Christian de Vita

Nice short animation by Christian de Vita (see his blog here) who worked with Tim Burton on Frankenweenie, to be released next year.

Tardive Dysphoria?

"Now Antidepressant-Induced Chronic Depression Has a Name: Tardive Dysphoria" read the title of the article in Psychology Today by Robert Whitaker (read it here). To me, this seemed an only natural light being shed on something that has been suspected and feared for a while now, that I felt I understood without even reading the article. For you, however, this might have very little meaning, so I thought I might try to explain some of the science behind it.

Synaptic Cleft

Your neurons can stretch for fairly long distances in your body (up to a metre). Messages are sent in the form of electrical signals, that flow down the long padded (myelenate) axons of the neuron. Neurons have endings that branch out like a tree, allowing them to send and receive messages to and from different neurons spanning different directions. At some point, though, the message must be passed on from one neuron (pre-synaptic) to the next (post-synaptic) and this happens at the synaptic cleft, the channel between them.

This area has been the focus of many of the drugs you may know, because it's a fairly simple concept of blocking or encouraging the mail man to deliver his message. The message, which could be a sensory one, such as pain, may still be happening but if it is not transmitted then the brain cannot interpret it and it is as if it never happened. Spooky.

SSRIs

Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors work to maximize the transmission of Seratonin (sometimes called 5-HT) which is known as the well-being neurotransmitter (transmitter of neuron messages at the synaptic cleft). It is given to those who suffer severe depression, as it is meant to maximize their sensation of happiness with fewer side-effects than the alternatives.


At the synaptic cleft, electrical currents traveling along the pre-synaptic neuron cause neurotransmitters to be released into the void. There, they have a few options: they can be admitted into the next neuron (post-synaptic) or leftovers can be taken back into the the previous neuron (pre-synaptic) to be recycled or reused.

Now what if we blocked the second possibility? What if we only allowed for the neurotransmitter to travel forward, exciting the next cell, sending a message of well-being to the body and brain? That is the work of SSRIs, they bind to the re-uptake proteins, only allowing for continued release of Seratonin with no returns.


Tardive Dysphoria

If you have ever heard the word "tardive" before, it is possibly in the context of drugs for schizophrenia or parkinsons. Oliver Sacks writes beautifully about this effect in Awakenings, where parkinsonian patients were given a new medication (L-dopa) which "awoke" them from their slowed states. They were essentially "normal", for a time, but then they started to revert back, to a state sometimes worse than previously. So what happened? Part of what makes life so amazing on the planet is its ability to adapt to circumstances.

Basically, after prolonged and high dosage use, the body adapts to the effects of the medication. It says to itself, well, heck, if you're going to keep giving priority to these transmitters over those ones, I'm just going to slow down producing and releasing them!

Once taken off the drugs, the body does not seem to regain its abilities to produce and release seratonin the way it did before. This leads to the chronic depression known as tardive dysphoria, a state even more difficult to treat than untreated severe depression, because it has become resistant to the effect of the drugs.

Moral of the story, medication for depression is meant only in severe cases and should be considered a temporary aid to treatment (with a set goal to discontinue). Treatment must also include talk-therapy, cognitive reframing therapy or other alternatives, to ensure lasting positive outcomes.

The Just City

Beautiful video calling for social justice in our urban centres by the Ford Foundation (see them here).


The Just City from Ford Foundation on Vimeo

Pigeon Hatchlings

To my surprise, today, as I was opening the windows, I noticed that the Pigeon outside our window, normally sitting on dead or infertile eggs, was feeding its young! Two little fuzzies, and boy are they ugly!

This grey one is actually the female, because though the male and female take turns sitting on the eggs during the day, the female tends to sit on them at night.

These ones are about 10 days old, and must have hatched just before we left for the weekend. Maybe we hadn't noticed because it's been so hot and we've been keeping the curtains closed!

Pigeons are not actually a cause for concern about public health. According to the Urban Wildlife Society, the disease they carry are of little risk to humans (see it here). 

Like many birds, these birds mate for life and this couple has been trying very hard to produce offspring. It takes about 2-3 weeks for the eggs to incubate and hatch. In the year I have been here, I've seen them sit on about a half dozen eggs (mostly in warmer weather) and this is the first successful batch!

Now that they are born, they are going to sit out there for up to a month, living uniquely on regurgitated curd from their parents for the first week, progressively upgrading to solid food. 

information source: wiki and animal-world.com

"The Shadow" Animation by Igor Coric

Cute little animation via Monsieur Bandit Blogozine (see it here).

Hillside 2011!

We're off to the Guelph Hillside Music Festival! Here are some pictures from last year (between showers).

Royal Wood

Wooden Sky

Jason Collett and Zeus

Sarah Harmer

Veggie or Non-Veggie?

I have increasingly found it troubling to consider the dilemmas surrounding meat eating in our household. This spurred out of a long time want to be a vegetarian but never being able to properly manage the diet for my own wellbeing but also out of a few posts I read on The Atlantic Magazine blog in their Food stream (here, here, here and here)

I had tried to consider myself at least a "conscious meat eater, but as you'll note in that last link "How 'Conscientious Carnivores' Ignore Meat's True Origins" by James McWilliams, even this feat would be inadequate. It's not the most compelling article, but certainly the picture is rather gruesome (reminds me of this horrible art-activism montage that is a Nike shoe made out of human leather). For me, when it came to the reality of trying to be a

conscious meat eater, it just did not materialize. Out at restaurants and such, 9 times out of 10 you have no idea where it came from. At the grocery store, we just stopped buying meat altogether, because we couldn't afford the alternatives.

In the argument of animal cruelty, I had never been one to succumb to that guilt. I had packed it away somewhere, but if I even begin to consider it, I become increasingly uncomfortable with my far removal from the animals I eat, knowing with immense regret that I would not be able to kill another living being.

Sustainability

When it comes down to it, a most convincing argument for me comes down to sustainable, far reaching solutions to food. Even if you are not the one who is able to support a vegetarian lifestyle, that you will benefit from the greater, positive effects of green lifestyles.

The second link is called "The Absurdity of Trying to Measure a Food's Sustainability" where the challenges of quantifying things that are not quantifiable for the purpose of indexing are explored. Seeing a price tag beyond monetary value might sway some to vote with their dollar. But, in all honesty, I find it hard to say whether this helps, hinders or does little. Food labels already exist for our own health, yet many do not know how to read them or do not feel they have the time or money to really consider them.

My philosophy tends to be, if you found it in the aisle and it has a food label, it's probably already not very good for you, as it is likely quite processed.


My favourite of the articles is the first link, called "Infographic: The Carbon Footprints of 20 Foods, Shown as Car-Miles" an easy to understand visualization of the environmental impact. The Environmental Working Group has an easy to understand brochure that you can download the pdf of here. Within it, they present this graphic (based on lifecycle assessment by cleanmetrics.com)

So, at the end of the day, I would not say that I’m a strict vegetarian but I have considerably cut down on meat, selecting a vegetarian option when I can. That said, I am being careful not to turn this into a tofu or processed-to-taste-just-like-meat diet, but one that is balanced and varied.


Bees

By the way, the thid link is about bees, who are dying out because they need undisturbed wild flowers which are predominantly in livestock grazing areas.

The story of the death of bees is a sad one (excellent David Suzuki video available on the cbc website here), one of displacement and disease. They suffered especially in the postal strike, as their hives are shipped around the country to various farms to “service them” and move on. Upon further consideration, it’s certainly an interesting line of work.

Eugenics and Leaf Cut-Outs

I recently read a post posted on the FedCan blog (Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, see it here) by Nathalie Ball of the University of Calgary, an article which re-peaked an old interest in philosophizing about eugenics. Something of the intricate nature of these leaf cut-outs seemed to resonate with this topic.

Coined by Sir Francis Galton, the easiest way to explain the concept is to consider positive and negative eugenics.

As Ball says in her post:

first, negative eugenics, that is, reducing the number of so-called undesirable genes within the population or, second, positive eugenics, that is, increasing the number of so-called ‘desirable’ genes within the population.

It's fairly easy to think of a few terrible ways this has been performed in the past, for example, in terms of negative genetics, from the sterilization of women with disabilities to the victims of the holocaust. Horrible things have been done for the "betterment" of the human race (as if we could ever really know what traits might be useful in the future?), but one would be foolish to say that a certain amount of eugenics continues on today.

Prenatal testing, for one, as well as in vitro fertilization provide a method of selection, of handpicking traits while discouraging others.

Now, Ball reminds us that one has to be careful in not to mistake the forced aspect, for example of sterilization, versus the voluntary aspect of terminating or keeping a pregnancy. Although there is certainly social pressure to find out, to attend to "prenatal counseling" and certain tests that are deemed "standards of care."

Society also has subtler ways of promoting certain families to have children while setting up barriers to others, as is seen in what is considered an acceptable marriage (sexual orientation, age, age gap, religious compatibility) and what is not.

Though for many, these thoughts are old news, and I think the most intriguing part of her article is when she moves on to the next topic:

We see, for example, a move towards beyond species-typical abilities beyond the ‘normal’ abilities (e.g. germline genetic enhancement, somatic genetic enhancements, and non-genetic enhancements). This poses an array of new questions. When new enhancements are created, should they be available to everyone, or only to those who are considered to be below the ‘species-typical norm’, or only those who can afford them? Who will be able to afford the ‘enhancement’ treatments?

Having spent my morning reading about the complexities of wait lists and marginalized groups, this rings a loud bell. We already see that access to care is not always fair, that it does not babysit your children while you go to your appointment, fill in for your low-wage job without benefits and it sometimes does not even cover its own costs. Ball continues, on this thought,

Enhancements may be unaffordable for some groups, and if only the wealthy can purchase them, then enhancements could add another measurement of inequity and marginalization – between the enhanced versus the unenhanced. Additionally, when enhancements are made available, what counts as ‘too enhanced’? Where do we draw the line? How we choose to answer any of these questions has implications for equity.

Beautiful Leaf cut-outs by Lorenzo Duran (website here) via CraftZine blog.

Birds of Australia

Some very sweet birds by Amy Borell via her blog/website cakewithgiants.com

The World as it is

I have already begun to develop a dark, pessimistic view of the corporate world and I shudder to think of what it might become when I have lived a longer in life. This blog has permitted me to exhibit positive sparks of thoughts and ideas, a slight shimmer of hope, but today I'm writing a reality check, as inspired-- if you can call it that --in part by this book "The World as it is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress" by Chris Hedges.

The book is a compilation of politically charged essays that were originally published in Truthdig (see it here), a progressive news website. It was recommended to me when I started to blame myself for not being able to find a job. A journalist, who worked mostly abroad, he writes

Because the press is not concerned with distinguishing truth from news, because it lacks a moral compass, it has become nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power and absurd court propagandists.

Accountability

I have been having somewhat of an email debate with a website (probably best not to name it) regarding some of their posted information about medications that can be taking while breastfeeding. My argument is not against their recommendations-- I lack the information to really know whether it is true --but in their lack of citations, references or further recommended reading.

In their response, I was slightly appalled to read "We cannot put references in for every drug a mother might take. Besides most wouldn't be able to access them or, more importantly, to understand them."


So today, dear website writer, I hold you publicly accountable for what you have said.

1. If you are unable to reference every drug that you present, how can you claim this as conclusive evidence? It seems to me that you should only present the drugs that you know about, in order not to misinform.

2. Access: I have complained about this one before, but unless we lobby for more public access and encourage the use of publicly available articles, we will get nowhere. I spoke to someone at a talk about Research and Media and he felt that articles that are published in private journals will fizzle out in time, given the growing number of publicly available ones. The demand will shift, which we already see in the form of public databases or even google books and google scholar. The hope is also to have key informants, leaders, I suppose, that people may turn to who have access to the information that is needed.

3. Won't be able to understand them. This part hurts me, because I wonder whether our hearts are in the right place when we put out information guidelines to the public, whether we really believe that they will be effective, whether we really believe in capacity-building. How can we foster health literacy if we water down all the information? How can we expect the public to decipher messages strewn in corporate campaigns if they cannot understand research? Understand the words: accountable, conflict of interest, transparent, public or private, corporate funder, and so on.

Do we 

lower the standard 

or 

do we raise it?

Conflicts of interest and Transparency

I quite liked a quote on the UN Public Administration Program website (here) regarding Ethics, Transparency and Accountability:

The explosion of new information and communication technologies is also allowing for a rapid, global diffusion of ideas and practices, enabling the public to demand higher standards of ethics, transparency and accountability in the public sector.

In my reply to this email today, I wrote:

To sum, I thought the information you presented was interesting, especially in its clear clarification of which drugs can be taken while breastfeeding, I just wanted to see a little accountability. As an outsider looking at your website, I look for endorsements. I look for any sign that your information has been tainted by conflicts of interest, even in the form of a simple statement. These are words that the public needs to learn and grow used to.

Book cover from KPFK 90.7 FM website

Sushi Bowl with Avocado and Brown Rice

I tried to make our bowls look just as good as the ones in Heidi Swanson's cookbook called "Super Natural Cooking." I've mentioned her before, as I really like her recipe blog 101 Cookbooks, that you can find here. She always has beautiful pictures to drool over.

This recipe is actually supposed to have Toasted Nori (in my house, it's just sea weed but I supposed that just doesn't resonate quite the same) but we didn't have any, so I've removed it from the title, as it was still very good!

2 cups short-grain brown rice
2 tsp fine-grain sea salt
(2 square sheets nori)
6 ounces extra-firm tofu
4 green onions, chopped
1 avocado (we used 2, mm!), peeled, pitted and thinly sliced
sesame seeds

Citrus-Soy Dressing
Grated zest and juice of 1 orange (the dressing maker was not fond of orange zest and suggests that this be removed from the recipe, but I liked it)
Grated zest and juice of 1/2 lemon (this was supplemented for a lime since we didn't have one)
2 tbs natural cane sugar (we used brown...)
2 tablespoons of shoyu sauce (we used Tamari but you could also just use soy sauce)
2 tbs of (brown) rice vinegar

Bring the rice (about 1:2 rice to water) to a boil and simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour.

(toast nori in preheated oven at 300 degrees F, not today my friend, it is a heatwave)

Drain tofu, place in medium hot dry skillet and drizzle with a little Tamari or soy sauce for a few minutes (I find it likes to stick, so I don't like to make it too crispy).

Dressing: combine orange juice, lemon juice, and sugar in a small saucpan and bring to a gentle boil. Cook for 1 or 2 minutes, then add the shoyu sauce and vinegar. Return to a gentle boil and cook another 1 or 2 minutes, until slightly thickened. Remove form the heat and stir in the zests. Poor on top of bowls.

Brains, Court Trials and Incarcerated Women

While I was at the Women’s Health retreat, one of the women, who had worked at great length with women in prison, firmly stated that she did not believe in incarceration for women. This surprised me, probably mostly because of my blind faith in everyone’s ability to make informed choices and a need for accountability as upheld by the legal system, and circumstances, well, they fit somewhere in there as well.

These naive thoughts came back to me again, today, as I was reading The Brain on Trial by David Eagleman (an article in the July/August 2011 issue of the Atlantic). It clarified for me some of the shortcomings of the Criminal-Justice System (from the U.S. perspective, though I suspect it compares to our own) given the hard, scientific evidence of brains and behaviour. Though I’ve included it here, he does not include the gender argument in his thesis.

Human behaviour cannot be separated from human biology [...] Perhaps not everyone is “free” to make socially appropriate choices.

Given my stance on social justice, I’m not one to get too caught up in biology as the defining point of self, but I could see where he was going in an integrated view of “nature” and “nurture.”

Eagleman accuses the current Social-Justice System of playing the blame-game, where complex situations leave few black-and-white guilty or non-guilty offenses.

Genetic Probability
He considers the increased probability of certain social deviances (violent crimes, robbery, aggravated assault, murder, and sexual offenses) given particular sets of genes. He continues:

And this feeds into a larger lesson of biology: we are not the ones steering the boat of our behaviour, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. By the way, as regard that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.

Certainly, this is not to say that women (non- Y chromosome carriers) are not able to commit offenses, but statistically they are usually of a different variety. According to StatCan (Highlights from “Female Offenders in Canada,” by Rebecca Kong and Kathy AuCoin, 2005, find it here), “When females offended, they tended to commit theft (other than theft of a motor vehicle), common assault, bail violations and fraud.”

And “Females are infrequently repeat offenders and, for those who are, their crimes tend not to escalate in severity.” They also say that women only represent a small minority:

Women in correctional facilities are few. In 2004/2005, they accounted for 6% of offenders in provincial/territorial sentenced custody, 4% in federal sentenced custody and 6% remanded into custody to await court appearances.

Free-will and Free-won’t
Back to Eagleman, he highlights evidence of brain tumours and disorders that lead to disinhibited crimes. Considering the various factors that affect our brain, then affect our behaviours (with or without our conscious awareness) he considers how “the concepts of free-will and personal responsibility begin to sprout question marks.”

Forward Thinking Legal System
Instead of considering only culpability (and the past events), he asks that the legal system judge the future for this person. “How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behaviour? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime?”

As well, he points out that despite present use, prisons are not viable mental health care institutions. The belief that the one-size-fits-all of prisons is completely inappropriate given the neural diversity of people. And so, specially tailored sentencing and rehabilitation should be trying to meet the individual needs of people.


There is a very nice run-down of facts and figures related to incarcerated women in Canada presented by the Council of Elizabeth Fry Societies in Canada, that you can find on their website here.

Students at TOAE

I quite liked the intricate installations done by So Yeon Michelle Kim. Here are some pictures from her blog, that you can find here.

And something about the paintings of violent scenes with colourful geometric shapes lured me in, the few times I walked by Jean-Sébastien Massicotte-Rousseau's paintings. You can find these pictures and a few more on his blog here.

Paintings from TOAE

Sandra MacGillivray had some really lovely, vibrant painted portraits. Below is a picture of her leaflet as well as a China Girl, a painting of hers from the Avenue Road Art School (see them on Flickr here)

I saw an art square for sale at the TOAE info booth of a bird, so I hunted about to find the artist. I'm not sure if she'd made the square, but I really liked the bird paintings done by Janice Ykema (find her here), like the ones seen below (from people.ca and a blog of Janice Ykema, seen here).

I also quite liked the electrical wires in the views of Toronto buildings in Stewart Jones's paintings. He has a lovely website that you can find here.

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition

I'm volunteering at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (their website here) that takes place this weekend. There is some really beautiful artwork and I hope to buy something maybe not this year, but some year.

I particularly liked the Ceramics of Jenanne Longman, seen below from her blog, see her blog here: http://jenannelongman.blogspot.com/

I also liked the colourful, flooded and overgrown nature paintings of urban scenes by Amy Shackleton, you can see more of her art on her website (here) or in person at the Elaine Fleck Gallery (see it here)

more to come as I spend more time there...