You can now find us at our new blog address “namingandtreating.com.” The work of our agency continues as does the same blog content focusing on issues concerning at-risk individuals, children, and families, specifically centering on how we name and treat ourselves, each other, and the word we live in. In effect, the names we are given are the way into the story of who we are in this time and place.

Remember that names/labels have power, becoming destructive if they are not treated with the proper reverence and respect or if they do not fit who we really are. In the coming months we will be adding members to our team and increasing content at this site in an ongoing effort to seek new ways of providing information and resources, while building community around the challenges we face. We are grateful for all of you who find us here, to those who reach out for help or to help others, and for the many who support and care about what we are doing and the issues we address. Our life’s work is a testament to all of you and to the belief that real transformation can occur and integrity does exist in the toughest places. Remember the story of who you are matters and we are more than just a name.

What strikes me the most about the current healthcare system and debates surrounding how to reform it is our disconnection from its costs to us personally until we or our loved ones really need it. The cost of healthcare goes beyond our copays and what happens to other people. Yes, healthcare costs are going up dramatically and will continue to do so if reforms aren’t put in place. But, so much of the real costs of healthcare are distributed out of sight and mind for many of us. A crisis is what ends up collapsing the distance between our perceptions and the real costs of healthcare. The American has an article titled “The High Cost of No Price” that helps us recognize how the costs of healthcare are covered. Here is an excerpt:

Economists have shown that if a good’s price is zero or decreasing, then the demand for this good will likely increase. In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume.

Our primary focus is to track how identities are formed and play out in our place and time. The formation of our identities is a co-creative act where biology, culture, and experience combine to forge who we are and how we view ourselves, others and the world around us. The Wall Street Journal has an article titled “Eight Rooms, Nine Lives: Soul Searching at the Wellcome” about an exhibit on identity from the Wellcome Trust Collection in London. Here is an excerpt:

One room deals with studies of twins, exemplified by a family that has both identical and non-identical twins; another looks at gender, taking as an example April Ashley, who had an early sex-change operation; a room features Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), who invented phrenology; another showcases Francis Galton (1822-1911), the Victorian polymath whose passion was hereditary intelligence but who founded the false science of eugenics; yet another room is devoted to performances by British actress Fiona Shaw.

Finding visual means of examining an abstract idea like identity has required ingenuity. Seeing vitrines containing two sets of identical toys (to prevent ownership disputes between identical twins), and then watching the twins diverge in their adolescent record collections, makes a nicely concrete point. Though Francis Galton made the discovery that human beings can be distinguished by their fingerprints, the pedigree Galton drew up for himself shows that his own motivation was to demonstrate to the world that, as the cousin of Charles Darwin, he had a hereditary claim to genius.

A confluence of events, attitudes and procedures have led us to the point we are at in the juvenile justice system. Violent crime among our youth, public outrage and alarm about real and perceived rising crime trends among this population, treating juvenile offenders like adults in our courts, hyper-punitive drug laws, and the three strikes law are all playing a factor. We are now more focused on punishment and incarceration then rehabilitation. Placing our youth in juvenile detention facilities that act like adult prisons only feeds more violence and the possibility of future offenses once a juvenile offender is released. Juveniles are not fully equipped developmentally to process the acts they commit and the consequences they face. Add to this dynamic of adolescent development the challenges of sexuality in a detained violent environment. The Economist has a post titled “A preventable problem” about rapes in juvenile facilities that helps illustrate the need for less incarceration and more rehabilitation. Here is an excerpt:

THE recent report on rape in juvenile facilities from the Bureau of Justice Statistics makes for horrific reading: 12% of juvenile prisoners report being sexually abused, more than 10% of them by staff (the surprising nugget within this subgroup is that 95%—95%!—of that 10% report having been victimised by female staff). Non-heterosexual inmates report a higher rate of abuse by another youth (12.5%) than their heterosexual counterparts (1.3%). Abuse is also not distributed evenly among facilities: at three of them—one each in Indiana, Pennsylvania and New Jersey—at least 33% of inmates report being abused, while 18% of facilities surveyed had no reported incidents of sexual abuse.

(Also read an article from the San Francisco Chronicle where the image above is from titled “SAN MATEO COUNTY: New juvenile hall focuses on rehab, not punishment” found at the Coalition Against Institutionalized Child Abuse (CAICA) website.)

Lise Eliot the author of our pick for best book of 2009 Pink Brain, Blue Brain is interviewed for an article at Discover titled “The Myths About Mr. and Ms.” that is worth checking out. Here is an excerpt of the interview:

Why do many boys love guns and girls love dolls, without parental encouragement?
Gender identity is a strong im­-pulse. Children figure out their gender in the second year, typically around 18 to 24 months. This knowledge helps them decide which toys and clothes are appropriate. Differences in activity levels, social sensitivity, awareness of other people—these become magnified once a child figures out which gender she or he belongs to.

(The brain scans above from Brain Sex Matters “shows M (the men in the top row of the picture) and F (the women on the bottom row) listening to a John Grisham novel. The coloured areas of the brain indicate brain activity, and it clearly shows that men are using only the left side of the brain; women are using both sides of the brain. Language is organised on both left and right sides of the brain in women but only on the left side in men.”)

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight has a great post “Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans.” More evidence of how absurd laws prohibiting same sex marriage are, exposing the hypocricy of those who are “defending” the sacred institution of traditional marriage. We should all have the right to marry and divorce whoever we want. Why should this be different for any of us regardless of our sexual orientation? Who we marry and divorce is our own and our partner’s business and a right that should be defended for all. Here is an excerpt:

Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period.

Also check out the powerful and moving must read article in Newsweek titled “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage: Why same-sex marriage is an American value” by Ted Olson. Here is an excerpt:

Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one’s own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society. The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it.

The NYT has an article titled “Before You Quit Antidepressants … ” by Richard A. Friedman, M.D., professor of psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College. In it Dr. Friedman is responding to a study from The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that questions the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs and is receiving a lot of buzz. He offers a balanced approach to viewing this study and others like it for the use of antidepressants when treating different degrees of depression from mild to severe. What we are looking for from objective professionals in the treatment and research fields of psychology and psychiatry is a more common sense targeted approach to who diagnostically needs these types of medications and when they in fact do or do not work. It is not the selling of these medications to consumers, but there efficacy that has to be the driving force behind their use. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Still, antidepressants are not panaceas, and their advocates have sometimes been overly optimistic about their efficacy. Only about 35 percent of depressed patients will achieve remission with the first antidepressant they receive. But with sequential treatments, most can expect to feel a lot better.

And the real test of an antidepressant is not just whether it can lift someone out of depression; it is whether it can keep depression from returning. For a vast majority of people with depression, the illness is chronic. Relapses and low-level symptoms between episodes are common.

(See the artist from the article Brian Stauffer’s work here.)

When we analyze the population of young people now being called the recession generation and this period of time we are in known as the Great Recession there is a lot we can learn about people and families in crisis. As we have noted, the American Dream has been the central organizing myth of our nation, one created out of the promise of opportunity for all and a chance of moving up the economic ladder to prosperity. Finding our way to the top where wealth and status await causes us to chase opportunities and wealth, living beyond our means and a proper sense of reality. The fantasies associated with wealth have fed the economic engine of our culture for decades, leading to massive individual and collective debt through risky credit schemes and choices. Can a major event like this Great Recession in effect challenge a myth as strong as the one we are in? Newsweek has an excellent article that helps address this question titled “The Recession Generation.” Here is an excerpt:

The situation could get even uglier if, as many predict, a depressed post-crisis landscape forces Americans to let go of the mythology of upward mobility. As Brookings fellows Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins point out in their new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, this myth hasn’t been true for some time: by international standards, intergenerational social mobility in the U.S. has been falling since the 1970s, and is lower than in countries such as Britain, Sweden, and Denmark. As everyone from de Tocqueville to the producers of MTV Cribs has observed, Americans generally have a high tolerance for inequality. Yet that tolerance may wane as we enter a new age in which young graduates can’t expect to do better than their parents—and one in which Wall Street is perceived as being able to continue business as usual while Main Street struggles. “Americans are OK with inequality,” says Reich, who believes we are at a tipping point, “as long as they feel the system isn’t rigged.”

Laurence Steinberg, Professor of Psychology, Temple University describes how “The ‘just don’t do it’ approach to teen prevention programs, which underlies programs from DARE to Driver’s Ed, relies on the fallacious notion that adolescent behavior is based on knowledge and beliefs.” We agree with Professor Steinberg’s focus on “changing the context” around teenage risky behaviors. Also check out his book Rethinking Juvenile Justice.

The need for heroes growing up is part of our developmental process. Heroic traditions passed on from parents to children are a rite of passage. Even as important, children find their own heroes for their time and place. Without comic book superheroes such as Spiderman and Batman and film heroes like John Wayne, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood growing up I would have been lost and feeling disempowered. Their ability to take on the bad guys and difficult challenges they face in books and movies gives us the courage to do so in our own lives. My journey into mythological studies stems in large part from the power these heroes held in my imagination growing up. To celebrate the cultural and developmental value of heroes there is a great site called Growing Up Heroes that is worth bookmarking and following.

(Hat tip again to the Daily Dish.)