- Sexual Trauma May Spark Mental Health Problems — Science Daily — This should be from the department of “no shit, Sherlock,” but the fact is the psychiatric community just doesn’t seem to want to deal with the fact that almost ALL people who have been labeled with serious psychiatric labels have been traumatized in childhood. Not all trauma needs be explicitly sexual of course, but some sort of trauma is present in the lives of most labeled folks. — Traumatic sexual incidents may cause serious mental health problems in the years after the events, research at the University of Ulster has shown. — Using a unique investigative method, researchers at the University’s Psychology Research Institute examined the mental health of women who had visited rape crisis centres — and it showed that sexual trauma plays a role in the development of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
- Depression and Your Poor Diet: Proof That Bad Food Creates a Bad Mood — thatsfit — Despite the fact that I’m always harping on about processed foods and how bad they are for you, it seems some of my regular readers still don’t get it. I get comments all the time that I should ease up on processed food bashing, that “everybody eats it” and that it’s not that bad. The thing is, it is that bad. (Ha! I could’ve written those exact words on this blog! And this is true of all mental health issues, not just depression.) How bad? Well, a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that eating processed foods actually leads to depression in middle age. Eating processed foods filled with chemical additives, refined grains and sugars, processed meats and trans fats can bring you down. Who’d have thought?
- Infomercial Disorder: Discovery’s Female-Libido “Documentary” Backed By Female Sex-Pill Maker | BNET Pharma Blog– Boehringer Ingelheim has quietly persuaded the Discovery Channel to repeatedly run a “documentary” about Female Sexual Dysfunction that feels like an infomercial for flibanserin, the company’s sex pill for women that’s up for a crucial vote at the FDA on June 18. The documentary ran on three occasions in May and can be seen in four parts on Discovery’s web site (one, two, three and four). — Although the film begins by stating “This patient education program was produced with the support of funding from Boehringer Ingelheim,” and the company discloses the same information on its SexBrainBody.com site, the actual content of the film doesn’t make it clear that Boehringer is promoting a new pill for low libido in women or that there’s a controversy over whether FSD even exists. — Historically, drug company involvement in filmmaking has been controversial. Centocor, the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) unit that markets the anti-inflammatory Remicade, launched a documentary titled “Innerstate” which followed three patients but didn’t mention the drug. Although Centocor was upfront about its backing of the movie, some still felt that it was misleading to call the film a “documentary” when the only reason it existed was because a company wanted to promote its drugs.
- Generation Monsanto (GM) Why We Need Labels on GM Foods Now!— TakeAction — Gen-M, the first Monsanto Generation of humans force-fed genetically modified foods hasn’t reached reproductive age yet (they were born in the late 1990s). But if the critical mass of animal feeding studies are any indication, the millennial generation, reared on Food Inc.’s unlabeled “Frankenfoods,” can look forward to a long-term epidemic of cancer, food allergies, learning disabilities, sterility, and birth defects. — Genetically modified foods can include anything made from corn (85% of U.S. production is GM), soy (91% GM) cotton (88% GM), canola (85% GM) or sugar beets (95% GM), as well as meat, milk and eggs from animals fed genetically modified feed or injected with genetically engineered growth hormones. — Corn, soy, cotton, canola and sugar beets are all genetically engineered by Monsanto to withstand massive doses of the company’s glyphosate herbicide RoundUp, or else to exude their own pesticide, Bacillus Thuriengensis (Bt). RoundUp, the favorite weedkiller poison of non-organic farmers and gardeners, causes brain, intestinal and heart defects in fetuses. And scientists warn that RoundUp, the most extensively used herbicide in the history of agriculture, “may have dire consequences for agriculture such as rendering soils infertile, crops non-productive, and plants less nutritious.”