Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 357

Are Colleges Failing Their Mentally Ill Students?

Katie J.M. Baker investigates:

“Schools should encourage students to seek treatment. But a lot of policies I see involve excessive use of discipline and involuntary leaves of absence, and they discourage students from asking for the help they need,” says Karen Bower, a private attorney who specializes in disability discrimination cases in higher education. “Ultimately, that makes the campus less safe.”

Two large-scale studies found that around 10 percent of college student respondents had thought about suicide in the past year, but only 1.5 percent admitted to having made a suicide attempt. Combined with data from other studies, that suggests that the odds that a student with suicidal ideation – the medical term for suicidal thoughts – will actually commit suicide are 1,000 to 1. “Thus, policies that impose restrictions on students who manifest suicidal ideation will sweep in 999 students who would not commit suicide for every student who will end his or her life,” Paul S. Appelbaum writes in Law & Psychiatry: “Depressed? Get Out!”

“Colleges don’t want people who are suicidal around, so what’s supposed to happen to them?” says Ira Burnim, legal director of the D.C. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “We’re going to lock them in a bomb shelter?” Kicking students off campus for mental health issues typically does more harm than good by isolating them from their support systems when what they really need is stability and empathy, he says. Moreover, it’s often a completely unnecessary overreaction.

How Scientific Is Astrology?

Skeptical stargazers are increasingly rare:

[A] substantial minority of Americans, ranging from 31 to 45 percent depending on the year, say consider astrology either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific.” That’s bad enough—the NSF [National Science Foundation] report compares it with China, where 92 percent of the public does not believe in horoscopes—but the new evidence suggests we are also moving in the wrong direction. Indeed, the percentage of Americans who say astrology is scientifically bunk has been declining ever since a high point for astrology skepticism in 2004, when it hit 66 percent.

The recent increase in astrological credulity was most dramatic among those with less science education and less “factual knowledge,” NSF reported. In the latter group, there was a staggering 17 percentage point decline in how many people were willing to say astrology is unscientific, from 52 percent in 2010 to just 35 percent in 2012. Also apparently to blame are younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, where an actual majority considers astrology at least “sort of” scientific, and those aged 35 to 44. In 2010, 64 percent of this age group considered astrology totally bunk; in 2012, by contrast, only 51 percent did, a 13 percentage point change.

Previous Dish on horoscopes here, here, and here.

CB2 vs HIV

The Dish stumbles upon the Holy Grail:

The changes that THC produces in the gut a process formally known as “microbial translocation,” isn’t as complicated as it sounds. During HIV infection, one of the earliest effects is that the virus spreads rapidly throughout the body and kills a significant part of cells in the gut and intestine. This activity damages the gut in a way that allows the HIV to leak through the cell wall of the intestines and into the bloodstream.

When THC is introduced into this environment, it activates the CB2 receptors in the intestines to build new, healthy bacterial cells that block the virus from leaking through the cell walls. In other words, the body works hard to keep bad stuff in the intestines and the good stuff out.

Put another way: HIV kills the cells that protect the walls— THC brings them back. Reducing the amount of the virus in the lower intestines could then help keep uninfected people uninfected.

Frequency

Illustrated.

How It Feels To Slaughter Animals

Rhys Southan Bob Comis, who raises pigs for meat, confesses that “no matter how well it’s done, I can’t help but question the killing itself”:

In a well-managed, small-scale slaughterhouse, a pig is more or less casually standing there one second, and the next second it’s unconscious on the ground, and a few seconds after that it’s dead. As far as I can tell — and I’ve seen dozens of pigs killed properly — the pig has no experience of its own death. But I experience the full brunt of that death.

It’s not the sight of blood that troubles me, but the violence of the death throes. Livestock science would assure us that these convulsions are a sign of the pigs’ insensibility, but as a witness, it is almost impossible to believe that the pigs are not thrashing around because they are in pain. And then that sudden lifelessness of the body as it is mechanically hoisted into the air, shackled by a single hind leg. I don’t think anything could be done to make the deaths of the pigs weigh less heavily on me.

I think a lot of animal farmers have the same ethical struggles me, although I’m not sure how many struggle as intensely as I do. I believe this is likely the case with even non-corporate factory farmers. Feeling nothing strikes me as mildly sociopathic.

Previous Dish on farming livestock here, here, and here.

A Poem For Monday

“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” by Robert Hayden:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

dissolve in iridescence, become

illusive flesh of light

that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world

each of us has lost.

Here is the shadow of its joy.

(From The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher  1970 by Robert Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Painting of waterlilies by Claude Monet, circa 1915, via Wikimedia Commons)

What Do Marriage Equality And Capital Punishment Have In Common?

Scott Bland draws a parallel:

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision to suspend the state’s death penalty Tuesday fits into a national trend. Eight states in the past decade have rolled back the death penalty, an accelerated pace mimicking the rapidly changing public opinion surrounding same-sex marriage that started at the same time. Public opinion over these two cultural wedge issues of the 1990s has changed dramatically since that time. And in blue states, both public opinion and public policy have moved significantly since Bill Clinton said Democrats “should no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent” with capital punishment. (To prove he was tough on crime, Clinton left the campaign trail in 1992 to preside over the execution of convicted murderer Rickey Ray Rector.) Clinton also later signed the Defense of Marriage Act barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages two decades ago. Now, more than 100 million people live in states without the death penalty. …

Support for the death penalty for murders, which peaked at 80 percent in 1994, according to Gallup, has declined markedly since. The last time the polling company measured public opinion, in October, support was down to 60 percent, the lowest mark since the 1970s. While support for capital punishment trends downward, support for same-sex marriage has swung up at about the same rate, from 27 percent in 1996 to 54 percent last year, again according to Gallup.

Dick Cheney Has No Regrets, Ctd

A reader writes:

Permit this slow reflection from an avid Dish reader over many years, who has tended to skim your Sunday stuff. But two threads recently caught my eye and, as I pondered them over a lazy weekend, I’ve found myself (to the amazement of this life-long agnostic) pushed towards a re-appraisal of Original Sin.

First, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld: men who commit evil without “thinking much about it” (as you write) because it’s something “other people do.” Reflecting on this it suddenly struck me that Original Sin (which I’d long mocked as an absurdity) serves precisely as a prophylactic against this kind of complacency.

I’m no theologian, but an assumption that one is evil – because we are all inherently fallen – makes it one’s job as a human being to meditate on the evil (or, if you prefer the term, “error”) permanently inherent in oneself. Our obligation is to identify it and to try to root it out. Or at least (since rooting it out is by definition impossible) to moderate it, to channel it positively, to restrict it. Hence your passion for Pope Francis: “I am a sinner” is his first reply.

Nothing one can do, as a being born into sin, can be a “no brainer” (as Cheney describes his decision to permit waterboarding). A profoundly Christian obligation to meditate on his own evil would have led Cheney (and the grinning Rumsfeld) at least to the point of “wrestling with the choice” of whether to torture, as opposed to the glib certainty you, and so many of us, find, well, evil. (I guess there’s an argument that the deliberate choice of evil is morally worse than unreflecting self-deception … but we’ll leave that for another time.)

In other words – if I may be permitted briefly to mix religion and politics – Original Sin is a concept that liberals can embrace, from an epistemological if not a theological perspective. Perhaps after all it’s not something that should be “laundered out of our culture” (to quote today’s post on Sam Harris). We need Original Sin as a restraint against our arrogant – and possibly evil – self-certainty.

Another reader gives Cheney a civics lesson on Presidents’ Day:

The quote taken from Cheney reveals part of the problem in this thoughtless man’s life-long failure and/or inability to think. He said:

Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job, do what’s required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens.

But his job wasn’t to safeguard the United States of America. And it wasn’t even his job to safeguard the lives of American citizens. Presidents and Vice-Presidents do not swear to defend America or Americans. They swear that they will “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. The putative “no-brainer” would seem to become rather brain-intensive when this critical difference is taken into account.

To recap: No Constitutional obligation whatsoever to protect the borders, the soldiers, the buildings, or the people. On the other hand, an obligation to protect the Constitution that is as close to iron-clad and unambiguous as anything to be found in the document. He evidently never read the job description. The “honor” he sneers at is the entire point. It’s not one desideratum among many; it’s the only one.

Update from another reader, who doesn’t think it’s that simple:

Your smugly ill-informed “civics lesson”-giving reader has compelled me to do the unthinkable: stand up for Dick Cheney. (Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to shower afterwards.) To suggest that the job of the chief executive of the country does not include protecting its people and property is simply idiotic.

First, the presidential oath of office is not an exhaustive list of presidential duties. But even if it were, the oath is not limited to preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution. The first obligation of the oath is to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States” – protecting the Constitution is mentioned second as an additional obligation. The Office of the President of the United States, per Article II of the Constitution, includes wielding the “executive Power” of the federal government and being the Commander in Chief. Article II is, fortunately or unfortunately, silent about the contours of the “executive Power,” which is why we’re still debating the powers of the executive branch 225 years later. But as the first – and possibly the only universally agreed – role of the state is to be a “night watchman,” it is absolutely within the job description of the President and Vice President to protect citizens from enemies foreign and domestic.

None of this excuses Cheney or Rumsfeld, or the dime-store Eichmanns they employed, for torturing in violation of settled U.S. law and basic morality. I just can’t abide smug sermonizing by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and reification of the Constitution by people who can’t actually have read it. Thanks for letting me vent.

A Fuller Picture Of The Presidential Past

On a day that Americans typically celebrate with patriotism, Clarence Lusane calls attention to “a largely hidden and silenced black history of the U.S. presidency“:

George Washington’s stated antislavery convictions misaligned with his actual political behavior. While professing to abhor slavery and hope for its eventual demise, as president Washington took no real steps in that direction and in fact did everything he could to ensure that not one of the more than 300 people he owned could secure their freedom. During the 10 years of construction of the White House, George Washington spent time in Philadelphia where a law called the Gradual Abolition Act passed in 1780. It stated that any slaves brought into the state were eligible to apply for their freedom if they were there for longer than six months. To get around the law, Washington rotated the people working for him in bondage so that they were there for less than six months each. …

In textbooks and popular history, the White House is figuratively constructed as a repository of democratic aspirations, high principles, and ethical values. For many Americans, it is subversive to criticize the nation’s founders, the founding documents, the presidency, the president’s house, and other institutions that have come to symbolize the official story of the United States. It may be uncomfortable to give up long-held and even meaningful beliefs that in many ways build both collective and personal identities. However, erasing enslaved African Americans from the White House and the presidency presents a false portrait of our country’s history. If young people—and all the rest of us—are to understand a fuller, people’s history of the United States, they need to recognize that every aspect of early America was built on slavery.

Plato’s Cave-mation

Josh Jones spotlights a few video adaptations of Plato’s famous allegory:

The ever-flickering lights, the ever-present screen, the stupefied spectators immune to a larger reality and in need of sudden enlightenment—Plato’s allegory of the cave from Book VII of The Republic is a marketing department’s dream: it sums up an entire brand in a stock-simple parable that almost anyone can follow, one that lends itself to compellingly brief visual interpretations…. [T]he award-winning three-dimensional renderings of the prisoners and their nonstop nickelodeon in the Claymation Cave Allegory [above] offers dramatic close-ups of the chained prisoner’s faces and the hypnotic movement of firelight over the cave’s rock walls.