Psyche, Science, and Society

Mesage from Dana Siegelman, daughter of jailed former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman

Followers of Scott Horton’s No Comment blog at Harpers are well aware of the travesty of justice involved in the politically-motivated prosecution and conviction (along with seven-year sentence) of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman by the Gonzales Injustice Department, apparently orchestrated by Karl Rove and aided by the state’s largest newspaper. This prosecution was apparently designed to help the Republican Party maintain control of the state. Those unfamiliar with this travesty can follow it in the 41 blog posts Horton has written on this case.

Today I received the following email from Siegleman’s daughter Dana, which she asked me to post here:

Dear Friends,

For those of you who have been concerned about my dad, I am writing to update you on his condition and to ask for your help again.

After visiting my dad in prison, I have observed this: They do not feed him nearly enough. He has no privacy. He works as a janitor everyday from 7-4. He is allowed few personal belongings, and he lives with real criminals (duh). However, despite the negative conditions he is under, his spirit remains positive, and he retains his hope in coming justice.

My goal in writing this letter is to incite your frustration toward our current political state. Politics has adopted the Mafia’s modus operandi. It thrives on power, money, and loyalty (i.e. being loyal to one’s own, versus the client), and aborting those who refuse to comply. Contrarily, we have a judiciary committee in the House of Representatives that cares and wants partisan prosecution to end. The conspirators, (for this is what they truly are), have been doing everything they can to crush the investigation in Congress before it reveals the truth. Our role is to petition these representatives to persevere and fight for justice.

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having my dad in prison has sharply awakened me to the many brutalities alive in this world. For years I tried to hide from politics and salvage my naiveness. This was a futile attempt. Hiding from and denying the injustices served to our people and the world is anything but empowering. We have the ability to face these problems and do something productive to stop them. Please join me in encouraging this committee to fight for the truth, to seek justice with all its power, and to rekindle the hope that we ought to have in our government.

With all my heart I thank you for your incredible help, prayers, and love.

Sincerely,

Dana Siegelman
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ” MLK Jr.

SPECIFICS ON WRITING

Your letter may be as short or long as you like. My advice is to shoot for one or two strong paragraphs. Do not worry about making ach letter personal. Just send the same letter to each
representative. Keep in mind, they want to know why the issue is important to you. A few examples may be: I knew Don Siegelman as an honorable man, I believe our justice system has been corrupted, someone needs to hold this administration accountable, or I’m friends with the Siegelmans so I feel inclined to write. Speak from the heart. We are working for the betterment of all, not the punishment of a few, so keep your letters positive! If you don’t want to send a letter to each representative, then I suggest at least mailing to the first four listed. You also have the option of sending them emails on their personal websites. Thank you again for everything you have done and are doing to help!

Congressman Artur Davis (D)
208 Cannon H.O.B.
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-2665 (phone)
(202) 226-9567 (fax)

Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D)
1222 Longworth Building
Washington, DC 20515

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D)
102 Cannon HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Telephone (202) 225-3072
Fax (202) 225-3336

Congressman Bobby Scott (D)
1201 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-8351 Phone
(202) 225-8354 Fax

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D)
2344 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2201
Fax: (202) 225-7854

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D)
2435 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3816
(202) 225-3317 Fax

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D)
2446 Rayburn Building
Washington DC 20515
(202) 225-2906
(202) 225-6942 Fax

Congressman Dan Lungren (R)
2448 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Congressman Chris Cannon (R)
2436 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-7751
Fax: (202) 225-5629
Email: cannon.ut03@mail.house.gov

Congressman Tom Feeney (R)
323 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2706 (202) 226-6299 fax

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R)
2449 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4905
Telephone: (202) 225-5101

Congressman Howard Coble (R)
2468 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-3306
Phone: (202) 225-3065

Congressman Steve Chabot (R)
129 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-2216
(202) 225-3012 (fax)

9 comments November 6th, 2007

There’s a third secret torture memo!

A press release today from the ACLU reveals the existence, but not the contents, of yet a third “torture memo” from the Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Torture:

ACLU Learns of Third Secret Torture Memo by Gonzales Justice Department

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org; (212) 549-2666

Group Presses for Release of Memos in Pending Lawsuit; Hearing Scheduled for November 13

NEW YORK – Legal papers filed in federal court Monday in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations disclose that the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for the Department of Justice issued three secret memos in May 2005 relating to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Until now, the existence of only two of those memos had been reported and it was not known precisely when the memos had been written. The memos are believed to have authorized the CIA to use extremely harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding.

“These torture memos should never have been written, and it is utterly unacceptable that the administration continues to suppress them while at the same time declaring publicly that it abhors torture,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “It is now obvious that senior administration officials worked in concert over a period of several years to evade and violate the laws that prohibit cruelty and torture. Some degree of accountability is long overdue.”

On October 4, 2007, The New York Times published a front-page article disclosing that the OLC authored two memoranda in 2005 relating to the interrogation of prisoners held by the CIA. The Times reported that the first was issued “soon after” February, when Alberto Gonzales assumed the post of attorney general, and explicitly authorized interrogators to use combinations of psychological “enhanced” interrogation practices including waterboarding, head slapping, and stress positions. The second memo, according to The Times, was dated “[l]ater that year” and declared that none of the CIA’s interrogation methods violated a law being considered by Congress that outlawed “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment.

The memos should have been – but were not – identified and processed for the ACLU as part of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit requesting information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. In response to legal papers filed by the ACLU on October 24 objecting to that omission and requesting the release of the two memos, the government filed papers Monday stating:

“OLC has reviewed its opinions from that time frame and has determined that there were in fact three opinions issued to CIA relating to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody … Two of the opinions were issued on May 10, 2005 … the third was issued on May 30, 2005 … OLC has not located any legal opinions issued to CIA from January 31, 2005 through May 9, 2005 that relate to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody.” (emphasis added)

In addition to neglecting to provide the relevant memos to the ACLU as part of its FOIA lawsuit, the government has also withheld the documents from key senators in a congressional inquiry.

“The Justice Department’s failure to identify and disclose these memos is yet another example of its efforts to thwart public inquiry into its authorization of illegal interrogation methods,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The memos must immediately be disclosed, and high ranking officials must be held accountable for authorizing torture.”

The OLC memos – and the possibility of others that might remain unknown – take on particular meaning as the confirmation process continues today in Congress regarding the nomination of Michael Mukasey for attorney general. Mukasey has been the subject of intense criticism over his refusal to identify waterboarding as torture.

A hearing regarding the ACLU’s request for the release of OLC torture memos is scheduled for November 13, 2007 at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in federal court in New York.

A copy of the ACLU’s brief requesting production of outstanding documents is online at:
www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/32572lgl20071024.html

The government’s response to the ACLU’s brief is online at:
www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/32573lgl20071105.html

More information on the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody and an index of documents received by the ACLU in its FOIA lawsuit can be found online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

Many of these documents are also contained and summarized in a recently published book by Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture. More information is available online at:
www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C.; Jaffer, Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights

Add comment November 6th, 2007

Breastfeeding: Nature determines nurture influence

According to the BBC, a new study reports finding a gene that determines whether breastfeeding will increase a baby’s IQ. The 90% of babies (the article doesn’t say in what population) with the gene will gain an average of 7 IQ points if breastfed, the other 10% will not experience gain. This study is one of a number showing that traditional models of the nature-nurture relationship, in which the two are additive effects, are flawed. Rather, their is an interaction between them. But elucidating the nature of the interaction requires identification of mechanisms, in this case the FADS2 gene. Perhaps gradually the “nature-nurture” dichotomy will die out as we learn more about how these factors interact in development:

Gene ‘links breastfeeding to IQ’
A single gene influences whether breastfeeding improves a child’s intelligence, say London researchers.

Children with one version of the FADS2 gene scored seven points higher in IQ tests if they were breastfed.

But the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found breastfeeding had no effect on the IQ of children with a different version.

The gene in question helps break down fatty acids from the diet, which have been linked with brain development.

Seven points difference is enough to put the child in the top third of the class, the researchers said.

Some 90% of people carry the version of the gene which was associated with better IQ scores in breastfed children.

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, used data from two previous studies of breast-fed infants in Britain and New Zealand, which involved more than 3,000 children.

IQ was measured at various points between the ages of five and 13 years in the studies.

Previous studies on intelligence and breastfeeding have come up with conflicting results.

There has been some debate as to whether mothers who had more education or who were from more affluent backgrounds were more likely to breastfeed, skewing the results.

Nature versus nurture

Professor Terrie Moffitt, a co-author on the paper, said the findings gave a fresh perspective on the arguments by showing a physiological mechanism that could account for the difference between breastfed and bottle-fed babies.

“The argument about intelligence has been about nature versus nurture for at least a century,” she said.

“However, we have shown that in fact nature works via nurture to create better health outcomes.”

Since the studies used in the analysis were done, manufacturers have begun to add fatty acids to formula milk but there have been inconsistent results on the benefits.

Belinda Phipps, of the National Childbirth Trust, said: “This shows for the majority of parents they can have a positive effect on their babies IQ by breastfeeding.”

Catherine Collins, a dietician at St Georges Hospital in London and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, said the study highlighted the interaction between nutrition and genetics.

“In this study you have an effect that suggests that nature is more important that nurture.

“If nine out of 10 babies benefit, then that is a very good chance.”

But she added the study did not specify how long babies were breastfed for and it may be that even breastfeeding for a short period may be beneficial for intelligence.

Professor Jean Golding, who founded the ALSPAC study set up in the 1990s to follow the development of thousands of children in the South West of England, said the results were fascinating and they would be doing a further study of the gene.

“In the past people have had different results about whether breastfeeding improves IQ and this would sort out the reason why,” she said.

1 comment November 6th, 2007

Olbermann: Daniel Levin and waterboarding of America

In his latest Special Comment, Keith Olbermann uses the case of Bush administration official Daniel Levin — who was fired for saying, based on his own experience, that waterboarding was torture — as a springboard for taking on Bush’s torture regime. Especially notable is that Olbermann postulates the irrelevance of all the discussion, by the American Psychological Association among others, of the “efficacy” of torture as an interrogation technique. As Olbermann sees it, the torture was used precisely because it would generate the sort of fantastical “terrorist plots” that were needed to coax the American public into acceptance of Bush’s authoritarian regime. At least Olbermann’s explanation makes sense as an explanation of the apparently pig-headed commitment to torture of this Administration.

Olbermann doesn’t spare those Democratic Senators who are about to put a torture-denier as Attorney General, responsible for the Department of Injustice:

Part I:

Part II:

1 comment November 6th, 2007

Is shyness an illness?

As a psychoanalyst and a researcher, I have an ambiguous attitude toward the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. I think there are certainly advantages to certain of the attempts at precision. Yet, as a researcher, I am well aware of the lack of evidence behind some of the “evidence-based” diagnostic categories. And as a psychoanalyst, I find the omission of any psychodynamic material to be troubling.

Today the Washington Post has a critique of the DSM category of social anxiety, excerpted from a new book. I do not know the data (or absence of it) behind this diagnosis, so I have no opinion on this particular argument. But I find its description of the DSM process to be all too similar to other accounts I have heard. And the psychiatric (indeed, all mental health professions’) to pathologize more and more of daily life is disturbing.

Shy? Or Something More Serious?

By Christopher Lane

If anyone in my parents’ generation had argued that shyness and other run-of-the-mill behaviors might one day be called mental disorders, most people would probably have laughed or stared in disbelief. At the time, wallflowers were often admired as modest and geeks considered bookish. Those who were shy might sometimes have been thought awkward — my musically gifted mother certainly was — but their reticence fell within the range of normal behavior. When their discomfort was pronounced, the American Psychiatric Association called it “anxiety neurosis,” a psychoanalytic term that encouraged talk-related treatment.

All that changed in February 1980, when the APA classified the broadly defined “avoidant personality disorder” and “social phobia” (later dubbed “social anxiety disorder”) as diseases. The professional group also listed 110 other new disorders in its revised diagnostic manual, with the result that the total number of mental illnesses on the books almost doubled overnight. It was a dramatic example of the modern medicalization of behavior.

Bashfulness, once prized as a virtue, became a sign for medical concern. According to the 1994 National Comorbidity Survey, as much as 12.1 percent of the U.S. population might have social anxiety disorder and a staggering 28.8 percent suffer from some kind of anxiety disorder.

As a result of statistics like these and the disease criteria listed in the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, large numbers of people swallow daily doses of Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft for conditions that many experts now consider medical problems stemming from a chemical imbalance. After examining prescription rates for these three antidepressants alone, David Healy and Graham Aldred of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at Britain’s Cardiff University reported in the International Review of Psychiatry that just over 67.5 million Americans had taken at least one of them in the 15-year period ended in 2002. More than 18.5 million of those had received a prescription for Paxil, the first antidepressant to receive FDA approval for social anxiety disorder.

Is shyness really such a debilitating and widespread trait, or have psychiatrists merely made it seem that way? The psychiatric literature on social anxiety disorder is vast and well intentioned, tied to a host of drug trials and clinical studies aimed at lessening suffering. Chronic anxiety can be a serious problem needing treatment. But did substituting social anxiety disorder for anxiety neurosis blur an important distinction between ordinary shyness and that kind of paralyzing distress?

My own research over the past three years, including several days’ intensive work in the APA archives, suggests so. I was able to review hundreds of unpublished letters and memos written by members of the task force assembled to define new disorders — and by mental health experts who’d heard and read about the changes and hinted at a process bordering on caprice.

I found one document acknowledging that field trials for some disorders involved just one patient, treated by the person advocating for inclusion of the disorder in the DSM. I discovered another memo warning that the calculations used to set the diagnostic thresholds across the board threatened to define as mentally ill far too many people who had no symptoms of disease.

Proposals also surfaced for the approval of problems as vague and questionable as “chronic complaint disorder” and “chronic undifferentiated unhappiness.” The symptoms of the first were listed, quite matter-of-factly, as whether people grumbled too much about the weather or said “Oy vay” too many times.

Among the dozens of letters from observers are questions about why a team of “kindred spirits” (the chairman of the task force’s term) was put in charge of such sweeping changes. Documents indicate that the task force met for four years before one participant observed that those representing different — long-esteemed — perspectives in psychiatry, including psychoanalysis, weren’t invited to contribute. Some warned that the revisions risked turning American psychiatry into a laughingstock.

In interviews with others and me, the chairman in question, Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, has since characterized the psychoanalytic community as getting “very uptight,” as if its near-total exclusion from the process were nothing to worry about.

Were the dissenters right to voice concern?

When the third edition of the DSM appeared in 1980, fanfare heralded the supposedly rule-driven, evidence-based diagnoses. But in 2005, Theodore Millon, a consultant to the task force, conceded in the New Yorker, “There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge — scattered, inconsistent and ambiguous.”

Behind the scenes, some of the framers of avoidant personality disorder had indeed fretted in their exchanges and even on their written votes that the difference between it and ordinary reticence was a “minefield,” and not (as they had hoped) a “borderline” or “continuum.”

Definitional questions like these became minefields for American psychiatry: While some on the task force reckoned that diagnosis should be limited to those chronically impaired by anxiety, others thought it fine to gauge impairment by whether a person with a supposedly avoidant personality preferred traveling to work by car or on public transportation.

The manual went on to list dislike of eating alone in restaurants as the prime symptom of social phobia, with fear of hand-trembling a close second and avoidance of public restrooms third. With the inclusion of more and more behaviors — public-speaking anxiety, concern about dealing with people in authority, even dating anxiety — the diagnostic category ballooned until it overlapped with common shyness, as several key studies suggested, including a 1990 article in Behaviour Research and Therapy by University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist Samuel M. Turner and his colleagues.

It’s not difficult to explain why. By 1987, a revised edition of the 1980 DSM had removed the phrase “a compelling desire to avoid” fear-inducing situations, requiring only “marked distress.” Signs of this could include concern about saying the wrong thing — a fear afflicting almost everyone on the planet.

With these elastic guidelines, the “illness” became widely diagnosed (some estimates, such as one in the December 2000 Harvard Review of Psychiatry, put it just a notch behind depression and alcoholism).

The line between shyness and social anxiety disorder has only gotten murkier. In the 1990 article, Turner and his colleagues wrote, “Interestingly, the central elements of social phobia, that is discomfort and anxiety in social situations and the associated behavioral responses . . . are also present in persons who are shy.”

Four years later, Murray Stein, a specialist in anxiety at the University of California at San Diego, and his team published an influential article about the disorder’s vague threshold. The piece drew from a single study — a random telephone survey of 526 urban Canadians — with results suggesting that social anxiety among them ranged from 1.9 percent to 18.7 percent, depending on the diagnostic threshold used. To most ears, that would sound sufficiently open-ended to be valueless.

But not to the drug companies. To them, articles by Stein and others that portrayed experts as troubled that almost one American in five might suffer from social anxiety disorder offered the potential for increased sales. SmithKline Beecham, maker of Paxil, for example, put more than $92 million behind a campaign aimed at convincing people that their shyness might in fact be a disorder treatable with drugs.

While many people want a more open dialogue about the widespread risks of overdiagnosis, including the potential side effects of medication, a group of psychiatrists is pressing ahead, discussing the inclusion in the next edition of the DSM (due out in 2012) of more eye-popping additions: apathy, overuse of the Internet and excessive shopping. The first of those would-be disorders was discussed as a candidate in the April 2005 issue of NeuroPsychiatry Reviews.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Minnesota have just wrapped up a trial on whether the antipsychotic drug Seroquel, prescribed for bipolar disorder, could benefit people anxious about speaking to large audiences. How long before a clever marketer pens a new ad campaign: “Think it’s nerves about your work presentation? It may be public-speaking anxiety disorder”? ¿

Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, is the author of “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness”, from which this article is adapted. Comments:health@washpost.com.

3 comments November 6th, 2007