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Oct. 13th, 2015 04:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* "John Kasich tells audience member they'd 'get over' his Social Security plan:" http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/09/politics/john-kasich-get-over-it-social-security/
* "America wants you to suffer: The staggering ways we punish our college graduates:" http://www.salon.com/2015/10/10/14131480_partner/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=Tumblr%20Share&utm_campaign=Tumblr
* I just saw another pundit out stigmatizing folks on psyche meds which is cruel, inaccurate, and dangerous, because way more people die or get way sicker than they otherwise would be because of the stigma discouraging them from seeking help. The brain is an organ. Needing to take meds to function normally shouldn't be stigmatized whether that med is insulin, welbutrin, prozac, or the celebrex that let's me walk around my apartment most days instead of being pretty much a wheelchair user which is the alternative given the level of spinal damage I have.
When it comes to medication for minors, I am a moderate because I was a teacher. Let me explain what that means. 1. Medications are mostly tested on adult white cis men. This is a huge fucking problem, because bodies vary wildly. If you do all your testing on a narrow, homogeneous population you do not get an accurate picture of what that drug will do at that dosage when released into the wild. Adult cis white men are not the default body. There have been huge problems with overdoses caused by the average woman or child being smaller than the average adult man. There have been issues caused by hormones, body fat, and structural differences interacting with medications differently. There have been problems because the developing brains and bodies of adolescents interact with meds differently, and overdoses caused because they are basically guessing at what the dose of something ought to be for a nine year old girl based on dosage for a forty year old man. People are horribly injured, sometimes permanently, and people die. There is pretty much no testing on what medications I in trans bodies, which means often deadly surprises for trans folk and doctors innocently following dosage directions that have zero data on what they will do to our bodies. I have a list of meds issues related to my transness that are as we speak word of mouthing between GPs who treat trans people because there is nothing in the text books they studied in college about a potentially deadly thing that happened to me and some other trans people in my region that likely happens to a significant percentage of us all over the world but isn't in any of the literature. The reason we know it's an issue is because trans folk do a lot of medical word of mouth. If that doesn't scare you it should. I think that the FDA should not clear any drug for use in the general population without a good sample size of both men and women with diverse racial and body types. No drug should be given to children or teens without having been tested and normed on a good sample size of people of more than one gender and a variety of body types in that age range. So that's a real problem and it needs to have changed like decades ago and there is no sign of it changing now.
2. One of the standard "educational reforms" mostly intended to save money is to cut out recess, phys ed., art, and music classes. This is done supposedly to make more time for "the basics." The problem is that if you cut those things you dramatically decrease the effectiveness of the academic class time. No really. I mean, yes, it's anecdotally obvious if you spend any time at all teaching K-12, particularly the 1-8 range, but there are lots of scientific studies backing up what any teacher can tell you. It turns out that retention is dramatically increased if you go out and do something physical after studying. Going out and running around or shooting hoops or whatever at regular intervals not only burns off energy and is healthier for your body, but it gives your brain important time to process whatever it is you just learned. It turns out that varying activity generally is good for you, and music and art are particularly helpful to certain types of learners. There are good, sound brain sience reasons that private schools leave in all the enrichment activities rather than cutting them for academics: that time spent oing other things enhances student learning and people who can afford to buy the best education for their children side with science over sentiment. Education reformers cut things we know are objectively good for the students because of unconscious classism: they don't want the children of the poor to ever have nice things. They consider what turns out to be fairly essential to the children's ability to focus in class and retain what they learned as frivolous. These are often the same people wanting to starve children to punish them for bad grades when we know that objectively, hungry children have a hard time focusing on tasks or retaining knowledge and that hungry children are more likely to act out in class. Feeding them three nutritious meals a day would be a much better way to improve student learning than starving them, but rich people love punishing poverty instead of giving people a ladder to climb out of it, so that's how policy is set.
What does this have to do with meds? In schools where I was allowed to hand a child a pass and send zim out to do a lap or two around the school in exchange for the child then sitting down and working hard the rest of the period, I had a lot more compliance from kids who really did want to work, but couldn't. It was much more effective and humane than a discipline referral. Would more recess and options to let kids run around a little more magically remove the need for meds? Hell no. I've seen kids with real dangerous depression. I've seen kids with ADHD who absolutely needed their meds to have a prayer of accomplishing anything that day. I've seen kids with less common issues who needed one type of medication or another. I absolutely think that there are children who need pharmaceutical help of one sort or another. That help was generally most effective when mixed with other sorts of help and support. Sometimes that help would be from a psychiatric professional, or a special ed teacher, or an occupational therapist, because often serious need for meds also comes with a need for coping strategies or other issues needing addressing. In pretty much all cases the children do better with a flexible and compassionate classroom teacher interested in partnering with the kid to find things that will help them deal with right now and getting through today productively and with a minimum of embarrassment.
So call me a moderate. Stigmatizing these children as lazy or violent or just needing to pull up their pants and get to work is the opposite of helping. It is in fact a lie that really can hurt people. I do favour a more global approach to the well being of each child. It shouldn't just be medicate them and forget them. It should be the right dose, combined with a variety of non-pharmaceutical help, tailored for what is best for the child and the room full of children as a whole. When I walked into that room every morning, my goal was for every one of the people under my care to have a pleasant and productive day. That went the same for the kid on insulin as it went for the kid on Ritalin or prozac or the kid who's english reading skills were still developing or the kid who was scared because ze didn't know where ze was going to be sleeping tonight. I couldn't fix all the problems, but I could sure try to make sure everyone felt safe in my room and had the best chance I could give them of learning something today whatever the hell else was going on in their lives.
So fuck you, Bill Maher!
* Someone should do a montage of news casters and pundits complaining about the Democratic presidential candidates being decent human beings capable of policy discussion without name calling and thus bad for ratings.
* "Ben Carson comments, favorability misaligned:"
* "The super wealthy's impact on the presidential campaign:"
* "Facts dispute 'Ferguson effect' on crime rate:"
* "By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years:" http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries
* Reality vs. fantasy in an active shooter situation: http://big-wired.tumblr.com/post/130838296818/anyanka-eg-daji-ruhu-that-whole-schtick
* NWS "Students Plan To Open-Carry Dildos Over Controversial Texas Campus Gun Law:" http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/10/10/ut-gun-carry-protest/
* "National Coming Out Day 2015:" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2015/10/national-coming-out-day-2015.html
* "Sunday Sweets Welcomes A Slice Of Fall:" http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2015/10/11/sunday-sweets-welcomes-a-slice-of-fall.html
* Yes, I watched it, but I really can’t seem to process it properly, so I’m linking you the fangs review. "American Horror Story (Hotel): Season 5, Episode 1: Checking In:" http://www.fangsforthefantasy.com/2015/10/american-horror-story-hotel-season-5.html
* "How to Dance Goth:"
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* "America wants you to suffer: The staggering ways we punish our college graduates:" http://www.salon.com/2015/10/10/14131480_partner/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=Tumblr%20Share&utm_campaign=Tumblr
* I just saw another pundit out stigmatizing folks on psyche meds which is cruel, inaccurate, and dangerous, because way more people die or get way sicker than they otherwise would be because of the stigma discouraging them from seeking help. The brain is an organ. Needing to take meds to function normally shouldn't be stigmatized whether that med is insulin, welbutrin, prozac, or the celebrex that let's me walk around my apartment most days instead of being pretty much a wheelchair user which is the alternative given the level of spinal damage I have.
When it comes to medication for minors, I am a moderate because I was a teacher. Let me explain what that means. 1. Medications are mostly tested on adult white cis men. This is a huge fucking problem, because bodies vary wildly. If you do all your testing on a narrow, homogeneous population you do not get an accurate picture of what that drug will do at that dosage when released into the wild. Adult cis white men are not the default body. There have been huge problems with overdoses caused by the average woman or child being smaller than the average adult man. There have been issues caused by hormones, body fat, and structural differences interacting with medications differently. There have been problems because the developing brains and bodies of adolescents interact with meds differently, and overdoses caused because they are basically guessing at what the dose of something ought to be for a nine year old girl based on dosage for a forty year old man. People are horribly injured, sometimes permanently, and people die. There is pretty much no testing on what medications I in trans bodies, which means often deadly surprises for trans folk and doctors innocently following dosage directions that have zero data on what they will do to our bodies. I have a list of meds issues related to my transness that are as we speak word of mouthing between GPs who treat trans people because there is nothing in the text books they studied in college about a potentially deadly thing that happened to me and some other trans people in my region that likely happens to a significant percentage of us all over the world but isn't in any of the literature. The reason we know it's an issue is because trans folk do a lot of medical word of mouth. If that doesn't scare you it should. I think that the FDA should not clear any drug for use in the general population without a good sample size of both men and women with diverse racial and body types. No drug should be given to children or teens without having been tested and normed on a good sample size of people of more than one gender and a variety of body types in that age range. So that's a real problem and it needs to have changed like decades ago and there is no sign of it changing now.
2. One of the standard "educational reforms" mostly intended to save money is to cut out recess, phys ed., art, and music classes. This is done supposedly to make more time for "the basics." The problem is that if you cut those things you dramatically decrease the effectiveness of the academic class time. No really. I mean, yes, it's anecdotally obvious if you spend any time at all teaching K-12, particularly the 1-8 range, but there are lots of scientific studies backing up what any teacher can tell you. It turns out that retention is dramatically increased if you go out and do something physical after studying. Going out and running around or shooting hoops or whatever at regular intervals not only burns off energy and is healthier for your body, but it gives your brain important time to process whatever it is you just learned. It turns out that varying activity generally is good for you, and music and art are particularly helpful to certain types of learners. There are good, sound brain sience reasons that private schools leave in all the enrichment activities rather than cutting them for academics: that time spent oing other things enhances student learning and people who can afford to buy the best education for their children side with science over sentiment. Education reformers cut things we know are objectively good for the students because of unconscious classism: they don't want the children of the poor to ever have nice things. They consider what turns out to be fairly essential to the children's ability to focus in class and retain what they learned as frivolous. These are often the same people wanting to starve children to punish them for bad grades when we know that objectively, hungry children have a hard time focusing on tasks or retaining knowledge and that hungry children are more likely to act out in class. Feeding them three nutritious meals a day would be a much better way to improve student learning than starving them, but rich people love punishing poverty instead of giving people a ladder to climb out of it, so that's how policy is set.
What does this have to do with meds? In schools where I was allowed to hand a child a pass and send zim out to do a lap or two around the school in exchange for the child then sitting down and working hard the rest of the period, I had a lot more compliance from kids who really did want to work, but couldn't. It was much more effective and humane than a discipline referral. Would more recess and options to let kids run around a little more magically remove the need for meds? Hell no. I've seen kids with real dangerous depression. I've seen kids with ADHD who absolutely needed their meds to have a prayer of accomplishing anything that day. I've seen kids with less common issues who needed one type of medication or another. I absolutely think that there are children who need pharmaceutical help of one sort or another. That help was generally most effective when mixed with other sorts of help and support. Sometimes that help would be from a psychiatric professional, or a special ed teacher, or an occupational therapist, because often serious need for meds also comes with a need for coping strategies or other issues needing addressing. In pretty much all cases the children do better with a flexible and compassionate classroom teacher interested in partnering with the kid to find things that will help them deal with right now and getting through today productively and with a minimum of embarrassment.
So call me a moderate. Stigmatizing these children as lazy or violent or just needing to pull up their pants and get to work is the opposite of helping. It is in fact a lie that really can hurt people. I do favour a more global approach to the well being of each child. It shouldn't just be medicate them and forget them. It should be the right dose, combined with a variety of non-pharmaceutical help, tailored for what is best for the child and the room full of children as a whole. When I walked into that room every morning, my goal was for every one of the people under my care to have a pleasant and productive day. That went the same for the kid on insulin as it went for the kid on Ritalin or prozac or the kid who's english reading skills were still developing or the kid who was scared because ze didn't know where ze was going to be sleeping tonight. I couldn't fix all the problems, but I could sure try to make sure everyone felt safe in my room and had the best chance I could give them of learning something today whatever the hell else was going on in their lives.
So fuck you, Bill Maher!
* Someone should do a montage of news casters and pundits complaining about the Democratic presidential candidates being decent human beings capable of policy discussion without name calling and thus bad for ratings.
* "Ben Carson comments, favorability misaligned:"
* "The super wealthy's impact on the presidential campaign:"
* "Facts dispute 'Ferguson effect' on crime rate:"
* "By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years:" http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries
* Reality vs. fantasy in an active shooter situation: http://big-wired.tumblr.com/post/130838296818/anyanka-eg-daji-ruhu-that-whole-schtick
* NWS "Students Plan To Open-Carry Dildos Over Controversial Texas Campus Gun Law:" http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/10/10/ut-gun-carry-protest/
* "National Coming Out Day 2015:" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2015/10/national-coming-out-day-2015.html
* "Sunday Sweets Welcomes A Slice Of Fall:" http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2015/10/11/sunday-sweets-welcomes-a-slice-of-fall.html
* Yes, I watched it, but I really can’t seem to process it properly, so I’m linking you the fangs review. "American Horror Story (Hotel): Season 5, Episode 1: Checking In:" http://www.fangsforthefantasy.com/2015/10/american-horror-story-hotel-season-5.html
* "How to Dance Goth:"
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com