Dr. X's Free Associations

Gold Star Families

For as long as I can remember, I've been a little uncomfortable with the celebratory atmosphere of Memorial Day. In recent years, my uneasiness has only intensified.

The barbecues, picnics, volleyball games and the fireworks display we had here, don't seem appropriate for a day set aside to honor and remember the dead and to remember the great losses that many families have experienced.  So I was relieved to run across an article in the Chicago Tribune, What Gold Star families want you to know.

Memorial Day wasn't a National Holiday until 1971, when the last Monday in May was designated a federal holiday.  From its inception after the Civil War until 1971, Memorial Day was a state holiday that fell on different dates depending upon the state.  I wonder if it was a mistake to designate the last Monday in May, giving us a long holiday weekend.  Perhaps that sends the wrong message.  Memorial Day shouldn't be about us or our convenience; it's about those who died for us.

How would you feel about a 911 holiday weekend with barbecues, drinking and partying?  I don't see the difference.

A Rose By Any Greek Or Latin Name Would Yet Smell Sweeter

My apologies to Shakespeare.

Alan Schatzberg, MD, the outgoing president of the American Psychiatric Association:

"One thing we ought to consider is using more technical language. Our cardiology colleagues don't talk about heart attacks but use the term myocardial infarction. Hematologists are not attacked for including leukemia in their nomenclature, and they wouldn't think of giving it up for "way too many white cells disorder" (WTMWCD)! Why shouldn't we follow their lead? To my view, bulimia would be a better term than binge eating disorder. The latter was attacked by a prominent psychiatric critic as suggesting he could be diagnosed with the disorder after a heavy Thanksgiving dinner. Our language should indicate the severity of the possible impairment. Simiarly, temper dysregulation in children sounds too much like temper tantrums. They are not the same, but the use of the language is problematic. We need to be more serious about our terminology. In the end, we will get it right." (via Novalis)

This is the kind of anti-therapeutic madness psychiatry should seek to allay rather than actively promote.

Birth Order and Risk-taking Among Professional Baseball Siblings

Alan Schwarz writes in The New York Times:

Given how younger siblings have been shown to take more risks than their older counterparts — perhaps originally to fight for food, now for parental attention — Drs. Sulloway and Zweigenhaft examined whether the phenomenon might persist to the point that baseball-playing brothers would try to steal bases at significantly different rates.

In fact they did: For more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s long recorded history, including Joe and Dom DiMaggio and Cal and Billy Ripken, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother.

Local Snapshots

Navy Pier & Chicago Shakespeare Theater tucked in the back.

Segways

Parade of Segway riders on the bike path at Oak Street Beach today.

Chicago Cop on a Segway, chatting on his cell.

Vintage Photos: 1925

Oak Street Beach (1925).  Click photo to enlarge.

Oak Street Beach May 29, 2010. Same shot as above, 85 summers later.

Shuffleboard at the beach.

Oak Street Beach, May 29, 2010

Getting ready to plant the palm trees at the beach.

Vintage Photos: 1936

Children at Hill House, Mississippi (Dorothea Lange, FSA).

Jonathan's Cochlear Implant Activation

8-month-old Jonathan hearing for the first time.

Dr. Michael Merzenich (Blog Roll: On the Brain) was on the research team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by Advanced Bionics.

Vintage Photos: April 1912

Titanic Survivors.

Reality and Fantasy: The Causes of the Deficit

Based on CBO estimates, this graph breaks down the causes of the projected federal deficit over time.  The graph depicts the one-off impact of TARP and the economic stimulus.  By 2019, Bush era policies will account for most of the projected deficit.  TARP and the stimulus are almost negligible in the projections.

source

Yet conservatives who rant about the growing debt bitterly resist every effort to reverse Bush era policies that account for a sea of red ink extending indefinitely into the future.