Tag: mental illness

Study Finds Magic Mushrooms As Good or Better than Antidepressants for Fighting Depression

A study carried out by researchers at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London has led to breakthrough discoveries about the impact psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, has on depression. The study found that treating depression with psilocybin may be at least as effective, if not more effective as antidepressants.

According to researchers, in the most rigorous trial to date assessing the therapeutic potential of a ‘psychedelic’ compound, researchers compared two sessions of psilocybin therapy with a six-week course of a leading antidepressant (a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor called escitalopram) in 59 people with moderate-to-severe depression.

The results of the study were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the study, both groups had reduced symptoms of depression, however, the reductions occurred more quickly in the psilocybin group and were greater in magnitude.

After six weeks, the self-reported results from the patients suggested the psilocybin was just as effective as the pharmaceutical, and in many cases showed a slightly bigger – but ultimately statistically insignificant – improvement in symptoms.

“We strongly believe that the … psychotherapy component is as important as the drug action,” Imperial College London neuroscientist Robin Carhart‑Harris said.

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China declares homosexuality a mental illness? Where’s LeBron? Where’s Disney?

This puts China’s defenders, nearly all leftists, in an increasingly untenable position.

Where’s LeBron James, whose claim to fame beyond basketball is defending China?  He’s got business interests there, and he’s said nothing.

Where’s Disney, whose family fare these days is more than a little gay-friendly?  They too have got business interests in China, and worse still, they made a movie on a Chinese theme complete with Xinjiang’s laogai forced labor camps accidentally appearing in the background.  They may be indifferent to the laogai, but let’s hear their reaction to this news from China.

Hollywood in general is co-opted by China; China has bought up major shares in nearly every major studio.  And Hollywood is also quick to jump for causes that can be called gay.  Weren’t West Hollywood’s denizens responsible for blacklisting people who opposed a gay “marriage” initiative?  Didn’t this bunch boycott the Beverly Wilshire over the Sultan of Brunei’s purchase of a share of it, the Sultan instituting anti-gay policies back in his satrapy?  Suddenly, we don’t hear much from Hollywood about this classification of gayness as a mental illness.

There’s also the Chamber of Commerce, the charmers who engaged in the “conspiracy” to “save the 2020 election,” as Time magazine reported.  They’re big China-boosters. 

And where’s Michael Bloomberg?  Bloomberg has famously refused to call China’s leader a “dictator,” giving a Clintonian dodge of “it’s a question of what is a dictator” to a town hall audience during his ill fated 2020 presidential run.  More disgusting still, he’s tried to ruin people who’ve spoken out about the hellhole.  Remember this, from The Intercept?

I AM ONE of the many women Mike Bloomberg’s company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements. The funny thing is, I never even worked for Bloomberg.

But my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me.

What about Nike, which touts every disrespect-America cause under the sun, which scotched its Betsy Ross flag shoe, but which continues to stand by China, even as it finds itself in court over its alleged use of slave labor?  Thus far, crickets.  Don’t hear a thing.

What about Apple, whose CEO is gay, and which just donated $1 million in iPads and other products to LGBT youths?  Apple just registered a blowout quarter in China, with 20% of its sales coming from the communist dictatorship.  Kind of odd to be making big bucks from a regime that now declares homosexuality a mental illness.  We won’t hold our breath waiting for their condemnation.

Where’s Tom Friedman?  The man who wished America could be just like China?  Thus far, no word.

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Grandma Left Unrecognizable After Calling 911 for Paramedics and Getting Cops Instead

“I wanted help,” McCabe said in a recent interview with KTVU. “We called for help. This was not the kind of help we wanted.”

According to KTVU, in their report, Fremont police described her as “combative,” “assaultive,” “hostile” and “uncooperative.” When she got to jail, she was listed as a “priority booking” inmate.

McCabe admits that she talked back to police when they showed up but says that was only because she didn’t want police there at all. She called for paramedics — not cops.

“Why am I in the back of a cop car when I called for help?” she remembers thinking.

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HOW THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM FAILS PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

How those with mental illness are treated in the system has become a focus in the ongoing calls for criminal justice reform that have increased in volume since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May. At least 25 percent of fatal police encounters involve a person with mental illness, and individuals with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during an encounter with police, according to a report from the Treatment Advocacy Center.

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Gender Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why is Silicon Valley Helping Them?

The day after I tweeted about the ongoing attempts to block sales of my book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, I was stuck on the phone with my parents’ real estate agent. “How’s your book going?” she wanted to know. “Is there a lot of controversy?”

I know it’s fashionable these days to claim to be an introvert—something to do with an unwarranted assumption of depth, maybe—but I actually am an introvert. Small talk exhausts me, not because I believe it’s beneath me, but because it feels like being handed a socket wrench. I have no idea what to do with it.

“Well, you had to expect that, right?” she added casually. “When you write a book like that, that’s what you’re expecting.”

This is, more or less, most people’s reaction to the efforts to suppress my book. It isn’t that they agree with censorship per se. But you also can’t go setting fires without expecting Big Tech’s cops to shut them down. “If you’re going to talk about the trans thing, I mean, what did you expect?” I think the agent may have said those very words.

Except that I didn’t write about “the trans thing.” I wrote specifically about the sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls. I fully support medical transition for mature adults. And I have no desire to be a provocateur. (I dislike pointless provocation, in part because I think provocateurs often have a good argument—one they’re too lazy or inept to make). Nor do I have any prurient interest in others’ social lives.

What I aim to do, as a journalist, is to investigate cultural phenomena, and here was one worth investigating: Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia”—despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

The efforts to block my reporting have been legion, starting with staff threats at a publishing house, which quickly reversed its original intention to publish my book. Once I obtained a stalwart publisher, Regnery, Amazon refused to allow that company’s sales team to sponsor ads on its site. (Amazon allows sponsored ads for books that uncritically celebrate medical transition for teenagers).

Because the book tackles an interesting phenomenon, a number of established journalists wanted to review it. The issue of trans-identification has seemed to come out of nowhere with Gen Z, the generation begun in 1995 whose large-scale mental-health crisis already has us so on edge. And the issue has created surprising bedfellows. Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians.

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Lockdown has caused a mental-health crisis

What’s strange is that a mental-health lobby that has spent years redefining mental illness to include more and more people, and spent years discussing the potential social causes of this supposed ‘crisis’, is strangely hesitant to criticise lockdown. This is despite the fact that lockdown forces us into circumstances pretty much guaranteed to increase anxiety, depression and debilitating mental illnesses

A major survey by Mind, the mental-health charity, has found that two thirds of adults and three quarters of young people with existing mental-health problems have experienced worsening mental health over the course of the pandemic. In addition, more than one in five adults with no previous experience of such problems described their mental health as poor or very poor. One in four of those who tried to access support was unable to get it from the NHS.

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