed. Sometimes, the game trails just peter out and end up in the bushes, with nothing much new to report. When that happens, I think I'll just randomly select some previous posts and introduce new visitors to the Duck Soup archives. Feel free to explore on your own.]

How to Have Rational Discussion
The Elements of Style
Always Strive to Be Polite
Spring is Just Around the Corner
Martha My Dear
Actors Acting Out
Dam Amazing
For Sorrow There is No Remedy

Sonic Youth @ The Continental Club (Austin, Texas, 1986)
By Pat Blashill
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Welcome to the Coldscape

More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.

J. M. Gorrie, a Florida doctor, was awarded the first US patent for mechanical refrigeration in 1851, with a device intended to cool cities rather than popsicles. Held back by heavy opposition led by the powerful natural-ice trade, not to mention the technical challenges that made early coldspaces risky as well as expensive propositions, artificial refrigeration for food only snowballed in the first half of the twentieth century, alongside the invention of plastic wrap and the introduction of self-serve supermarkets. Its story is central to every aspect of our national postwar narrative: the widespread entry of women into the workforce, the rise of suburban living, and the reshaping of the American landscape by the automobile. Gradually, at first, but now completely, in the United States—the first refrigerated nation—and then beyond, a network of artificially chilled warehouses, cabinets, and reefer fleets have elided place and time, reshaping both markets and cities with the promise of a more rational food supply and an end to decay, waste, and disease. 


Despite the efforts of industry bodies, government agencies, and industrial archaeologists, this vast, distributed artificial winter that has reshaped our entire food system remains, for the most part, unmapped. What’s more, the varied forms of these cold spaces remain a mystery to most. This guide provides an introduction to a handful of the strange spatial typologies found within the “cold chain,” that linked network of atmospheric regulation on which our entire way of life depends.


These are spaces in which a perpetual winter has distorted or erased seasonality; spaces that are located within an energy-intensive geography of previously unimaginable distance—both mental and physical—between producers and consumers. Artificial refrigeration has reconfigured the contents of our plates and the shape of our cities—it has even contributed to the overthrow of governments, as anyone familiar with the rise and fall of United Fruit can attest. Perhaps most bizarrely, although their variations in form reflect the particular requirements of the perishable product they host, coldspaces have, in turn, redesigned food itself, both in terms of the selective breeding that favors cold-tolerance over taste and the more fundamental transition from food as daily nourishment to food as global commodity.


Welcome to the coldscape: the unobtrusive architecture of man’s unending struggle against time, distance, and entropy itself.


by Nicola Twilley, Cabinet |  Read more:

Photo: Nicola Twilley

Pathologising the Norm

One in four of us will struggle with a mental illness this year, the most common being depression and anxiety. The upcoming publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) will expand the list of psychiatric classifications, further increasing the number of people who meet criteria for disorder. But will this increase in diagnoses really mean more people are getting the help they need? And to what extent are we pathologising normal human behaviours, reactions and mood swings?

The revamping of the DSM – an essential tool for mental health practitioners and researchers alike, often referred to as the ‘psychiatry bible’ – is long overdue; the previous version was published in 1994. This revision provides an excellent opportunity to scrutinise what qualifies as psychiatric illness and the criteria used to make these diagnoses. But will the experts make the right calls?

The complete list of new diagnoses was released recently and included controversial disorders such as ‘excessive bereavement after a loss’ and ‘internet use gaming disorder’. The inclusion of these syndromes raises the important question of what actually qualifies as pathology. Are we really helping more people by expanding these diagnostic criteria, discovering problems that were always there but previously unaddressed, or are we just creating new problems that now need to be treated? Moreover, the crucial questions of what these treatments entail and who will really benefit from them needs to be asked, not only for these new diagnoses but for our mental health care system as a whole.

There has been an explosion in psychiatric diagnoses over the last 30 years, due in large part to a change in ethos in the treatment and research of mental illness. This began in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III, the first major revision of the manual to consider psychiatric disorders as physical diseases with biological origins, rather than mental illnesses stemming from intra- and interpersonal roots. This shift coincided with the development of the first effective psychiatric drugs (e.g. Prozac), thus enabling psychiatrists to prescribe medicine in treatment rather than relying on cognitive or psychoanalytic talk therapies. Since then, psychiatric diagnoses have more than doubled in the last 25 years, with this trend especially prominent in childhood disorders.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is particularly exemplary of this phenomenon, with diagnoses skyrocketing over the last 10 years, up 66 percent in the United States since 2000. This may be partially due to a recent change in the diagnostic guidelines from theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics, suggesting that children as young as 4 and as old as 18 be screened and treated for the condition (ADHD was previously only diagnosed in children aged 6-12). Widening this age gap may enable parents to start seeking help for a troubled child earlier on, or include adolescents and adults previously thought to be too old to have ADHD, thus contributing to the increase in numbers. However, it is unlikely that this age change alone explains the ADHD boom.

Accounts by parents and clinicians alike suggest that the more common diagnoses of ADHD become, the easier they are to obtain. The spread of the disorder seems to have taken on epidemic proportions, stretching across geographical and socio-cultural boundaries. As such, acquiring a classification of ADHD has become remarkably easy. Diagnoses are made based on a clinician’s observations and subjective self-reports from the child, alongside comments and complaints from teachers and parents. There is no chemical or objective diagnostic test to identify ADHD, just as there are no such tests for the vast majority of psychiatric disorders. Clinicians must instead base their decisions on the symptoms described by the patient and his or her parents, matching their complaints to the criteria listed in the DSM. While this practice can be seen as progressive, giving those in need easier access to the treatments they require, it can also result in the undesirable consequence of widespread over-diagnosis in those who would not have originally qualified for the disorder.

This increase has also resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of prescriptions for psychostimulant medications used to treat ADHD, up 375% as of 2003. Pathologising and subsequently prescribing medication to help control a ‘problem child’ is a worrying side effect of the broadening of diagnostic criteria. A concerning trend has emerged for parents to give their children psychostimulant medication to treat inattention or hyperactivity in school, without an official diagnosis of ADHD. Clinicians willing to go along with this practice believe that these sub-threshold children can benefit from the calming and focusing effects of the drugs, and that they will help improve their academic performance. However, this seems a highly dubious practice, as the referring clinician may have a financial investment in writing these prescriptions, receiving perks or consulting fees from the very drug companies whose medications they are prescribing. This conflict of interest can significantly contribute to the free-flowing prescriptions for psychoactive medications, particularly in cases where the full-fledged diagnosis of ADHD is not warranted.  (...)

An important question that needs to be raised regarding these recent increases in psychiatric diagnoses is what role does the multi-billion pound pharmaceutical industry have in this trend? With the rise in diagnoses comes a spike in prescriptions, poising pharmaceutical companies to make millions off the expansion of these varying diagnostic criteria.

This is particularly applicable in the recent changes made to the qualifications for clinical depression, with the DSM deciding to drop the exclusion of bereavement in its classification of the disorder. This means that individuals going through the natural grieving process following the loss of a loved one can now be prescribed anti-depressant drugs to help them cope. In the previous version of the DSM, only cases of ‘excessive bereavement’ (severe depressive symptoms lasting longer than eight weeks) were covered under the criteria for depression, enabling those who needed help to receive it, but without truncating or pathologising the normal grieving process. However, doing away with the time restriction and enabling those experiencing sadness immediately following the death of a loved one to receive pharmaceutical treatment unnecessarily medicalises this process. Additionally, the antidepressants prescribed in these situations (usually serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are not entirely innocuous, and can be accompanied by unpleasant side effects. Furthermore, SSRIs can take up to four weeks to have full effect, and prescriptions usually last for several months. Thus, the immediate benefit to the patient when they need it the most would be limited, and it is likely they would be on the medication for longer than necessary.

The Washington Post recently investigated the decision behind this change and discovered that 8 of the 11 members on the board of the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, who were responsible for the revisions to the DSM have various financial ties to several different pharmaceutical companies. These include owning stock options, receiving consultation fees, and obtaining grant funding from the industry. These conflicts of interest can create serious potential bias in those members to best serve the financial interests of these companies; and in the current dilemma regarding the medicalisation of bereavement, the potential increase in profit from the rise in prescriptions is tremendous, almost undoubtedly influencing the decisions of those on the board. Furthermore, one of the chief advisors to the committee was the lead author of a study promoting Wellbutrin, an antidepressant drug developed by GlaxoWellcome, as an effective treatment for the alleviation of depressive symptoms following the loss of a loved one. The consultation from this individual, who could benefit both personally and professionally from such a change, was clearly biased in this situation, and most likely ended up swaying the board’s decision to its present outcome.

by Dana Smith, King's Review |  Read more:
Image: SOS

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Elton John

Montreal, 10 january 2013, Plan Nord
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Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

A script arrived at my house, the title page read Pulp Fiction, and I loved it,” says Danny DeVito. DeVito had a first-look deal with TriStar. “I had just spent a weekend at the White House, and there was a lot of talk that there was too much violence on the screen, and Hollywood should address it,” says former TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy. “So I read the script, which I liked a lot, and there was one scene that is really extremely violent, where they shoot someone in the back of the car and there are pieces of his brain splattered all over. The director and I had a discussion, and I said, ‘That is really over the top, and you’re going to get blowback.’ He said, ‘But it’s funny!’ It turned out he was right. The audience thought it was funny, and it did not get the blowback I thought it would get.” However, TriStar passed on making the movie.

“Every major studio passed,” says Lawrence Bender. Then, says DeVito, “I gave it to the king, Harvey Weinstein.”

It went through Richard Gladstein, who was now at Miramax. Weinstein, who had recently merged Miramax with Disney in an $80 million deal, was walking out of his L.A. office on his way to catch a plane for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Gladstein handed him the script. “What is this, the fucking telephone book?,” Weinstein asked him when he saw that it was 159 pages, the normal being 115. He lugged the script to the plane, however.

“He called me two hours later and said, ‘The first scene is fucking brilliant. Does it stay this good?’ ” remembers Gladstein. He called again an hour later, having read to the point where the main character, the hit man Vincent Vega, is shot and killed. “Are you guys crazy?” he yelled. “You just killed off the main character in the middle of the movie!”

“Just keep reading,” said Gladstein. “And Harvey says, ‘Start negotiating!’ So I did, and he called back shortly thereafter and said, ‘Are you closed yet?’ I said, ‘I’m into it.’ Harvey said, ‘Hurry up! We’re making this movie.’ ”

Disney may have seemed an unlikely match for Pulp Fiction, but Weinstein had the final say. “As for [then chairman] Jeffrey Katzenberg, that was the first test of what I call autonomy with Jeffrey,” says Weinstein. “When I signed my contract with Disney selling Miramax, with us still running the company, I wrote the word ‘autonomy’ on every page, because I had heard that Jeffrey was notorious for not giving it. When I read the Pulp Fiction script, I went to him and said, ‘Even though I have the right to make this, I want to clear it with you.’ He read it and said, ‘Easy on the heroin scene, if you can, but that is one of the best scripts I have ever read. Even though you don’t need it, I am giving you my blessing.’ ”

The script was sent out to actors with the warning “If you show this to anybody, two guys from Jersey [Films] will come and break your legs.”

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz