A Disorder for Everyone! – The Online Festival – Friday 18 September 2020 – 09.00 -23.00 BST
The Route To End FGM: Moving From ‘Multi-Agency’ Via Multi-Disciplinary To Public Health And Economics
Efforts to end female genital mutilation (FGM) have for decades been an important element in promoting the health of women and girls in many parts of the world; but still this gendered harmful practice continues.
Abstract: In this piece, written for the journal EC Gynaecology and primarily as a ‘conversation’ with obstetric and gynaecological clinicians whether in the ‘developed’ or the ‘developing’ world, I seek to
• Create connections between the clinical treatment/care of women and girls with female genital (‘sexual’) mutilation (FGM) and various of the environments in which the practice continues;
• Establish that two themes – economics and patriarchy – are critical to a full understanding of this harmful practice; and
• Explore ways in which colleague support across disciplinary boundaries, along with a willingness to try new approaches to the problem, may help to enable a Public Health framework leading to the eradication of FGM.
I…
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‘First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you …’*
Summary:
I respond to some of the points in the recent Rolling Stonearticle and correct the many inaccuracies and distortions.
Ignoring is no longer working, so champions of big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry have gone into attack mode. The strategy is to undermine the messenger (me) in order to neutralise the message. In this case the message is the bombshell that there is no evidence that depression is a brain chemical imbalance and antidepressants do not do what people have been told they do. In fact, the scientific community does not know what antidepressants do but, they reassure people, they still ‘work’ so it doesn’t matter.
Apparently our finding is so obvious that it ‘was met with yawns by the psychiatric community’. Yet the public were kept in the dark about the lack of evidence for a chemical imbalance for three decades in what an Australian psychiatrist recently called…
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How to take the news that depression has not been shown to be caused by a chemical imbalance
Summary TL;DR
For decades people have been told that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency. This was the rationale behind the introduction of the SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) antidepressants in the 1990s, which were thought to work by boosting low levels of serotonin. Our research shows no evidence of low serotonin in depression, which suggests that antidepressants do not work in the way they were originally thought to work.
There are other explanations for how antidepressants affect people, and why they can be helpful that are not to do with reversing underlying brain abnormalities and have different implications. Drugs like antidepressants change normal brain chemistry and this affects people’s moods and behaviour. SSRI’s blunt both negative and positive emotions, for example, and this may provide relief for people who are acutely distressed or unhappy. Antidepressants also act through inducing hope and optimism (the placebo effect). In the long-term…
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Thanet columnist Jane Wenham-Jones dies aged 59 – Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage
Writer was due to defend regional crown next month
Source: Thanet columnist Jane Wenham-Jones dies aged 59 – Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage
New obesity strategy is a ‘landmark day for the nation’s health’ and our ambition to beat cancer
The UK Government have launched a new obesity strategy with a raft of measures, including restricting junk food marketing on TV and online.
Source: New obesity strategy is a ‘landmark day for the nation’s health’ and our ambition to beat cancer
Far be it from me - 