Salon.com > Rob Waters

AIDS: Why Africa suffers for the West’s sins

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:00:00 +0000

As a lens to explore the complex and deeply fraught relationship between Africa and the West, the AIDS epidemic is as revealing and disturbing as it gets. Born in colonial Africa and discovered in gay America, the devastating rise of AIDS has been fueled in no small part by the clash of cultures that played out over the past 130 years or so between Africa, Europe and the U.S. — and the rivers of resentment those conflicts have sown.

“Tinderbox,” an insightful new book from a journalist and an AIDS researcher, tells the story of the epidemic from its birth in colonial Congo — where it lingered undetected for decades — to its sudden spread around the globe in the 1980s, to its status today as the object of a global public health war directed from Washington and Geneva and targeting Africa, home to some 70 percent of all AIDS cases today.

Narrating this disturbing tale are Craig Timberg, former South Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, and Daniel Halperin, an epidemiologist, AIDS researcher and former advisor to the U.S. government’s anti-AIDS program. Timberg met Halperin in the middle of his five-year stint as the Post’s Johannesburg bureau chief and the two began exploring questions that had bothered Timberg since his arrival in South Africa.

The depressing toll of the Great Recession

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

In late 2009, as the unemployment rate in San Joaquin County, California, reached 18 percent and one in twelve homes were being foreclosed, two high school students in the town of Ripon, population 15,000, committed suicide within two months of each other. Over the next eighteen months, sixteen more teenagers around the county took their own lives, a not-uncommon occurrence that public health researchers refer to as “suicide contagion.”

Years of declining budgets had cut the number of counselors, nurses and psychologists in county schools, impairing the ability of individual districts to handle the needs of grieving students, parents and communities on their own. So school officials in cities like Ripon, Stockton, Lodi and Linden turned to each other for help.

The districts made use of a mutual aid pact they’d set up, like those employed by firefighters and police from the same region. On the morning after each death, school nurses and counselors trained in suicide response, along with a team of therapists from Valley Community Counseling, a local mental health agency, descended on the school the student had attended. They spent days, sometimes weeks, meeting with pupils and parents, focusing on kids who knew the victims or seemed at particular risk.

Therapists revolt against psychiatry’s bible

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Anyone who’s ever tried to get reimbursed by a health insurance company after seeing a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, or taking a child or teenager to one, has no doubt noticed the incomprehensible numbers that appear on the clinician’s statement, perhaps preceding some slightly less imponderable phrase.

Maybe you are a 296.22 (major depressive disorder, single episode, mild) or a 300.00 (anxiety disorder NOS--not otherwise specified). Hopefully, you are not a 301.83 (borderline personality disorder). Your kid might be a 313.81 (oppositional defiant disorder) or, more likely, a 314.01 (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type).

Since 1952, a tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, has been reducing to a few digits the psychological malady said to afflict a patient. This bible of mental health treatment, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), provides a list and description of every mental health condition known to—or invented by—psychiatry, from histrionic personality disorder (301.50) to transvestic fetishism (302.3).

My antidepressant made me do it!

Mon, 19 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It was May 1998, and comedian Phil Hartman and his wife, Brynn, were planning a party. Their son, Sean, was soon turning 10 and they wanted to make it special with a bash at Planet Hollywood. Brynn was inviting her son's friends, including some of his classmates from his school in Encino.

In mid-May she called Kathryn Alice, the mother of one of Sean's friends, to get her address. Sean and Calvin, Kathryn's son, played together and had visited each other's homes. Through their sons, the moms had gotten to know each other, too. They chatted on the phone, and Brynn confided that things were tough. "She said she was barely hanging on by a thread," Alice recalls. "I told her things will get better, but she said 'I don't know.'"

The invitation soon arrived in the mail, but the birthday party never happened. On May 28, at about 2:30 a.m., Brynn Hartman returned home from a night out with a female friend. As Sean and his sister, Birgen, slept in their rooms, Brynn entered the master bedroom and shot her sleeping husband three times. Four hours later, with police in the house and friends listening outside, Brynn lay down on the bed next to Phil's body and pulled the trigger once more, killing herself.

Johnny get your pills

Thu, 17 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Jimmy Spence was in fourth grade when his strange new behavior started: He
began jerking his head and limbs uncontrollably and making strange blowing
sounds with his mouth. During lunch at his school in Milford, Conn., his arm would suddenly jump and smack into someone next to him. Jimmy would hang his head in embarrassment as the kids around him laughed.

Partly to control these tics, a psychiatrist prescribed an antidepressant,
Wellbutrin, which Jimmy began taking twice a day. Ironically, the tics were
most likely a side effect of another medication Jimmy had started taking
three years earlier, when he was 6: Ritalin, the stimulant taken by
millions of American kids who are considered hyperactive.

Looking back, it's hard to say exactly when Jimmy's problems began. When he was 3, his mother and father separated. He felt suddenly lonely, and
thought he didn't fit in with his parents' new partners. Entering school
didn't help; in class he was restless, unable to concentrate or stay in his
seat. His teacher urged Jimmy's mother to seek professional help and when
she did, the psychologist diagnosed Jimmy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and suggested Ritalin. Within a week, Jimmy was taking two pills a day.

Precarious prescriptions

Wed, 05 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

To Teresa Vasquez, the news story that surfaced earlier last month about errors in the dispensing of a popular new arthritis drug, Celebrex, must have seemed chillingly familiar. On its way to becoming one of the bestselling new drugs in history, Celebrex has also earned another distinction: In 56 cases reported to the FDA, pharmacists have confused prescriptions for Celebrex with two other, similarly named drugs.

So far, apparently, the Celebrex mix-ups have caused no serious injuries. But Teresa Vasquez's husband, Ramon -- a heart patient from rural west Texas -- was not so lucky. In 1995, according to court documents, Vasquez saw cardiologist Ramachandra Kolluru, who wrote out a prescription for the angina drug, Isordil, to be taken four times a day in doses of 20 milligrams. But to the pharmacist on duty at Albertson's pharmacy in Odessa, Texas, the doctor's scrawl looked like Plendil, a blood pressure medication with a maximum daily dose of 10 milligrams a day.