For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs. AlterNet: Health and Wellness: How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness
Unemployment is climbing. The stock market is dropping. The housing boom is bust. Corporate earnings are tanking. The nation’s economy is in the worst shape it’s been in years. Maybe even headedtoward recession. Working families are worried. [Last week] the Bush administration proposed a growth package of as much as $150 billion, which insiders familiar with the details say may include $800 tax rebates for individuals and $1,600 for households, along with business incentives. Bush’s plan does not address crucial problems facing working families or target tax benefits to those families who need them the most and will spend them the fastest. AlterNet: Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Stop Bush’s Stimulus Package; It’s a Give-Away to the Wealthiest
AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Happy 35th Birthday Roe v. Wade [VIDEO]
Today, we owe it to ourselves, and the generations of women and activists before us, to celebrate 35 years of women collectively fighting to uphold the legal right to abortion and for accessibility to quality healthcare in the name of self determination, autonomy, political and social equality.
The APA has recently offered its most detailed description of its position on the issue of psychologists and abusive interrogations, in a document placed prominently on the APA Website, entitled “Frequently Asked Questions Regarding APA’s Policies and Positions on the Use of Torture or Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment During Interrogations” (FAQ).We at the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology see the FAQ as a unique opportunity for us to provide, in a single document, a thorough refutation of the APA’s position. Through the following link, you will find an extensively referenced Commentary on the FAQ.
Poverty is expensive. Just as it is much more costly to treat a disease than prevent one, it costs more to provide emergency hostels than affordable housing, more to take a child into the care of child welfare agencies than to make sure families have adequate incomes and more to cope with school dropouts than to train our youth for the jobs Canada needs to fill in the coming years.TheStar.com - comment - Eliminating poverty makes economic sense
AFP: France is healthcare leader, US comes dead last: study
WASHINGTON (AFP) — France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.
The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries’ effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.
The study, entitled “Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis,” was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.
The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.
AlterNet: Blogs: PEEK: New Health Care Ad: Every American Deserves CheneyCare
Last month, the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee ran ads in Iowa newspapers advocating for a single-payer health-care bill, highlighting the fact Vice President Dick Cheney has benefited from his government-provided coverage. “If he were anyone else, he’d probably be dead by now” due to his long history of health problems, claimed the ad.
In the group’s newest round of ads, which ran “in eight New Hampshire papers” on Friday and will go “national” today, they dub a new name for “guaranteed, publicly-funded health care for all Americans”: CheneyCare.
The ad “asks readers to go to CheneyCare.org and sign a petition in support of CheneyCare for all Americans”.
Today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released The Great CEO Pay Race, by Hugh Mackenzie. The study finds that Canada’s best paid 100 CEOs will have pocketed the national average wage of $38,998 by 10:33 am on January 2nd. The CEO report and an online tool to find out how quickly the top 100 CEOs earn your salary are available at www.growinggap.ca and www.policyalternatives.ca.
On January 11, we are calling on everyone opposed to torture and indefinite detention to WEAR ORANGE to symbolize their sadness and disgust with the national shame that is Guantánamo Bay.
Download the CLOSE GUANTÁNAMO
Toolkit now to find out how you can organize for January 11 at home, in your office, on campus, in your community, and online.
American Civil Liberties Union : Close Guantánamo
Bernice Lott’s piece from the Providence Journal has been picked up by Common Dreams
By Bernice Lott,
Faculty members of the Psychology Department at the University of Rhode Island, by majority vote, have signed a resolution stating that “direct or indirect participation by psychologists in interrogations of prisoners incarcerated in foreign detention centers that do not afford prisoners internationally recognized due process of law is unethical.”
URI’s resolution is part of a growing grassroots effort to urge the American Psychological Association to move beyond its current position, which allows psychologists working in foreign prisons to assist teams in certain kinds of interrogations.
The association’s failure to rule out all participation has been the subject of protest among some of its members, some of whom are withholding dues while others are resigning. Psychologists at six colleges and universities, URI among them, have passed resolutions in hopes that the APA will reconsider its stance.
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