Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 4:10:58 PM     The difficulty of evidence. Health Prozac Appears Safe, Effective in Teens By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2004/06/02/hscout519310.html WEDNESDAY, June 2 (HealthDayNews) -- While it may not settle the debate entirely, preliminary findings from a major U.S. government-funded study suggest that antidepressants do not raise the risk of suicide in adolescents.   Reducing ill effects to suicide is a rather rough measure of what may be psychological dependence, ego depleting (I am ok because I tkae pills), prelude to otehr ways of mood management from drugs.  There were 378 adolescents, or about 90 per group of four combiantions of prozac and talk. In the prozac only ther were five of six attempted suicides.Lets say that for half the kids prozac helps depression and for half it does not. a double rate in the "not helped group" would indaicte a low rate, but double for the not helped group that if the norm was 6 for a whole group of 90. The numbers however are so small, one wonders at the wisdom of data presentation, especially when 5 of the six attempts were in the prozac only group! But the deeper isues are the psychological and social - and the way the reporter bannered the story. and then the quote! However, "people who are concerned about this issue can be reassured" by the results of the new research, said Dr. Marvin Lipkowitz, chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City. "The take-home message," he said, "is that the medication is, overall, excellent -- there's no question." ********

	Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, April 21, 2004 at 9:12:22 PM     And, put this together with the previous two posts. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/education/22COLL.html?hp Over all, at the 42 most selective state universities, including the flagship campuses in California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and New York, 40 percent of this year's freshmen come from families making more than $100,000, up from about 32 percent in 1999, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. Nationwide, fewer than 20 percent of families make that much money. At Harvard, for instance, financial-aid forms suggest that the median family income is about $150,000. The increasing wealth on the nation's most prestigious campuses has gone largely unnoticed until recently ********

	Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Paige's reflections Posted here Tuesday, February 24, 2004 at 9:00:38 AM     Paige said the NEA was terrorists, but it's important to look at the reverse sensitivity. he realizes it was wrong, but that it happened tells us something about the way labguage may be being used in the Cabinet - and a trial baloon for campaign language? "As one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks, I should have chosen my words better," said Paige, the first black education secretary. ********

	Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Erich Fromm on reason Posted here Wednesday, December 03, 2003 at 3:49:57 PM     Erich Fromm in Beyond the Cains of Illusion. I believe that the only force that can save us from self destruction is reason; the capacity to recognize the unreality of most of the ideas that man holds, and to penetrate to the reality veiled by the layers and layers of deception and ideologies; reason, not as a body of knowledge, but as a "kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects a force whose "most important function consists in its power to bind and to dissolve." (fn 1) Violence and arms will not save us; sanity and reason may. .... (footnote 1 from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 13.) ********