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BPA, a compound found in plastic bottles, aluminum cans, dental sealants, baby products and even on receipts, is more pervasive and harmful than previously thought. This according to Dr. Frederick vom Saal, Professor of Biological Sciences University of Missouri, who spoke on the subject today at the Mount Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center.
With the FDA and EPA on the $ideline$, Dr. Vom Staal advocated for “citizen action” to compel American companies to find safe alternatives to BPA. The Europeans have.
“If I were writing today, I’d have to assert that human life begins even earlier (than the womb), with the complex process of fertilization — a miracle in chemistry, physics, and molecular biology occurring within the fallopian tube. By the time the fertilized egg, dividing and beginning to organize itself, enters the womb, life has been in action for at least three days.”
After overseeing or performing 60,000+ abortions — “I did my last abortion in 1979. I had come to the conclusion that there was no reason for an abortion at any time; this person in the womb is a living human being, and we could not continue to wage war against the most defenseless of human beings.”
“I am no longer alone. It has been my fate to wander the globe in search of the One without Whom I am doomed, but now I seize the hem of His robe in desperation, in terror, in celestial access to the purest need I have ever known.” Dr. Bernard Nathanson (1926-2011), The Hand of God (Regnery, 2001)
After running the largest abortion mill in the world — in New York City, Bernard Nathanson had a change of heart. He spent his final years advocating against abortion and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1996.
Mental health is a growing concern in the United States. The question is can mental health professionals be counted to guide people to mental health? Is there a model for mental health? Is there even a definition for ‘person’ in the mental health community.
In the recently published: Psychoanalytic Terms & Concepts, we looked up the word ‘person’ and found this: “The word person has not found much theoretical place in psychoanalysis.”
In psychiatry the lack of a coherent understanding of the human person (mind, body and soul) invariably results in a failure to properly diagnose and deal with the root causes of mental illness, resulting in remedies that can do more harm than good.
The American Psychoanalytic Association 2013 National Meeting included a session called: The Application of Psychoanalytic Thinking to Social Problems: Frontline Mothers at a Trauma Vortex.
Dr. Judy Roth (left), clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, presented her psychoanalytical and ethnographic work with Palestinian mothers on the frontline of political violence and terror.
In describing case-after-case of Palestinian suffering, dehumanization, disintegration, and crushing loss of property and life, Dr. Roth bore witness (and invited everyone in the room to bear witness) to the evil visited on the Palestinian people by the government of Israel. She hopes to rally the mental health community to confront the causes of ‘psychic death’ — that she says will continue in the Palestinian Territories, as long as they are under Israeli occupation and colonization.
Commentary: In a conference of over 1000 psychoanalytic professionals, it’s unfortunate that fewer than 30 showed up for Dr. Roth’s presentation.
Photograph: Stephen Wise
This medical student at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told LE, 1/12, that he had not received a flu vaccine this year — nor any other year. A registered nurse we spoke with, on the #7 subway, said the same thing.
Commentary: The (health care professionals) opting-out of getting a flu vaccine seem more knowledgeable and trustworthy than those who are compelling people to take it.
“Assure children that they are safe no matter where they go.” Psychotherapist on NPR, Dec. 17, 2012 (when asked what he would tell families after the Newtown shooting?)
Commentary: If there is a place more toxic and unsafe for children today, than the United States, we don’t know where it is. One reason is because mental health professionals tend to be dishonest, incompetent — even wicked in their treatment of children. As LE has reported, children in foster care in the U.S. are routinely made available for antipsychotic drug testing.
Commentary: No analysis of the Newtown shooting will be complete without serious consideration given to the role antipsychotic drugs may have played. The worst thing you can do to someone is take away their consciousness. And yet millions of Americans with developmental disabilities (some as young as 1 year old) are being forced to take consciousness altering drugs, with adverse effects. “Monster drugs” as one vet put it. It’s been reported by a family friend that Adam Lanza was on meds.
On this the 25th anniversary of Prozac’s introduction to the U.S. market, it is worth noting the suspected link between antidepressants, taken by pregnant women, and autism spectrum disorders in their children.
Mount Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center held a symposium, 12/5, titled: Environment Chemicals and the Developing Brain. The presentation addressed how chemical exposures effect a child’s ability to learn and reason, and are linked to problems in child development, including ADHD.
In his talk, Program Director Philip Landrigan MD mentioned that childhood leukemia is on the rise, including brain cancer. He said that radiation and pesticides might have something to do with it.
LE told Dr. Landrigan of seeing a pregnant woman in the park using a computer resting on her baby bump. He said that if it were his daughter he would advise her not to do that. The message coming from the symposium: the need for better labeling, increased literacy on environmental risks, and reduced exposure.
New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan, at a Barnes & Noble event last evening, presenting her book: Brain On Fire — My Month Of Madness.
Commentary: The only boundaries and taboos in American society are those restricting an honest exploration into the root causes of her pathologies.
“With the pluralism of rules (and our times are the times of pluralism) the moral choices (and the moral conscience left in their wake) appear to us to be intrinsically and irreparably ambivalent.” Zygmunt Bauman
With all the talk about what may have motivated the New York nanny to kill two children in her care, no one is talking about the side-effects of psychotropic drugs, that she may have been taking. It’s been reported that she was getting treated for mental illness.
At an American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology conference in NYC this weekend, LE asked an attending psycopharmacologist if psychotropic drugs can produce homicidal side-effects? He said “yes.”
Commentary: With tens of millions of people in the U.S. (including children) being given psychiatric drugs, often times unnecessarily and off-label, industry and government officials seem willing to let short term utilitarian interests trump the debilitating consequences and lethal side-effects associated with psychotropes, including long-term links to dementia.
Artwork: Rosemarie Throckel
