The safety net

In yet another pointless, heartless, and cruel move by the Trump administration, a budget proposal includes a directive by the Department of Health and Human Services to cut funding for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.

Let's put this in perspective.  Forty percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers surveyed said they'd considered suicide within the last year.  One in ten attempted it.  This is four times higher than for straight teens (and those lower rates are disturbing enough).  But how, exactly, are these numbers shocking to anyone?  We have a government passing laws right and left specifically to deny rights to queer people.  There is a vocal minority of Americans who advocate making same-sex relationships illegal; one (Pastor Dillon Awes) gained national notoriety for saying that gays should be "lined up and shot."  Less overtly violent, but more pervasive, are strategies like the ones in multiple states to remove library books about the queer experience, or even fiction with queer characters.

Pastor Awes wants to kill us; but I'm not sure how much better the people are who simply want us erased.  That queer youth are feeling hopeless about the situation they're facing is hardly a surprise.

But let me be completely clear, here.  You people who still support Trump and his cronies -- you no longer have the right to call yourselves "pro-life."  What you are is pro-birth, because you don't seem to give a flying rat's ass what happens to kids after they're born.  What, do a person's rights begin at conception and end at birth?  Oh, to be fair, if they're the babies of straight white wealthy Christian conservatives, you're just thrilled to pieces.  But anyone else?  You've advocated reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits to feed low-income children.  You've voted to cut Head Start, which gives underprivileged children better access to early education.  This government's ICE thugs deported three children who had birthright citizenship (which, allow me to point out, is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution), including one with stage 4 cancer.  And as far as the proposed elimination of support for LGBTQ+ teenagers -- well, let me put it this way.

You fucking frightened little MAGA types, we are not trying to turn straight kids into queer kids.  We're trying to make sure queer kids don't turn into dead kids.

But deep inside, you know that, don't you?  You know queerness isn't a choice, because when you hit puberty, you didn't sit down and "choose to be straight."  Your support for this kind of government is based on hate, pure and simple.  So I misspoke earlier; Trump's elimination of a suicide hotline for queer youth isn't pointless.

The cruelty is the point.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Allow me to get personal, here.  I was one of those queer kids who almost did turn into a dead kid.  Twice.  I attempted suicide when I was 17, and again when I was 20.  There was no safety net for me, and I came damn close to succeeding.  My mom felt like the appropriate thing to do was ignore it.  Her take on things was a dismissive, "What do you have to be sad about?"  It was never talked about; to my knowledge, no one besides her and my dad ever knew about it.  Both times were during summer, so there weren't even missed school days to red-flag anyone.

But if I hadn't gotten scared, and had taken the whole bottle of sleeping pills rather than just a handful, I wouldn't be here right now.

My depression, and my suicide attempts, were not solely about being a closeted queer kid in a place and time where coming out would have put my safety at significant risk.  My childhood, looked at from the outside, seemed pretty placid, but from the inside... well, let's just say that depressed people are chameleons, and so are emotional abusers.  I never felt safe, not for a single moment, neither at home nor at school.  And when I hit those catastrophic downward-spiral points at 17 and 20, I felt like I just wanted out, permanently, whatever it took.

If I had had someone I could have trusted to reach out to -- a counselor, a sympathetic adult, someone on the other end of a hotline -- my life would have played out very, very differently.  I might not have come so very close to ending it.

And the fact that Trump and his cronies want to pull that safety net away from this generation of queer young people is cruelty for cruelty's sake.

So Trump supporters: don't you ever, ever in my presence call yourselves "pro-life" again.  Not until you disavow the vicious and ugly attacks this administration is making against the most vulnerable of us.  Maybe you should revisit the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, in that book you profess to care so much about:  "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'  The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

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Attitude conversion

Here's a hypothetical for you.

There's a therapeutic practice being proposed for widespread use.  It has the following drawbacks:

• its use is strongly correlated with long-term PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation.
• over half of the patients recommended for this practice are referred not by medical professionals, but by religious leaders.
• it has been denounced by every major medical organization.
• it has very close to a zero percent success rate.

Would you support the approval of this practice?

I devoutly hope the answer is "no," but unfortunately, this is no hypothetical or "proposed practice," it's already being used.  It's "conversion therapy" -- an attempt to "convert" LGBTQ+ people, many of them teenagers, into a straight cis identity.

And the word "convert" softens the impact of what the practice actually consists of.  Because its advocates don't want to use more accurate words like "bully" and "cajole" and "harass" and "subject to emotional abuse."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bojan Cvetanović, Rainbow flag ("Progress" variant by Daniel Quasar) at EuroPride 2019 (Vienna), CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in The Lancet Psychiatry, which lays out in no uncertain terms the dangers of this practice.  "Our study found an association between recall of conversion practices and symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide," said study lead author Nguyen Tran, of Stanford University.  "In particular, we saw the greatest harms in people who had been exposed to both types of conversion practices — those addressing sexual orientation and gender identity.  This study highlights the need for policy changes at a federal, state and local level, and an understanding of the lasting mental health impacts related to conversion practices."

The whole thing rests on the old idea that sexual identity and orientation are things you can change -- i.e., the ridiculous idea that "it's a choice."  With the tacit part being that queerness is a bad choice, or (to take the religious approach) a sin.  As a trans student of mine said some years ago, "How does that even make sense?  Who the hell would choose this?  To face ridicule and non-acceptance on a daily basis, and in some places, be in danger of injury, imprisonment, or death?  You have to be an idiot to believe that we're choosing this."

And, of course, the people who are straight never seem to be able to answer the question of when and how they decided on their sexual orientation.  I'd bet you cold hard cash you couldn't find a single one who sat down at age fourteen and thought, "Hmmm... guys or girls?  Guys or girls?  How will I ever decide?"

Speaking as a queer man, all I can say is believe me, I tried to change who I was.  I grew up in not only a devoutly Roman Catholic household, but one so uptight it almost beggars belief, and in one of the most conservative, homophobic areas of the United States.  When I was growing up I can barely remember my parents ever saying the word "sex."  Sex, and sexual desire (of any kind), were not something to be enjoyed and celebrated, but were nothing but an embarrassed necessity for procreating.  When it was time for The Talk I was handed a book that explained the mechanics (a book which, by the way, labeled queerness as "a mental illness").  The result: I tried like hell to erase from my brain all the same-sex attraction I felt.  Didn't work, of course, because it never does.  So I simply hid, in shame and fear and self-loathing.

For almost fifty years.

So even though I was never put through the hell of conversion therapy, the Tran et al. research is hardly a surprise to me.  And the fact that we don't have a nationwide ban on this practice is downright criminal -- and provides yet more evidence of the stranglehold religion has on the United States, to the point that religious considerations trump evidence, data, and the health and safety of American citizens.

"The preponderance of evidence indicates that conversion practices are related to negative mental health effects," Tran said.  "There is a greater need for mental health support among survivors of conversion practices.  Other studies that have explored this suggest that helping LGBTQIA+ people find supportive LGBTQIA+ networks, access affirming mental health care, and rebuild their self-esteem and embrace their gender identity or sexual orientation are important for addressing the negative mental health related to conversion practice."

It's attitudes that need to be converted, not people's sexual identity.

People are enraged about the non-issue of children being given sex-change operations on a whim -- like Donald Trump's idiotic lie, "The transgender thing is incredible.  Think of it.  Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.  The school decides what’s going to happen with your child."  (I worked in a school for 32 years, and trust me, school nurses are not equipped to do surgery.  And nothing in a school happens apropos of a child's health without parental consent, unless it's a life-or-death emergency.  Nothing.)  

So if you want to be furious about something, how about choosing something real, something that actually does demonstrable and long-lasting harm?

And then take that fury and turn it into something useful -- working to ban forever a practice that does irreparable damage to the mental health of one of the most vulnerable minorities.

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The least of these

A friend of mine quipped that Republicans are the party that believes your rights begin at conception and end at birth.

Yeah, I know, I know, "not all Republicans."  But looking at the behavior of the GOP elected officials, it's hard not to come to that conclusion.  Across the nation, they're known for eliminating programs to combat poverty, reducing jobless benefits, blocking mandates for life-saving vaccines, and cutting funding for education.  But if you needed more proof of how anti-life this party has become, look no further than the removal from the Texas child welfare website of a page offering resources to LGBTQ youth, specifically ways to cope with discrimination and avoid self-harm.

The removal was due to pressure from former state Senator Don Huffines, currently campaigning for the GOP nomination for governor.  As such, Huffines is doing his best to paint his opponent, current Governor Greg Abbott, as a closet liberal.  "These are not Texas values, these are not Republican party values, but these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values, that’s why we need a change, that’s what my campaign’s about," Huffines said.  "We aren’t surprised that state employees who are loyal to Greg Abbott had to scramble after we called their perverse actions out.  I promised Texans I would get rid of that website, and I kept that promise."

This makes me so angry I'm actually feeling nauseated.  LGBTQ youth face struggles that most cis-straight children never do.  A survey this year by the Trevor Project found that 42% of LGBTQ teenagers have "seriously considered suicide."  They are four times more likely to go through with it.  "State agencies know that LGBTQ+ kids are overrepresented in foster care and they know they face truly staggering discrimination and abuse," said Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas.  "The state is responsible for these kids’ lives, yet it actively took away a resource for them when they are in crisis.  What’s worse, this was done at the start of Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month."

The most horrifying part of all this -- and there's a lot to choose from -- is that most of the people who support Huffines and others like him are self-professed devout Christians, who follow a guy who said, "Then [God] will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in,  I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'  They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'  He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"

Apparently what Jesus actually said was, "Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me, as long as the least of these were also cis-straight-white-Christian-conservative Americans.  The rest of y'all can go fuck yourselves."

I know it's unlikely Huffines will ever read this, and if he did, it's even less likely it'd make any difference.  Huffines and his ilk revel in their reputations as callous, anti-humanitarian hardasses.  As Adam Serwer said, "the cruelty is the point."

But I don't know how anyone who claims to follow a compassionate God isn't sickened by bullshit like this.  So let me end with this: the Suicide Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  If you're considering harming yourself, reach out -- there are people who can help.  You are not alone; a great many people have gone through this, and considered suicide, and understand where you are.  (I'm one of them.)

It is also probably worthwhile getting the hell out of Texas as soon as you can.

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During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die.  (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen?  The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left.  They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410.  But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting.  In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.  

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book.  It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mental health priorities

What do you hear about more on the news, homicides in the United States, or suicides in the United States?

Unless you're watching drastically different news media than I do, you answered "homicide."  The media, and many people in the government, harp continuously on how dangerous our cities are, how we're all terribly vulnerable, and how you need to protect yourself.  This, of course, plays right into the narrative of groups like the NRA, whose bread and butter is convincing people they're unsafe.

Now, don't get me wrong; there are dangerous places in the United States and elsewhere.  And I'm not arguing against -- hell, I'm not even addressing -- the whole issue of gun ownership and a person's right to defend him or herself.  But the sense in this country that homicide is a huge problem and suicide is largely invisible reflects a fundamental untruth.

Because in the United States, suicide is almost three times more common than homicide.  The most recent statistics on homicide is that there are 5.3 homicides per 100,000 people.  Not only is this lower than the global average (which in 2016 was 7.3 violent deaths per 100,000 people), it has been declining steadily since 1990.

Suicide, on the other hand?  The current rate is 13.0 suicides per 100,000 people, and unlike homicide, the rate has been steadily increasing.  Between 1999 and 2014, the suicide rate in the United States went up by 24%.

It's appalling that most Americans don't know this.  A study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington, Northeastern University, and Harvard University showed that the vast majority of United States citizens rank homicide as a far higher risk than suicide.

"This research indicates that in the scope of violent death, the majority of U.S. adults don't know how people are dying," said Erin Morgan, lead author and doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.  "Knowing that the presence of a firearm increases the risk for suicide, and that firearm suicide is substantially more common than firearm homicide, may lead people to think twice about whether or not firearm ownership and their storage practices are really the safest options for them and their household...  The relative frequencies that respondents reported didn't match up with the state's data when we compared them to vital statistics.  The inconsistency between the true causes and what the public perceives to be frequent causes of death indicates a gap in knowledge."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wildengamuld, Free Depression Stock Image, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This further highlights the absurdity of our abysmal track record for mental health care.  Political careers are made over stances on crime reduction.  How many politicians even mention mental health policy as part of their platform?

The result is that even a lot of people who have health insurance have lousy coverage for mental health services.  Medications like antipsychotics and anxiolytics are expensive and often not covered, or only are partially covered.  I have a friend who has delayed getting on (much-needed) antidepressants for years -- mostly because of the difficulty of finding a qualified psychiatrist who can prescribe them, the fact that his health insurance has piss-poor mental health coverage, and the high co-pay on the medication itself.

No wonder the suicide rate is climbing.  Dealing with mental health is simply not a national priority.

It's time to turn this around.  Phone your local, state, and federal representatives.  My guess is that at least some part of the inaction is not deliberate; I'll bet that just as few of them know the statistics on suicide and homicide as the rest of the populace.

But once we know, it's time to act.  As study co-author Erin Morgan put it, "We know that this is a mixture of mass and individual communication, but what really leads people to draw the conclusions that they do?  If people think that the rate of homicide is really high because that's what is shown on the news and on fictional TV shows, then these are opportunities to start to portray a more realistic picture of what's happening."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Take my hand

Today I'm going to take a detour from my usual fare and tell you about a former student of mine, a young man named Justin.

I first met Justin in my Critical Thinking class, almost two years ago.  He struck me right away as the thoughtful type (in both senses of the word).  He was quiet, friendly, and kind, and always was the first one to laugh at my jokes (which may speak to his kindness as well).  As the semester progressed, he was more and more willing to contribute to class discussions, and what he said never failed to be articulate, interesting, and well-considered.

He tuned in right away on my obsession with UFOs and Bigfoot (not that hard to discern, really, considering the various Roswell-and-Sasquatch-related paraphernalia strewn about my classroom).  He started ferreting out good examples of goofy paranormal claims -- I used more than one of his finds as a basis for a Skeptophilia post -- and I still remember when he took me up on my offer to the class of an optional assignment to use PhotoShop to make the most convincing fake paranormal photograph they could.  His submission -- a wildly creepy double exposure that looked like a ghost floating over a country road -- stayed on my wall for the rest of the year.

So I was glad to see that he'd signed up for my AP Biology class this past school year.  He continued in much the same fashion, participating in a quiet, understated sort of way, coming in early to discuss the latest science fiction movies, asking good questions.  Not a boy who was a splashy presence, but someone who was steady, smart, and pleasant, the kind of student most teachers would love to fill a class with.

Justin graduated from high school six days ago.  I saw him that Thursday evening, laughing with some friends in their caps and gowns, and he asked me to take their picture with his cellphone.

That was the last time I saw him.  Three days ago, Justin committed suicide.

My first thought, when a colleague called me up at 9:30 Monday night to tell me the news, was, "How could I have missed the signs?"  Justin never exhibited the slightest sign of depression to me.  No moodiness, no sudden disinterest in classwork, no distancing himself from friends.  All year long, he was the same constant, easy-going person, almost always with a smile on his face.

Of course, I know from first hand experience that my reaction was ridiculous.  Since his death, I've heard from a couple of colleagues that he'd had bouts of depression, had contemplated suicide, but in the past months had seemed so much better.  One friend, who was especially close to him, said, "I honestly thought he was in the clear."

So did we all.  But we depressives are chameleons.  It's what we do best.  And I use "we" deliberately; I've had serious depression and anxiety as long as I can remember, and until I went public with it -- I first blogged on my own personal struggles about four years ago -- I'd bank on the fact that no one knew.  I never missed work, never seemed down, never did a sudden radio silence.  If anything, people described me as dependable and reliable, and most of all, competent.  I never acted as if I needed help.

The truth, of course, is that a good part of the time, it was a struggle even getting myself to work.  Once there, I put the happy-mask on -- because I was expected to.  Taking charge is part of my job.  Even when I was at my lowest, during the breakup of my (all things considered) disaster of a first marriage, hardly anyone knew what was going on.  To admit it, in my depressive state, was somehow to give it more reality.  Easier to pretend it didn't exist, that my life was just hunky-dory, thank you very much.

So it's not to be wondered at that a lot of us didn't know what was going on with Justin.  Still... I wish I had.  Maybe had someone known, we could have made a difference.  I know hindsight is 20/20, and all that, but suicides always leave the survivors playing out what-if scenarios, as pointless as they are, as unfair as they are to everyone concerned.

But it does highlight that it's absolutely critical we look after each other.  Our society has taught us that going it alone is some kind of virtue, that to ask for help is to appear weak or needy.  We pretend we're fine when we're falling apart, and our closest friends often don't know.

So reach out to the people around you.  Treat people with compassion, even those who don't seem to deserve it; sometimes those are the ones who need it most.  Don't forget to check in with the strong ones, the competent ones, the quiet-but-steady ones, who may not be showing you what they're really feeling -- not until you push them to dig deeper.

And don't forget the Suicide Prevention Lifeline Number, 1-800-273-8255.  If you're hurting, and it seems like you can't keep going, give them a call.  If you have a friend or family member who is in crash-and-burn mode and don't know how to help them, give them a call.  Don't go it alone.  You don't need to.

Because -- as I found out in my case, having attempted suicide twice, once when I was 17 and once when I was 20, when things looked completely hopeless -- the only thing suicide ensures is that things won't get better.  Whatever's gone wrong for you, you can survive it, if you're willing to put out your hand and say, "Please help me up."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I always try to remember the adage that a family friend told me when I was six.  I was whinging about some classmate that I didn't like, and this friend -- instead of commiserating -- bowled me over by saying, "Always treat people with more kindness than you think you need to, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."  I've never forgotten it.

And to Justin, who lost his terrible battle three days ago: I will always remember you as a kind young man with a fine mind and a ready smile.  I, and your friends and family, will miss you dearly.  I wish I could have helped you, but perhaps, if your life and death push someone else to reach out for help, it won't have entirely been in vain.

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This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

Psychedelic uplift

In a study released last week by a team of psychologists working at the University of British Columbia, we find that in an extensive survey of 1,266 men from the ages of 16 to 70, guys who had used psychedelic drugs (specifically LSD or psilocybin) had a statistically significant lower likelihood of abusing their partners.

In "Psychedelic Use and Intimate Partner Violence: The Role of Emotion Regulation," by Michelle S. Thiessen, Zach Walsh, Brian M. Bird, and Adele Lafrance, the authors write:

Males reporting any experience using lysergic acid diethylamide and/or psilocybin mushrooms had decreased odds of perpetrating physical violence against their current partner (odds ratio=0.42, p<0.05).  Furthermore, our analyses revealed that male psychedelic users reported better emotion regulation when compared to males with no history of psychedelic use.  Better emotion regulation mediated the relationship between psychedelic use and lower perpetration of intimate partner violence.

Given the role of psychedelics in changing levels of activity of serotonin -- a major mood-regulating neurotransmitter -- it's unsurprising that this correlation exists.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons: This image was created by user Caleb Brown (Joust) at Mushroom Observer, a source for mycological images.You can contact this user here., 2013-10-22 Psilocybe cyanescens Wakef 378614, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is more surprising is that apparently, it only takes one use.  Consider, too, that one use of another psychedelic drug -- ketamine -- has been found to relieve many cases of intractable depression, acting in as little as thirty minutes and providing dramatic improvements that last for months.

If you've checked out the links, you may have noticed that none of these studies took place in the United States.  The first one was done (as I mentioned) in Canada; the research on ketamine was the result of two studies done in China.  Here in the United States it's extraordinarily difficult even for neuroscientists to obtain permission to experiment with psychotropic drugs, and there's been strong resistance to easing up these regulations by a group I can only describe as being the Morality Police.  Odd, isn't it, that alcohol -- a clearly mood-altering drug that is responsible for (by estimates from the National Institute of Health) 88,000 deaths yearly -- is legal.  Tobacco, which kills even more than that, is not only legal but is federally subsidized.

Psychedelics are unequivocally illegal in all fifty states.  At least some motion forward has happened with marijuana, which has been known for years not only to be effective for pain relief in terminal cancer patients, but has shown promise as an anti-anxiety medication.  The problem seems to be that marijuana and psychedelics have both become associated with recreational use, and I guess there's a sense that therapeutic agents shouldn't be fun.

I dunno.  Maybe there's a better reason, but if so I've never been able to figure it out.  It seems to me that careful administration of chemicals that can potentially alleviate depression and anxiety shouldn't be dependent on people moralizing about what amounts to this century's version of Demon Rum.

This is brought into sharper relief by the suicide last week of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Depression is reaching epidemic proportions.  I use the word "epidemic" deliberately, and not as hyperbole.  Another study, released just three days ago by the US Center for Disease Control, has found that since 1999 there's been a thirty percent increase in suicides in the United States.  Only one state -- Nevada -- had a decrease, and that was by only one percent.  Twelve states had an increase of between 38% and 58%.  The result -- suicide has become the third highest cause of death, and is so frequent it's actually contributed to a statistically significant drop in American life expectancy.

This is a personal one for me.  As I've mentioned before in Skeptophilia, I've suffered from moderate to severe depression and serious social anxiety for as long as I can recall.  The depression is being controlled reasonably well by medication; the anxiety is still a work in progress.  But if I could knock out my depression -- potentially get off antidepressants permanently -- by one hit of ketamine, one use of LSD or psilocybin -- I'd do it in a heartbeat.  And I'd like to hear, if any of my readers are in the no-way-no-how column of the legalization controversy, a cogent argument about why I should not be allowed to do that.

Interestingly, I was asked that very question by one of my oldest friends, even before the tragic suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Would I be willing to try it?  Would I do so even before it was legalized?  My answer was an unequivocal yes.  Given a reasonable dosage, and friends to make sure I didn't do anything stupid while high, what exactly would be the risk?  Speaking perfectly honestly, if a 57-year-old middle-class science nerd with no social life had any access to the chemicals in question, I'd already have done it.

Perhaps we're waking up, though.  Like I said, there is an increasing push to legalize certain drugs, and that's encouraging.  (Nota bene: I'm not saying these drugs should be completely unregulated.  There are very good reasons for keeping them away from children, and for making sure that they're not used before someone gets behind the wheel of a car.  But if we can handle those challenges with alcohol, we can handle them with other chemicals.)  It's to be hoped that we'll see reason -- and potentially do something to alleviate the suffering of people whose illnesses have heretofore been essentially untreatable.

And maybe, in the process, reduce some of those suicide numbers, which are absolutely horrifying.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.

Responses to suicide

There's nothing like the tragic death of a celebrity to bring out the worst in humanity.

I'm talking about the suicide of Robin Williams, of course, and in my first statement I'm guilty of Overgeneralizing Because I'm Pissed Off.  There have been a great many beautiful tributes, both by public figures and by Williams' fans, mourning the loss of a brilliant comic and sympathizing with the heartbreak his family is experiencing.  I have seen many use this as an opportunity to make a statement about the devastating nature of depression, and encouraging those contemplating suicide to consider other options.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But man, does this kind of thing bring out the jerks.

Starting with our friends over at the Westboro Baptist Church, which I thought had more or less fallen apart after the death of Fred Phelps.  But no, they're still going strong, and sending out their edifying messages to all and sundry.  And yesterday they announced that they're planning on picketing Robin Williams' funeral because he was a "fag pimp" for creating positive portrayals of gay men in movies.

We'd expect that kind of thing from them, though.  These people are light years from anything resembling human compassion, so such a move is hardly surprising.  Equally unsurprising is the reaction of conspiracy theorists such as noted wingnut Mark Dice, who claims that Williams didn't commit suicide, but was "sacrificed by the Illuminati."

But none of that really bothers me, other than on a purely superficial level.  Wackos will be wackos, after all.  I'm bothered far more deeply by people who are coldly, callously using Williams' death to make a political or philosophical point.  Let's start with Kevin Burke, over at the anti-abortion site Life News, who is claiming that Williams' depression was caused by the fact that his girlfriend had had an abortion back in the 1970's:

Many are aware that Williams struggled for years with serious addiction issues.  However a lesser known fact is that one of those demons was an abortion that took place in the 1970’s...  Is there a relationship between Robin William’s descent into drug addiction and depression that began in the 1970’s and his past abortion?  Williams said in an interview in The Guardian in 2008, “You know, I was shameful…You do stuff that causes disgust, and that’s hard to recover from.  You can say, ‘I forgive you’ and all that stuff, but it’s not the same as recovering from it."  Williams may have been making a thinly veiled reference to what society tells us does not exist…his post abortion trauma and complicated grief.

Then there was P. Z. Myers, whose blog Pharyngula I actually used to like, who decided to use Williams' suicide to make a point about how biased media coverage is:

I’m sorry to report that comedian Robin Williams has committed suicide, an event of great import and grief to his family.  But his sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people.  I mean, really: young 18 year old black man gunned down for walking in the street vs. 63 year old white comedian killing himself?  Which of those two stories gives you an excuse to play heart-warming and funny video clips non-stop on your 24 hour news channel?...  Boy, I hate to say it, but it sure was nice of Robin Williams to create such a spectacular distraction.

He's right, of course, about media bias.  But putting it this way, P. Z., doesn't make you acerbic or cutting-edge or clever, it just makes you an insensitive asshole.

But no one pissed me off worse than prominent Christian blogger Matt Walsh.  Not, of course, the first time this has happened.  And actually, he started off well enough:

The death of Robin Williams is significant not because he was famous, but because he was human, and not just because he left this world, but particularly because he apparently chose to leave it. 

Suicide. 

A terrible, monstrous atrocity.  It disturbs me in a deep, visceral, indescribable way. Of course it disturbs most people, I would assume.  Indeed, we should fear the day when we wake up and decide we aren’t disturbed by it anymore.

But take a look at how he ended the piece:

(W)e can debate medication dosages and psychotherapy treatments, but, in the end, joy is the only thing that defeats depression.  No depressed person in the history of the world has ever been in the depths of despair and at the heights of joy at the same time.  The two cannot coexist.  Joy is light, depression is darkness.  When we are depressed, we have trouble seeing joy, or feeling it, or feeling worthy of it.  I know that in my worst times, at my lowest points, it’s not that I don’t see the joy in creation, it’s just that I think myself too awful and sinful a man to share in it.

Seriously?  That's your suggestion to the depressed, that they should just "feel joyful?"  His statement "joy is the only thing that defeats depression" is like saying that "the only thing that defeats cancer is not having cancer."  He says, earlier in his blog, "(B)efore I’m accused of being someone who 'doesn’t understand,' let me assure you that I have struggled with this my entire life."

I don't know about you, but it sure as hell sounds to me like he doesn't understand.  His shallow and thoughtless piece minimizes the anguish suffered by tens of thousands, and once again falls back on the old, horrible trope that people who are depressed "just aren't trying hard enough."

Let me be perfectly open here.  I have suffered from moderate to severe depression my entire adult life.  I have only once been in the depths to the point that I actually had the pile of sleeping pills in my hand, a glass of water on my nightstand.  I didn't follow through with it for one reason only; I was scared.

I'm glad I didn't, of course.  Because you can get through depression, you can deal with it, even though it never really is completely defeated.  Through many long years of therapy and the support of my family and friends, I'm doing okay.  But depression is a murderous bitch, no respecter of fame, fortune, or stature, that robs life of its spark and saps your energy and makes everything look gray.  I wish Robin Williams had found his way out of that dark place; his choice to end his life is especially wrenching considering the joy he gave to millions.

But I do understand it.  I've been there.  And I have nothing but empathy for what he went through, and my heart breaks for what his family is enduring.

So to the people like Matt Walsh, whose ridiculous assessments downplay the real struggles the mentally ill experience; to P. Z. Myers and Kevin Burke, who heartlessly sank their claws into Williams' suicide as a way of scoring a philosophical point; and even to wackos like Mark Dice and the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who are using the whole thing to bolster their bizarre worldviews... to them I only have one thing to say.

Shut the fuck up.

Islam and the fatwa against Mars One

Sometimes I run into a story that infuriates the absolute hell out of me.

Most of the time, I can maintain a sense of perspective about things, even if they frustrate me.  Despite my often strongly-worded missives here on Skeptophilia about the illogic of certain claims, very little of it gets me truly angry.

Yesterday, though, I ran into a story at The Register that raised my blood pressure into the "incipient aneurysm" zone.  The subject of it was a fatwa issued by group of Muslim clerics -- preventing observant Muslims from participating in the Mars One mission.

[image of the Martian surface courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, on first glance, this isn't surprising.  Traditional Islam isn't known for its progressive stance with respect to science.  (Contrast that to Islam in the Middle Ages -- when they were the shining lights of reason and rationalism and experimental inquiry.)  But it becomes more interesting -- and infinitely more absurd -- when you find out why the fatwa was issued.

"Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam," read part of a statement from a committee appointed by the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowment, as reported in The Khaleej Times.  "There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death."

Dr. Farooq Hamada, president of the GAIAE, went on to say, "Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Qu'ran: Do not kill yourselves or one another."

Now wait just a second, here.  Seriously?  You're concerned about observant Muslims joining what could turn out to be a suicide mission, and so your response is to issue a fatwa against the Mars One mission?

How about issuing a fatwa against suicide bombers?  Or the Muslims who are right now slaughtering each other in Syria?  Or "honor killings?"  What about the fact that seven of the top ten countries, in terms of numbers of executions, are Yemen, Iran, Syria, Libya, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, and in those countries the execution methods include public hanging, beheading, and stoning?  The Muslim world has a few bigger problems at the moment than the chance that some observant Muslim might end up on a mission that could end with the deaths of the participants.

Oh, but wait!  Coming together, as a unified voice, against any of that other stuff would be controversial.  That would require the hidebound, patriarchal, tribal-minded leadership to reconsider some of what their devout adherents are actually doing.  It might even require them to say, "You know that violent, brutal, inhumane shit that we've accepted for all of these years?  That stuff is wrong.  It's always been wrong, but we've been too cowardly to say it.  So you people need to knock it off."

To be fair, there was a fatwa issued against terrorism, back in 2010.  It was hailed as a landmark by press in the west -- and then promptly forgotten.  Ever heard a leader of any Muslim country mention it?  Have you noticed a decrease in violence in the Middle East in the last four years?

Didn't think so.

It's possible that if the leaders of all of the Muslim countries -- and that includes the religious leaders, since politics and religion in most Muslim countries are so entangled as to be inseparable -- said, with one voice, that killing others would condemn the killer to hell, that some of it would stop.  At least, perhaps, it might slow down the killings that are motivated by Islam itself, the ones that are acts of violence committed in the name of some twisted notion of sanctity and purity and holiness, where all too often the victims are random strangers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But that's not going to happen.  It's much easier to go around issuing fatwas against distant eventualities (Mars One, even if it succeeds, isn't going to depart for the Red Planet until 2023) than it is to change present evils that have been accepted without question by the leadership up to this point.  It's much easier to give lip service to "protecting life against all dangers" than it is to demand that the people here and now who are raping and murdering cease and desist.

You have to wonder, don't you, what would happen if all the religious leaders of the world finally stood up for human rights?  I'm no apologist for the Catholic Church, but I have to admit that Pope Francis has made some real strides in that direction.  But the others?  Not so much.  Most of them are too busy worrying about who is having sex with whom to deal with the issues of how their followers are infringing on the basic rights of their fellow humans.  And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the Muslim leaders are about the worst offenders in this regard.

I don't know how much this blog gets read in Muslim countries.  Not much, is my guess.  But you never know.  And so I'll issue this challenge: if you really claim to follow the Qu'ran, then the verse that Dr. Hamada quoted should be taken at its face value.  Your leaders need to demand, now, that all of the murders and suicide bombings and honor killings and public executions stop.  All along, they have tacitly supported a worldview that allows people to claim that they are observant Muslims, approved by Allah, and are headed to heaven, while simultaneously hurting or killing others (and sometimes themselves).

Maybe you could change that.  Turn your religion into a force for good.  Leave aside useless gestures like objecting to missions to Mars, and deal with the problems that some of your followers are causing here and now.

To do any less is pure hypocrisy.

Flipping over "Flappy Bird"

I am astonished, sometimes, at how little it takes to generate a conspiracy theory.

Of course, at the bottom of it always has to be someone who is (1) delusional or (2) lying.  Or possibly (3) both.  In some few cases, we are able to figure out where the whole thing started (and as I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's frequently either The Daily Mail or The Weekly World News).  But more often, it's a random comment, claim, tweet, or Facebook posting by a random person, which somehow... improbably... gets picked up, is considered to be true, and goes viral.

That seems to be the case with the most recent conspiracy theory -- one that is only days old.  And wait till you hear what this one is about.

"Flappy Bird."

Yes, Flappy Bird, the new app that induces you to waste inordinate amounts of time trying to maneuver a deformed-looking bird through a set of steel pipes.  The game that generates nearly homicidal rage in completely ordinary, mild-mannered individuals when they almost complete level 8 only to run smack into a pipe because they tapped one too many times on the screen.

Flappy Bird was, for some reason, wildly successful, at its peak bringing in $50,000 of revenue a day.  This, by itself, caused suspicious narrowing of the eyes amongst the serious conspiracy theorists, who see dastardly plots wherever they look; but the real crazy talk didn't start until the news two days ago that Flappy Bird's creator, Vietnamese game designer Dong Nguyen, had removed the app from the market.

Within hours, rumors started circulating about why Nguyen had pulled such a lucrative game.  After all, having a blockbuster app is to game designers what having a bestseller and a movie contract would be to us novelists; "success."  It seemed impossible to believe that Nguyen had done it for the reason he stated, which was that he was overstressed by the game's wild success and "needed some peace."  Another suggestion was that "a major game manufacturer" had put pressure on Nguyen because the game resembled apps that they owned the rights to -- also possible, but at this time unsubstantiated.

But that was only scratching the surface, and both of those read like scientific text, plausibility-wise, compared to the claims currently zinging around the internet.  Here are just a few rumors I've seen:

• Flappy Bird was a Trojan Horse; while you are focused on guiding birds into steel pipes, it's stealing personal information from your computer.  Nguyen pulled it when Interpol realized what he was doing, and he's now on the run from the law.
• Flappy Bird has code in it that includes subliminal messages, rendering you a mindless automaton.  Given some of the behavior I've seen of students playing it, I'm not sure this is far off the mark.  But the game was withdrawn because the Illuminati threatened Nguyen, apparently because we can only have one set of Evil Brain-Stealing Overlords in the world at a time.
• Flappy Bird is a coded message having to do with the apocalypse.  Nguyen was trying to warn us of the arrival of the Antichrist, for some reason using a bizarre bird and pipes.  The order of the heights of the pipes can be decoded to tell us the date of the opening of the Gates of Hell.  Nguyen withdrew the game when he realized that the Minions of Satan had figured out what he was up to.

Then, the whole thing took an even more surreal turn when the rumor started flying about that Nguyen had not only withdrawn the app from the market, but had withdrawn himself as well, via a self-inflicted pistol shot to the head.  I was told this by some students this afternoon, and already there is an International Business Times article declaring that the story about his suicide is untrue, and further tweets and Facebook posts stating that either (1) yes, it is so true, or (2) okay, so it isn't true, but he's on the run so it could be true soon, or (3) Nguyen has disappeared, so we don't know if it's true or not.

And the whole time I'm reading this, I'm thinking: what the hell is wrong with you people?  How about let's see if we can find out some facts before we make pronouncements about why Nguyen withdrew the app, and whether or not he's still alive?

But as to Flappy Bird's purpose: as far as I can tell, it mostly exists to irritate the bejeezus out of everyone who attempts to play it.  I have yet to hear anyone say, "Wow, that is a fun game!"  Mostly what people say after finishing a game is unprintable, and is often followed by a wireless internet device flying across a room and crashing into a solid object, much like the bird did on the second pipe of Level 1 during my one and only attempt to play the game.

So I doubt if any of the other stuff is true, and my intuition is that Dong Nguyen is probably still alive.  But myself, I'm willing to wait to find out.  And until then: just calm down, okay?

And next time, can you spin a conspiracy theory around something more plausible?  Because this one kind of sucked.  If you people are right, and the Illuminati and/or the Antichrist have sunk to communicating via coded messages in idiotic computer games, then I'd just as soon throw my lot in with InfoWars and have done with it.