The Game: Anatomy of the White House - PhRMA Deal

http://youtu.be/ta_FOY_9ZR8

State budget cuts decimate mental health services

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110309/ap_on_he_me/us_states_mental_health

By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press – 4 mins ago

DENVER – State budget writers looking for cash to balance the books have stripped a cumulative $1.8 billion from mental health services over the last 2 1/2 years, putting the public at risk as the mentally ill crowd emergency rooms and prisons, according to the nation's largest mental health advocacy group.

The Washington-based National Alliance on Mental Illness tallied state budget cuts to mental health services between 2008 and today and found that 32 states and Washington, D.C., cut funding just as economic stressors such as layoffs and home foreclosures boosted demand for services.

"These are really dangerous times," warned Michael Fitzpatrick, NAMI's executive director. The group reviewed state mental health budget cuts in the wake of the January shooting in Arizona, in which six people died and 13 were injured, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The man charged with shooting them, Jared Loughner, showed signs of mental illness but was never referred for treatment.

Indeed, the picture looks only grimmer in many states where legislatures still at work on next year's budgets are considering making things worse.....

"Any time you make cuts this massive in mental health cuts, the needs in prisons and hospitals and emergency rooms and homeless shelters start to pile up," Fitzpatrick said.

(snip) 

Tough times - for NAMI? Recently NAMI got 60% or so of its cash from Pharma - and a large percentage of the rest came from County, State, and Federal funding.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alliance_on_Mental_Illness#Funding_and_US_Senate_Investigation_of_NAMI

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/blogcategory/23/60/

A World Health Organization study indicated that those who were never medicated got better sooner than those who took meds.

http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-global/sartorius-on-who

Antidepressants may cause many more problems than we ever imagined.

http://www.madinamerica.com/madinamerica.com/Depression.html

Isn't it time doctors started checking for the real physical causes of mental illness rather than handing out prescriptions for something the drug rep recommended when your 15 minutes is up? 

http://www.alternativementalhealth.com/articles/diamond.htm

For those who want to find out if they are on medications they actually need, and how to withdraw from meds they don't need to be on, check out the resources in our LINKS section - start at the top of the right hand column.

NYT: The Americanization of Mental Illness

From the essay:
'...we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.'

Link

Wikipedia has an article about mental health diagnoses in China.

America is hooked on drugs, and a lot of them are made in China

Check out this link - and this.

Obama Health Care: Taking on Big Pharma

"Taking on Big Pharma

Paul Jay continues his conversation with Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future at the Tides Foundation's Momentum conference in San Francisco. The first segment of this interview was done before President Obama's speech about his health care reform. Now, after the speech, they speak about what the president said and the feasibility of the health reform taking on the Single Payer system which would allow for everyone to be covered. They also speak about President Obama's centrism, and that his collaboration with major pharmaceutical companies, also known as Big Pharma. Hickey says that questions about the functioning of the drug and insurance industries and the deal President Obama invariably agreed to with Big Pharma, "are now politicized questions in the United States of America, while a few years ago they were not. Whether or not we get a good bill, and I think we will, that would be only the beginning of the process of getting public power countervailing and regulating and cutting back the private power of those insurance and drug industries that control our lives."

Bio
Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, an organization launched by 100 prominent Americans to expand the national debate about America's economic future. The Campaign seeks to empower working Americans, middle-class families, and the poor to make their voices heard in support of a populist economic agenda and an expansion of democracy. Recently, Hickey organized and helped to lead a national coalition of citizen leaders known as Americans United to Protect Social Security."

With thanks to the The Real News Network and the Tides Foundation.

Creative Aging With the Raging Grannies

The Raging Grannies "bared all" at the Creative Aging Symposium held in San Francisco, June 15, 2009.
Posing as the scheduled entertainment for the symposium, they took the stage and made the case for Single Payer Health Care Reform.

The Symposium was sponsored, in part, by an insurance company, and also gets funds from AARP which acts very much like a corporate insurance company and is against any health care reform that would eliminate insurance companies.

IN THE VIDEO: Some members of the crowd look suspicious, others sing along with the Grannies who croon, "We won't feed CEO's anymore!" to the tune of This Little Light of Mine.
Eight-minute QuickTime movie. 36MB at Link


Do you have the right stuff to be a Raging Granny?
Raging Grannies Net - with Song Lyrics
Some Raging Granny Songs
Raging Grannies Official Site
Raging Grannies Film Launch
Link to buy Raging Grannies CD
Link to buy Raging Grannies book

NYT: Democrats say no to cost cap for drug manufacturers

Botox in the deal
for Nancy?









"Ms. Pelosi, many House and Senate Democrats and most of the administration’s liberal allies had assumed that the $80 billion was more of a starting point than a firm commitment.

“We know we can squeeze more from the system,” Ms. Pelosi told a Washington Post blogger a few weeks ago. “The minute the drug companies settled for $80 billion, we knew it was $160 billion.”

“The president made the agreements he made,” she added. “And maybe we’ll be limited by that. But maybe not!”

After Mr. Waxman’s committee approved a House bill last Friday allowing government negotiation of drug prices and requiring additional price rebates, the drug lobbyists began demanding public reassurances from the White House — until Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, confirmed the lobbyists’ understanding of the deal in a Wednesday night e-mail message. (A White House spokesman said Thursday that the confirmation was unrelated to the lobbyists’ pressure.)"

LINK

UPDATES: William Greider in The Nation says this deal stinks.
Huffington Post reveals an internal memo about deals the White House cut with Pharma.

"We do not have a health care system in the United States; we have a sick care system"

"As the lead Senator in drafting the Prevention and Public Health section of the bill, I view this legislation as our opportunity to recreate America as a genuine wellness society – a society that is focused on prevention, good nutrition, fitness, and public health.

The fact is, we currently do not have a health care system in the United States; we have a sick care system. If you’re sick, you get care, whether through insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, community health centers, emergency rooms, or charity. The problem is that this is all about patching things up after people develop serious illnesses and chronic conditions.
We spend a staggering $2.3 trillion annually on health care – 16.5 percent of our GDP and far more than any other country spends on health care – yet the World Health Organization ranks U.S. health care only 37th among nations, on par with Serbia.

We spend twice as much per capita on health care as European countries, but we are twice as sick with chronic disease.

How can this be so? The problem is that we have systematically neglected wellness and disease prevention. Currently in the United States, 95 percent of every health care dollar is spent on treating illnesses and conditions after they occur. But we spend peanuts on prevention.

The good news in these dismal statistics is that, by reforming our system and focusing on fighting and preventing chronic disease, we have a huge opportunity. We can not only save hundreds of billions of dollars; we can also dramatically improve the health of the American people."

Senator Tom Harkin on the new Health Reform Bill

Stop the Dangerous and Invasive Mothers Act

Mothers Act Fuels Multibillion Dollar Drug Industry - Evelyn Pringle
Link
FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers - Evelyn Pringle
Link
Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign - Evelyn Pringle
Link

Want to contact your congresscritter? Find out what to do at Unitedforlife's Action Page

Environmental Protection Agency: Corruption worse than we thought

What's in your water?
Censorship exposed at US Environmental Agency
Erin Brockovich Redux: Newsweek reviews a new book on falsification of statistics in industry, "Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health" here