Straight Inc., Legacy of Torture as Treatment

Clips from Surviving Straight Inc.

Clips from the upcoming documentary Surviving Straight Inc.

Placebo effect beats God, Prozac

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn’t that strange? Wonderful? Both?

The three drugs — which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses — are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f–.

Let’s lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America’s beloved wonderdrug antidepressants — all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world — are essentially useless and don’t really work worth a damn.

Wait, that’s not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there’s a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better — and often are far worse for you — than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid.

Have you heard this before? Of course you have. The placebo effect has been known for years. Decades. Forever. It’s one of those hotly controversial, yet irrefutable medical/psychological wonders that we don’t have the slightest clue how to unravel, much less leverage. And hence, it just freaks us the hell out.

Nevertheless, the recent findings, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies in recent years, are still nothing short of astounding. A sugar pill works as well as a hit of Prozac, if the patient believes she’s getting the latter? It’s just all sorts of confounding, in how it reveals how the power of the mind is still, to this day, barely understood, untapped, wildly feral, far more brightly powerful than we know what to do with.

It also reveals just how deeply invested massive drug companies are in convincing everyone they can “cure” depression with powerful, often dangerous chemical alternatives, how fearful doctors are of refuting this, how reluctant patients are to understand the difference, and how, above all else, nothing is as it seems.

Problem is, it ain’t just the pills. The placebo effect — hereby defined as the sheer force of will and belief, of the mind’s (and heart’s) ability to heal and nurture itself sans external assistance — applies to all sorts of constructs in our tortured modern world.

Organized religion? Hell yes. Is your life flawed and painful? Are you guilt-ridden and terrified of the world’s swarm of demons and daggers? Of course you are, sinner. Here, have a giant, unknowable deity. Give to it all your faith, hope, belief, money, angst, sexual shame. Believe in it wholly and without doubt, to the point where you lose a sense of yourself and your true divine source, forever and ever, amen.

There now. Feel better? Are miracles starting to happen in your life? Do you feel uplifted and joyful? Are you healed? It’s the power of Jesus! It’s God in your life! It’s because you have blind faith! No no no, it’s not you, silly. Even though, in fact, it totally is. Shhh.

Of course, what we call the power of faith is just the power of the mind, soul, the Self, rather harshly rerouted through some external conduit that relieves us from having to figure s–t out for ourselves. After all, it’s just much easier to give it all over to the god, the pill, the product, than it is to delve deep into one’s own dark and inscrutable psyche. Same as it ever was.

But whatever works, right? If expensive pills genuinely help millions, who’s to argue? If devout belief gives you stability and a sense of place, what’s wrong with that? It’s all well and good… until you factor in the cost.

The organized religion racket rakes in hundreds of billions a year, and requires a massive toll in guilt, shame, dogma, homophobia, war, pedophilia and sexual hysteria. The antidepressant market runs $10 billion a year and makes millions into casual addicts, convincing many they are powerless to get better without chemical assistance.

The placebo market is, at last check, absolutely free. Man, they just hate that.

Behold, study number two. This research reveals another time-honored truth that science is only now beginning to barely get a grip on, albeit nervously, suspiciously. Few want to claim it or ponder what it might mean to how we define illness, consciousness, God, the sanctity of the DSM-IV.

This research reveals, once again for the millionth time, that various psychedelics like MDMA, LSD and psilocybin really do, in fact, have a rather stunningly helpful — and often permanent — effect on the health and well-being of numerous patients, almost universally and without fail.

(Did you hear that? That’s the sound of a million mystics and healers, teachers and gurus throughout history, sighing and rolling their eyes).

Of these drugs’ power to dance and frolic with the brain’s synapses, there is absolutely no doubt. This is no placebo effect. This is no sheer force of will. Psilocybin, for one, is an E-ticket to a shifting dimension, a dance on the blurrier edges of definitive reality. Ecstasy is a widening out, a warming up, an opening into the cold, cold heart of the human species.

Patients who get to dabble with these fine plants and chemicals are reporting astonishingly positive, almost impossibly curative reactions. Lives are forever altered. Ideas of the soul, heart, human connection forever reset and restored. Possibilities expand, PTSD contracts, hearts open, fear and inhibition dissolve. Love expands. And man, the PTB hate that, too.

Do you know why? Two reasons: One: No one holds the patent to these drugs. No one company stands to rake in billions if, say, MDMA is somehow decriminalized. Two: Science loves reliable data, anchor points, the flawed sturdiness of the scientific method. But when it comes to hallucinogens and psychotropics, it’s all just a delightful, slippery mess. The swim and swirl of consciousness, it would appear, just refuses to be pinned down.

The grand upshot: We are but infants. We hammer and prod at the brain, the self, inundate it with chemicals and blast it with terminology to try and get it to behave and respond in somewhat predictable ways. And yet, the ancient plants, the mystical connections they offer to that original source seem to prove one irrefutable point: We still have a long, long way to go to get back to where we started.

Rebecca Riley’s doctor on the defense

By Lane Lambert
The Patriot Ledger
Posted Apr 10, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
BOSTON —
Years before she became a board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji was diagnosing children as young as 2 as bipolar and hyperactive – and prescribing powerful cocktails of mood-altering drugs to quiet them.
By the time Kifuji finally passed the psychiatric board exam – on her fourth try – one of her youngest patients, Rebecca Riley, had a little more than a year to live. Her parents murdered the 4-year-old by overdosing her with one of the drugs Kifuji prescribed.
Both of Rebecca’s parents are in prison for her murder. Her mother, Carolyn, was convicted in February; her father, Michael, in March.
Now the spotlight is on the controversial doctor who testified in both trials in exchange for immunity. Kifuji and her employer, Tufts Medical Center, face a malpractice lawsuit filed by Norwell attorney Brian Clerkin, the court-appointed administrator for Rebecca’s estate, which was created for the benefit Rebecca’s brother and sister, who are now 14 and 9.
Glimpses into Kifuji’s background and treatment methods are part of a lengthy deposition she gave in December in the civil suit. The final pretrial hearing in the case is scheduled for June 1.
Kifuji diagnosed Rebecca Riley and her sister with mental illness and prescribed drugs for both girls and their brother. Prosecutors in the parents’ murder trials said the Rileys killed Rebecca because they couldn’t get disability payments for her, as they had with their two other kids.
According to the plaintiff’s lawyer in the malpractice suit, Benjamin P. Novotny, of the Boston firm Lubin and Meyer, Kifuji said she “trusted the mother” (Carolyn Riley) to tell her how the children were behaving and reacting to the drugs. She relied almost exclusively on what Carolyn told her about the kids when diagnosing them and ordering increasing amounts of drugs for them.
Kifuji also trusted the mother to keep tabs on Rebecca’s heart rate and blood pressure for signs of problems with the four drugs she was on. Kifuji, a pediatrician who later became a psychiatrist, told Novotny during the deposition that she didn’t realize she had a blood pressure cuff in her office and could check the girl’s vital signs herself until after Rebecca was dead. She said she didn’t take Rebecca’s pulse with her fingers because Carolyn Riley told her the child’s pulse “was within normal range.”
Kifuji also told Novotny during the deposition:
She prescribed clonidine – the drug that killed Rebecca – during the child’s first visit to control the “impulsivity” that Carolyn Riley described. Rebecca was 2 at the time.
She originally came to the United States from her native Japan in 1990 to research dust allergies in children. She switched her training to psychiatry when she went to New England Medical Center in 1994.
In 2000, she took a job at Baystate Medical Services in Springfield because it meant she wouldn’t have to return to Japan for two years and wait for an H-1 work visa.
She diagnosed dozens of children as bipolar or having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or both, and estimated that she prescribed drugs for 99 percent of her pediatric patients.
She usually saw Rebecca for 20 minutes at each office visit because she was seeing all three Riley children in an hour.
She explained that some researchers believe the area of the brain called the amygdala is different in people with bipolar disease. But she admitted she didn’t know where the amygdala is in the brain.
Kifuji’s medical career has taken her from Tokyo to Detroit and Boston. She was living in Somerville as of December.
She grew up in Kumamoto, Japan, on the southwest tip of the island of Kyushu, and graduated from Tokyo Women’s Medical College in 1981.
She’s been a permanent legal resident of the U.S. since 1990, and has held a medical license here since 1999.
She worked at Baystate in Springfield from 2000-03. Her outpatients there included the Rileys’ two older children, whom she also diagnosed as bipolar with ADHD.
After Rebecca’s death in December 2006, Tufts Medical Center placed Kifuji on paid leave after the psychiatrist agreed not to practice medicine. The state Board of Registration in Medicine reinstated her license this past September after Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz announced that a grand jury would not bring criminal charges against her.
In January, Tufts reaffirmed its support for Kifuji and her treatment methods, saying she provided “appropriate” care to Rebecca Riley. Kifuji began seeing patients again in the fall. As of December, she was seeing five outpatients – four children and one adult – and working with a state-funded child psychiatric access program.
Lane Lambert is at llambert@ledger.com.
READ MORE about this issue.

http://www.patriotledger.com/news/x905416295/Rebecca-Riley-s-doctor-on-the-defense

Florida to Punish Kids for Crimes They Haven’t Committed Yet

I knew it was easy to get locked up in Florida. Apparently, you can get punished in the state before committing a crime, too.

An extremely troubling new partnership between the Florida Department of Corrections and IBM wants to use software to predict which juveniles will commit crimes in the future, so “the best course of treatment” can be chosen. Hey, why wait for juveniles to commit crimes, if we can start their “rehabilitation” now?

The Florida DOC says that by using predictive analytics software, it can “analyze key predictors such as past offense history, home life environment, gang affiliation and peer associations to better understand and predict which youths have a higher likelihood to reoffend.”

What about talking to the kids to determine the best course of action? People are unpredictable and complex; they aren’t data points. Juveniles should be taught that the world is open to them, and that they are the agents of their own destiny — not that they fit into the bottom half of a spreadsheet, and therefore need extra mandatory counseling or placement in a group home.

My biggest problem with this announcement is that it takes a good principle and completely warps it. Evidence-based programming is good. Using data to determine what works and what doesn’t is smart. But we’ve crossed the line when IBM’s vice president for analytics says the software will help authorities “take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.” What are they thinking?

I first heard about this partnership from Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo, who had the same reaction: “I don’t know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution? What about article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No? Let’s make this easy then: Didn’t you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?”

Florida’s Department of Corrections should use any data collected to guide programming decisions on a macro level, rather than using an individual’s past mistakes to condemn them to a less-promising future. As it stands, Florida’s latest move is badly misguided. But with just a few tweaks, this new partnership could get back on track.

Source: http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/florida_to_punish_kids_for_crimes_they_havent_committed_yet