We’d rather pay for prison: Poverty, mental illness and the high cost of justice failing before a crime is even committed

www.salon.com|Lyz Lenz

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. A 2013 study reports that while the U.S. accounts for only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it has 22 percent of the world’s criminals. Yet, despite all of this jail time, Americans are crying out for justice. The recent Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer” decries the inept working of justice in Wisconsin that led to the faulty conviction and incarceration of Steven Avery for rape, and later muddied the certainty of his later conviction for murdering Teresa Halbach. Later this year, Graywolf Press will rerelease “The Red Parts,” Maggie Nelson’s memoir of the trial for her aunt’s 1969 murder, which, in part, focuses on the inability of American justice to truly provide closure or retribution.

Joining this chorus is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Sanders, whose new book “While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent Into Madness” (out Feb. 2) looks at the deplorable state of mental health care in America through the story of Isaiah Kalebu and his victims, Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz. The book follows the intersecting lives of the three individuals and concludes with the trial and conviction of Isaiah Kalebu for the 2009 murder and rape of Teresa Butz and the rape of her partner Jennifer Hopper. 

Stop watching “Hoarders”: Our lurid reality TV obsession with mental illness has crossed a line

www.salon.com|Rachel Kramer Bussel

For a long time, I actively avoided watching “Hoarders.” I am one, so I didn’t think I needed to see others engaging in my own vice. Plus, at the height of my hoarding, I had a feeling that I would approach the show only as a way to make myself feel like my hoarding wasn’t that bad compared to what I saw on my screen, even though I couldn’t even get through my apartment door without shoving it mightily to push some of the belongings littering my floor out of the way.

Now that my hoarding tendencies are far more under control, thanks in part to living with a partner who calls me on it when my stuff starts to spill out everywhere, I’ve let my curiosity take over. I wanted to find out: Is “Hoarders” actually helping the people it showcases, or is it simply reveling in their mental illness in order to court viewers?

“A few weeks after I graduated, I tried to jump in front of a train”: My bipolar disorder nightmare

www.salon.com|Mary Lu Unterburger

When I was 17, I decided that I wasn’t going to get out of bed anymore. It was a grey morning in March, and I woke up feeling lifeless and sad. There was nothing particularly wrong with my life; I had a great group of friends, I was involved in several clubs, and I was set to graduate in three months with straight A’s. I knew my misery was completely unjustified, but I couldn’t move.

My dad dragged me to a psychiatrist and I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. This wasn’t a shocking revelation for me. It was pretty obvious I was a sad kid. I had figured out that I was probably depressed years ago, but until the diagnosis, my family had dismissed my lifeless demeanor as typical teenage angst. I was almost proud to hear a doctor say that I actually had a mood disorder; it made all my mood swings seem legitimate and, more importantly, fixable. I was going to be prescribed a happy pill, feel better, and go back to my life like nothing had happened.

We need to talk about Ben: Kylo Ren, “Star Wars” and the media narrative of the mentally ill school shooter

www.salon.com|Lauren Duca

Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news.

The psychopath in your office: How ruthlessness, risk and narcissism pay off at work

www.salon.com|Erin Coulehan

A new study aligns itself with the idea that ruthlessness in the office is not only common, but also multifaceted. Daniel Spurk from the University of Bern in Switzerland conducted a survey using 800 participants from varied work industries to compare the dark triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. Participants responded to statements such as “I lack remorse” and “I like others to pay attention to me” in addition to providing information on their careers

“I didn’t feel fit to be a mother:” I was holding it together, pushing through, getting by, and then one night, I wasn’t

www.salon.com|Mary T. McCarthy

At 25, I gave birth to my first daughter, Sarah, at 29, my second, Molly. I didn’t experience any feelings of depression whatsoever surrounding their births. I began a successful part-time writing career while I raised my girls. After about two years, I had a miscarriage about 12 weeks into my pregnancy. It was a devastating loss — I’d seen the baby’s heartbeat, everything had progressed normally and suddenly the heartbeat was gone and I had to have surgery to remove the lost baby. Heartbroken, I sought out other women who had experienced miscarriages; they seemed to be the only ones who knew what to say. Others said the wrong things, awful things. Too soon after, another pregnancy came and another miscarriage at around nine weeks. I couldn’t understand why, after two full-term lovely girls, my body seemed to have forgotten how to be pregnant. It was only after this second miscarriage that I learned I had a condition called bicornuate uterus, which meant I’d only ever had a 50/50 chance of carrying a baby to term due to the shape of my uterus.

Facebook is annihilating your self-esteem, and you’re not alone

www.salon.com|Nico Lang

Last month, I reactivated my old Facebook account for 15 minutes before realizing I’d made a terrible mistake.

I deleted my profile last year because I didn’t like the person I was when I was on Facebook—or the person that I was pretending to be. If they say that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, my experience of Facebook was like being a canine with a keyboard, pretending to be human. In place of feeling connected to those around me, I had “Likes” to do that for me. Being a good “friend” to 2,000 people on the Internet meant I didn’t have to be one in real life.

But like an alcoholic passing a favorite pub, I often get nostalgic for a place where everybody knows my name. I find myself craving a sip of the old social media juice, but this time around, it didn’t taste the same.

1. A House Bill Would View Corporate Crimes as ‘Honest Mistakes’
2. Unpaid Taxes of 500 Companies Could Pay for a Job for Every Unemployed American
3. Almost 2/3 of American Families Couldn’t Afford a Single Pill of a Life-Saving Drug
4. Violent Crime Down, Prison Population Doubles
5. One in Four Americans Suffer Mental Illness, Mental Health Facilities Cut by 90%

The Internet is scrambling our brains: We spend more time online than sleeping — and here’s how it’s messing us up

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

It’s hardly the first we’ve heard of it, but a Sunday New York Times piece took a hard and poignant look at the way online living scatters our attention. “One evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue,” author Tony Schwartz wrote. “I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.” Instead of reading book, he was getting lost online, “checking the traffic numbers for my company’s website, shopping for more colorful socks on Gilt and Rue La La, even though I had more than I needed, and even guiltily clicking through pictures with irresistible headlines such as ‘Awkward Child Stars Who Grew Up to Be Attractive.’ “

Schwartz – who runs The Energy Project consulting firm – tried to wean himself of the web’s distractions and to adapt a more disciplined life. He gave up alcohol, sugar, and junk food, but wasn’t able to scale back his time online.(Fun fact: Schwartz co-wrote Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”)

How widespread is this kind of thing? And how do people find ways to adapt themselves to the demands of online life? We called  Timothy Caulfield, a medical researcher and professional debunker, to get some perspective on the formal research. (He is the author of “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?,” about bogus celebrity health and happiness advice.)

The schizophrenia spectrum: What the mental disorder could have in common with autism

www.salon.com|Simon Makin

Most people have felt depressed or anxious, even if those feelings have never become debilitating. And how many times have you heard someone say, “I’m a little OCD”? Clearly, people intuitively think that most mental illnesses have a spectrum, ranging from mild to severe. Yet most people do not know what it feels like to hallucinate—to see or hear things that are not really there—or to have delusions, persistent notions that do not match reality. You’re psychotic, or you’re not, according to conventional wisdom.

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In a Gainesville, Georgia megachurch on Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson vowed that he would “go to war with the PC police” and return God to the forefront of American life, as “the founding documents” intended — and that anyone who thought he should do differently is suffering from “schizophrenia,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Daniel Mallow reported.

Carson told the assembled faithful that “the pledge of allegiance to our flag says we are ‘one nation, under God'; many courtrooms in the land on the wall it says ‘In God We Trust’; every coin in our pocket, every bill in our wallet says ‘In God We Trust.’” He neglected, conveniently, to note that the motto “In God We Trust” was adopted in 1956 as part of an anti-communist campaign to differentiate the United States from the ideologically secular Soviet Union.

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The VA Southern Oregon Rehabilitation Center & Clinics (SORCC) was on the left at the last of three stoplights that move traffic along through White City on Crater Lake Highway 62, heading from Medford, Oregon, to Shady Cove. White City began as Camp White, established in 1941 as an Army training facility for the 91st Infantry Division during World War II.

The military commandeered over seventy-seven square miles for the base, which briefly served as a German POW camp, and provided training for more than 110,000 troops. Dozens of bunkers were built to stage exercises for machine gun crews, and the gray cement pillboxes squatting in the pastures provided a stark structural backdrop for the cattle grazing peacefully around them. When the war ended, the military hospital and barracks were turned over to the Veterans Administration and reopened as the only free-standing domiciliary in the country. We lived about eleven miles away, as the crow flies, on what was once the old artillery training field, and the hardpan pasture and old white oak trees still spit out the occasional casing or bullet.

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It has been suspected for decades that stress and heart disease are linked, and recent studies have further pinpointed the connection. In a study by Harvard Medical School’s Matthias Nahrendorf, blood samples taken from medical students who were under a high level of stress were found to possess higher levels of white blood cells than normal. Previous studies had shown that cortisol transformed the texture of white blood cells, making them more likely to stick to the walls of blood vessels. The resultant plaque was a key marker for hardening of the arteries.

A study was done in 2012 on 276 healthy people all under different levels of stress. After interviewing the subjects on their stress levels, all were exposed to a cold virus and then quarantined for several days. Thirty-nine percent of the subjects developed a cold. Statistically, those with higher levels of stress were twice as likely to fall ill as those who were not so stressed. “Stressed people’s immune cells become less sensitive to cortisol,” said the author of the study, Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. “They’re unable to regulate the inflammatory response, and therefore, when they’re exposed to a virus, they’re more likely to develop a cold.”

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a psychiatry professor at Ohio State University’s College of Medicine, conducted a study that showed a link between stress and weight gain. Although it may seem obvious that people under stress might strive to alleviate it by grabbing that extra candy bar, the study went beyond that to show that stress affects the metabolism itself. Women in the study were all fed similar fast-food meals. In the next seven hours the rate of their metabolism was studied. Women who had had one or more stressful events in the previous 24 hours burned 104 fewer calories than the women who were stress-free. Although this metabolic rate was seemingly negligible, 104 calories over a year would result in a weigh gain of 11 pounds. The study also showed that stress produced a rise in insulin levels and a reduction in the oxidation of fat in the body, a process that promotes fat storage.

A different study by Kiecolt-Glaser showed the relationship between stress and the rate of healing. Women who were caregiving for relatives with dementia took 10 days longer to heal from a biopsy incision than women in a control group who were not caregivers. The study reported that the longer the stress continued, the longer it took for the healing to occur. Additionally, it showed that caregivers who had a network of friends and family to support them had a faster healing rate than those who did not.

As we get older, sleeping patterns often change and we may experience a decrease in the amount of deep sleep we get. This results in an increase in the number of times we may wake up at night. Stress compounds this natural process by making it more difficult to fall back asleep once awake. This in turn leads to sleep deprivation, shown to cause memory lapses and lack of emotional control, leading to a further cycle of stress and sleep deprivation. The level of cortisol in the system is thought to be a factor in nighttime wakefulness.

Depression is an illness all its own. However, stress can often cause depression. The prevailing belief is that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain’s neurotransmitters, like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. Stressful situations can trigger such an imbalance in the brain, and continued stress can cause permanent changes in cortisol levels, damaging brain cells and the hippocampus until the brain itself is physically altered.

It’s no surprise that with all of modern society’s dependence on computers and smartphones, and the amount of time we spend hunched over them, we have a virtual epidemic of back issues, neck strains and shoulder pain. What is surprising is that stress seems to intensify the pain. People in stressful workplaces seem particularly vulnerable to these afflictions, and they last longer than in non-workplace environments. Researchers have theorized that constant workplace stress and the resulting inflammation prevents the muscles from fully healing.

In 1983, an Australian study showed that stomach ulcers, which researchers once attributed to stress alone, were actually caused by a specific bacterium. This was not the end of the story, however, for it has subsequently been shown that 15% of ulcer sufferers are not infected by the bacteria, and even in those infected, only 10% actually get ulcers. Although a precise reason for this has not been discerned yet, one theory is that stress suppresses the immune system and allows the ulcer bacteria to multiply. Another theory posits that stress actually changes the balance of gut bacteria, suppressing good bacteria and allowing the bad to thrive. In addition to ulcers, most experts agree that stress plays a major factor in such digestive tract illnesses as Crohn’s disease, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.

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I shut the door, numb. I go back to my desk chair and sink down with my heart still pounding. I feel shamed and exposed. Some line has been crossed, a hidden life revealed. For a few minutes I get up again and go about lamely gathering and throwing out some of the litter of newspapers, magazines, and junk mail adrift on the floor by the entryway. But then I get overwhelmed and I go back to my laptop, back to resume half-working and half-surfing— my customary mode, the activity in which I’ve been interrupted. Except that a sick worm is gnawing inside me. A definition of troubled or addictive behavior I once read bubbles into my head, not for the first time, here behind my barred door: It’s behavior that interferes with your intimate relationships and obligations.

I gaze out the window at Second Avenue. People leave the bodega across the street carrying ice cream sandwiches, packs of cigarettes, tabloid magazines. There are so many ways to slowly kill the human heart, all in an effort to get through the day. Dancing is not supposed to be one of them.