A Thought on Mental Illness
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
American soldiers have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for over four years now. Tragically, some have returned home in coffins. But because of advances in military medicine, many more have come home alive but wounded, with embedded shrapnel and missing limbs serving as permanent reminders of their time serving our country. What will their…
The food stamp program helps over 40 million Americans pay for groceries. Unlike other forms of economic assistance, this program, called SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), only pays for food, thereby constraining how recipients make use of the aid. But are food stamps constrained enough? SNAP recipients experience higher rates of obesity and diabetes…
In a recent article in the Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley argues that we should dramatically diminish, or even get rid of, high school sports in the United States, because they are throwing off our priorities and sucking up our funding. I began the article with even more than my typical skeptical eye, having written not long ago…
Rates of cigarette smoking have dropped substantially in the US over the past few decades. But lots of Americans still smoke, and the burden of tobacco-related illness does not fall evenly across our population. That is tragic under normal circumstances, with tobacco use leading to heart attacks, strokes, cancers, and emphysema, to name but a…
In an article about Natalie Maine, the former lead singer for The Dixie Chicks, Hiatt writes about the way her conservative, country fan base reacted when she spoke negatively about President George W. Bush. I thought it was worth sharing this sentence: It was as if she’d French-kissed Saddam Hussein while setting fire to a…
Something like one in seven people living in the US have no healthcare insurance. In fact, the number of uninsured people has grown by 7 million since Trump has become president. (Make America Uninsured Again?) These numbers are atrocious. Embarrassing. Shameful, actually, in a country as wealthy as ours. We need to recommit ourselves to guaranteeing people access…