Salon.com > Rehab

Steubenville rapists can be saved

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

When the lawyer for Ma’lik Richmond, one of the two teens convicted in the Steubenville rape case, went on "The Piers Morgan Show" Tuesday night and said his client would appeal the verdict, he sounded, well, like a rape apologist. It was unfair for Richmond to be on a sex offender list, the lawyer, Walter Madison, had argued, because “I don't believe that a person at 75 years old should have to explain for something they did at 16 when scientific evidence would support your brain isn't fully developed.”

Incredulous, Morgan retorted, “I got three teenage sons and when you get to 16, 17 ... your brain's developed enough to know you shouldn't be raping girls."

But here's the thing: While Richmond and his fellow offender Trent Mays are justly being held accountable for their crimes, Madison was actually citing medical consensus.

“They have not completed their neurological development. That carries through until their early 20s,” says Elizabeth Letourneau, associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Health at Johns Hopkins and the director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. “They don't attend as much to the downside of what they're going to do as much as they attend to the pleasure or reward. Their brains are in fact different and cause them to behave differently.”

“Girls” recap: Acting on impulse

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:11:00 +0000

Being over the edge can actually be embarrassingly useful. It, like losing one's job, forces confrontations mere happenstance cannot easily achieve. In reasonable doses, it's the means by which we erode meaningless bonds, break people down to their elements, and collapse all the strictures polite society was designed to achieve.

BUT NOT QUITE YET.

As we begin this season's penultimate episode, we slide up into what I have begun to think of as a Dunhamian shot: the bed and bedroom seen from the side, like Freud's ideal diorama. In this bedroom are the yet-more-encoupled Nat (Natalia) and Adam, about to make love. We know this because Natalia says, “I'm ready to have sex now,” telling Adam “You've been really nice all week,” then laying out information and prohibitions, including “no soft touching” (takes her out of the moment) and coming outside (“I'm on the pill”). Though his expression is briefly inscrutable, Adam reacts to these proscriptions with relief. “I will do all of those things ... I like how clear you are with me.” How, responds Natalia beatifically, could a person do anything any other way?

What really goes on inside rehab

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:48:00 +0000

Anne M. Fletcher’s new book, Inside Rehab—out this week—is a no-holds-barred report on addiction treatment in America today. Fletcher, who struggled in the past with her own drinking problem, got involved in the rehab field a decade ago after writing Sober for Good, a book about long-term recovery. While only a brief section of Sober for Good focused on treatment, Fletcher was “astounded” by the shortcomings she discovered.

About five years later, a massive amount of media coverage focused on hot-mess celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, as they bounced in and out of pricey rehabs, stirring up misconceptions about addiction treatment. “I said, someone needs to write a book about what really goes on in rehab,” Fletcher tells me. Turns out that someone was her.