#Q: ''what's even the point of this post?'' A: the point is that mental illness/disorder is not always harmless or something that -

[satanfemme]

"no mental disorder makes you a bad person" is very very true and a good statement to promote, but "if someone does something bad, they must've chosen do it, there's never any other possible explanation, and it's especially never b/c of any mental disorders" isn't true?? besides the fact that people can make honest mistakes (even big ones) without realizing what they're doing, or the fact that life circumstances can influence what choices someone even thinks are available to them in the first place, my hot take is that mental disorder can influence you to do bad things sometimes and that should be acknowledged.

that does NOT mean a person with a disorder would be a special extra evil kind of abuser compared to a neurotypical person (ie "narcissist abuse" is still a meaningless and harmful term). it also does not mean that abusers are more likely to have a disorder than to be neurotypical. but disorders are disabling, they cause disorder, it's right in the name, they negatively affect you and your connection to others... why do you think that wouldn't that affect your behavior too sometimes? I know my disorders affect mine. often in negative ways!

besides just "mental disorders are never disabling in ways that make me feel uncomfortable" being ableist, understanding this is important if you believe in prison abolition (which you should). "someone did something bad because they randomly chose to be bad idk" is just as unhelpful as "someone did something bad because they were born bad". but "someone did something bad because of X thing they're struggling with, or their Y need is unmet" is helpful, that's something you can work with and fix. integrate this into your anarchist worldview.

and lastly, tbh it's isolating to have "scary" or "bad" symptoms, and then get told by armchair "mental health advocates" online that you're just choosing to have those symptoms and maybe you could be a better person if you simply chose to stop having mental illness in the first place. so you know, don't be fucking rude lol

[is-the-primate-vid-cute]

FAQ

Q: Can primates be neurodivergent/have mental illnesses like people?

A: Mental illnesses and neurodivergency are human concepts and social constructs that were designed to specifically apply to people to explain perceived differences and issues that an individual may experience. While primates can exhibit signs of what we would label as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress, other labels such as ADHD, autism, OCD, bipolar disorder, and the like do not translate across species. It is important to consider as well that many of these labels are culturally dependent, so they do not even apply universally across human populations.

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Q: Can primates be physically disabled/use disability aids?

A: Yes, primates can have virtually any type of disability. There are primates with limited mobility, vision impairment, hearing impairment, diabetes, and any number of other health problems or physical challenges that may impact quality of life. The best way that caretakers for disabled primates in captivity can help them is to make adaptations to their lifestyle and habitat so that they can live the best and more independent life they are capable of. Primates will not use disability aids such as hearing aids, glasses, canes, prosthetics, or wheelchairs, so instead caretakers will install ramps in their enclosures to help them get around, will have care regimens that account for their limitations, and will provide them with diets and enrichment that is best for them considering their health.

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Q: What about primates as service animals?

A: Primates are wild animals. Only domesticated animals can be successfully trained for the use of serving someone who needs assistance. As established in the case of primates kept as pets, they have extensive care needs and require social time with appropriate peers. This does not change in the context of service animals. Only dogs and miniature horses are legally recognized service animals in the USA. 

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Q: Have you guys heard about the game Gibbon: Beyond the Trees?

A: Yes we have! It looks great and we have yet to play it, but we hope to at some point.

Q: Do primates enjoy music?

A: Some do, but most are indifferent. San Francisco Zoo did a study where they played different types of music at different locations throughout their chimpanzee habitat and indoors and found most their chimpanzees preferred silence over any of the music provided. In mod E's personal experience, primates tend to enjoy videos much more than music. 

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Q: Aren’t chimpanzees super violent and aggressive?

A: No. Chimpanzees are some of the most tragically misunderstood primates, and have a bad reputation based on a few high profile incidents. Aggression is part of chimp life, but most conflicts are able to be resolved without escalating to serious violence. By and large, extreme chimpanzee violence happens as a result of human intervention such as deforestation forcing chimp troupes into smaller areas leading to territory disputes, and chimps that have been kept as pets never learning appropriate outlets for their frustration. While chimpanzees can be violent and aggressive, they spend most of their lives working together and taking care of each other and form extremely close bonds with their loved ones. While it is important to consider aggression as part of chimpanzees, it is just one part of the total primate package.

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Q: I want to work with primates. How can I get into a career with primates?

A: There is no one route to a career working with primates, but there are certain things you can do to be a better contender for primate related jobs. It is important to consider that jobs working directly with animals are very physically demanding and because these jobs are desirable, there can be steep competition for available positions. This being said, if you feel passionate about primates absolutely go for it! Starting with volunteering is a great way to get into primate care taking, and can help you find a type of work that works for you. If you have specific questions about careers working with primates, mod E is happy to help.

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Q: Can I ethically be friends with a primate?

A: We feel that desire! The most ethical way to be friends with a primate that not only doesn’t harm them but actively helps, is to find an accredited zoo near you and go as often as you want. Primates are highly social and enjoy watching people as well as being watched, and if you go frequently enough the primates you see may start to recognize you. We also encourage volunteering for primate organizations that help them if you can.

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Q: What is a fear grimace vs a play face?

A: These two expressions can be used by social apes and monkeys but are most commonly expressed by chimpanzees and macaques. They can be easily mixed up or mistaken by humans.

A “fear grimace” features tense body language, eye contact or avoidant eyes, and the lips pulled all the way back to expose both rows of teeth (looks alot like a human smile). Fear grimaces are often paired with crying or screaming, and running away or otherwise avoidant body movements. The fear grimace can be used to express: “I’m not a threat! I don’t want to fight! Let’s be friends!”. Sometimes a fear grimace can be used when monkeys or apes are meeting for the first time to communicate a friendly, non-threatening, stance. In the past (and today, unfortunately) chimpanzees, macaques, capuchins used for entertainment would be trained to “smile” as part of an act. This muddied the public perception of the expression. A normal person would not know a “smiling” primate is a tense, fearful animal and the person may attempt to approach the animal, in which case the animal may defend itself, since the fear grimace was not responded to correctly. A fear grimace is not an expression of aggression: it communicates a desire not to fight.

A “play face” features an open, relaxed mouth that exposes the bottom row of teeth, soft (non-focused) eyes, relaxed body language and may be accompanied by panting sometimes described as a laugh. A play face is often being displayed during play, or “flirting” (friendly behavior to show interest before courting). 

Please check the links below for visuals of the difference between the two. 

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Q: Why do humans smile if a “smile” (aka fear grimace) is a defensive measure for other primates? 

A: A fear grimace is a complicated expression. Typically, the grimace is a means of asking for acceptance; “I don’t want to fight. I’m friendly. Please don’t make me defend myself physically”. It does not only occur when the animal is fearful, but instead when they are anticipating potential conflict.  A human smile (In western cultures) is utilized in a very similar way. Do you only smile when you’re truly happy? Do you ever find yourself smiling when you’re nervous, when you’re trying to fit into a new social group, when you see a stranger and want to appear friendly, when you greet a customer/worker, etc. These are all ways in which our smile is used to communicate “I’m not a threat. I’m friendly, see!” This is not to say all our body language is the same as our primate cousins, but to simply show how similar that can be in ways we don’t always notice.  

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Q: Why are humans so different from every other species of primate?

A: A couple million years of evolution has sent us down a strange path, making humanity a very odd species in comparison to other lifeforms. While we tend to think of ourselves as the most evolved or developed species, the truth is that evolution abides by the principle of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. While other species have settled into evolutionary niches, early human ancestors (hominids) struggled to find an edge on the competition for resources. We have never been the strongest, fastest, or most efficient species, but walking upright became our strength. Every development a species goes through is a trade off: walking upright gave us the ability to walk longer distances and left our arms free to carry things, but for this ability we lost speed, take more fall damage, have more back and joint problems. However, in a period of great scarcity being able to walk for hours to forage and collect the spoils to save for later/sharing was a great way to survive. Walking upright ended up being the catalyst for further development along the lines we now know as human: narrower hips to support upright posture made giving birth more difficult which meant that unlike other species which tend to give birth alone, birth became a group effort. The strengthening of our social bonds and increased interdependence allowed us to take more risks as a species and rely on each other, and as we gained cognitive function we became known for our intelligence (at least to ourselves). Human evolution has been a strange and unique path, and a big reason for that is that our niche shifts slowly, and so do we. Australopithecus Aferensis, the species commonly referred to as the earliest common ancestor, existed for 900,000 years– thats much longer than homo sapiens! So while we are very different from other primates, things could look very different in a few million years.

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Q: Does anyone else find great apes to trigger an uncanny valley response? Is it normal to be kind of creeped out by them?

A: It is absolutely normal. We never judge anyone for being scared, apprehensive, or off-put by a primate, it’s a good survival skill to be cautious! Lots of people find primates close to people to be uncomfortable to look at and while we hope that feeling will fade as you get to know our ape cousins and (hopefully) grow to love them, we totally get it.

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Q: What do you think about Kanzi the bonobo?

A: Yes, we get asked about Kanzi kind of a lot! We think he is a gorgeous and lovely ape, and though the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative has had a rocky history we are proud to support them at their current standards of bonobo care and ethics. Kanzi clearly lives a good life with his friends and family, and while we aren’t confident that he can communicate to the extent that he has complete understanding of human language, he does appear to possess recognition of some spoken English and symbols on his lexigram board. Neat guy altogether!

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Q: Why did Travis end up committing that famous attack?

A: Travis is perhaps the most famous pet primate in the USA.  Travis was purchased as a pet for Sandy Harold and her family. He was raised more as a child than a pet. He ate meals with the family at the table, was trained to drive cars, and was discouraged from displaying his natural chimpanzee behaviors. When he started to mature, his strength and confidence with humans became a problem. Harold unfortunately lost her son and her husband, leading her to lean more on Travis for emotional support. They slept in the same bed together, she let him drive her into town, and the nature of their relationship was troubling and unsafe. Harold relied on Xanax to calm Travis when he would act out. She also utilized many unhealthy foods Travis enjoyed to appease him- which in turn made him extremely obese. The famous attack started when Harold had trouble soothing a distressed Travis. She called her friend Nash to come over and help her with Travis. She also dosed him with some Xanax (while Xanax is a depressant and commonly tranquilizes humans, primates can actually become more agitated and aggressive on Xanax.)Travis had taken the car keys and was attempting to leave the property when Nash arrived. She stepped out of her vehicle and Travis attacked her. Harold called the police and attempted to stab Travis with a kitchen knife. Police arrived and Travis attempted to enter the squad car, that’s when Travis sustained the fatal gunshot wound and he retreated to the house before he passed away. Nash survived the attack but required many surgeries. Travis is a tragic red flag in the American law-making system. Wild animals do not belong in out homes. Allowing humans to keep wild animals routinely puts the public at risk of attack when the animal inevitably escapes. May Travis and the Harolds rest in peace. Please do not soil their memory with unkind jokes, this is a topic we take very seriously.  

The second link contains outside sources that go into some pretty disturbing details of the attack.

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Q: Could Koko the gorilla really talk?

A: She certainly could use some signs to get a desired response, but I wouldn’t say she could talk. The research methods used were not up to standard; the “signs” she used were not any other official sign language, videos of her signing were always in clips and full videos of her training sessions were never released. She was an absolute legend and her fame really helped gorillas as a whole receive public interest and support in a time they were seen as the stinky, dumb ogres of the great apes.  

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Q: Why did the Harambe situation play out like it did?

A: Harambe was a western lowland gorilla who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo from 2014 to 2016, and previously at the Gladys Porter Zoo for 15 years. May 2016, a 3 year old boy climbed the wall of the enclosure and fell 15 feet into into the moat of the enclosure. Keepers immediately signaled the gorillas to shift to the indoor space, and the two females complied. Harambe though, approached the child. He grabbed the kid, propping him up and pushing him down when the child tried to stand. Onlookers were screaming which disoriented the gorilla, he was displaying “strutting” behavior where he walks tall with his chest pushed out to appear bigger. Because he was not responding to keepers and they feared the situation would escalate, the emergency team decided to use the zoo’s emergency rifle to kill Harambe and retrieve the child, who was unharmed.

On top of the grief of unexpectedly losing a beloved animal, the staff at Cincinnati Zoo were tormented with public opinions on what they should have or could have done. Making light of such a difficult situation, a coping mechanism for many, sparked alot of hot debate for keepers on their personal social media accounts. Animal Rights Activists protested the zoo and many felt the need to debate if it was an ethical decision. As sad as it is, human lives will always be the priority in situations like this. 

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Q: How can I determine if a sanctuary or zoo is ethical?

A: This can be especially difficult, even for professionals in the field, doubly difficult for facilities abroad. When traveling, we recommend doing as much research possible about the destination and their entertainment opportunities. Heavily research the animal encounters you may see. If they allow/encourage you to touch or feed wild monkeys, that’s a red flag. If animals are restrained, that’s a red flag. The human populations in popular travel destinations know that animals are a great source of revenue. Keep an eye out for volunteer opportunities rather than paid experiences in order to support local sanctuaries and rescues! A proper sanctuary should not breed, allow for hands-on “playtime”, exchange funds for experiences, or encourage you to be in unprotected contact with the animals. Happy travels!

In the states, we recommend first checking the facility accreditation. Accreditation is a way for facilities to say, “hey, we all agreed to X standards and we check each other to ensure we are all meeting those standards.”. Accreditation is a membership. There are fees and politics involved so this is not the end-all-be-all of ethics. Typically, AZA and ZAA are accreditors who can be trusted. For primate sanctuaries, NAPSA is the largest and strictest accreditor. Next, we recommend going to the facility website and checking their encounter rules. Do they restrain their animals, or allow you to feed or touch animals? Do they contribute to conservation? Are they outspoken about ending the trade of animals into private collections and homes? These can all be clues about the standards of the facility. 

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[marshvlovestv]

Eric in the Pod Room - An impassioned defense of a man at his worst

Big tw for discussions of suicide, suicidal ideation, and mental illness, and lots of me projecting my own issues onto a terrible fictional character

I’m in a really bad place mentally right now and I’m immersing myself in a Zero Escape Let’s Play series to distract myself from it. It definitely isn’t the healthiest thing for me to be hyperfixated on right now - the series has a chummy relationship with the concept of suicide, after all, and suicidal thoughts are my worst symptom at the moment. But you know what, it’s twisted, but I’m so dangerously comfortable with my own suicidality at this point that the themes of suicide in Zero Escape almost feel warm and welcoming, to the point where I’d even consider them a factor in why I am so obsessed with the series.

I was working on a larger meta, which most of this post is an excerpt from, about the many suicides from Zero Time Dilemma specifically - none of them influenced by Radical-6, all of them with some interesting psychological analysis to be done concerning them. But the Let’s Players have reached the Pod Room, the puzzle that seems to singlehandedly give players the most reason to hate my favorite character. They turned out to be no exception, and they spent the length of the puzzle going on and on about how they despise Eric. I got really tense and upset and thought, “You know what? Forget about Diana, Carlos, and Delta. I can talk about them later. All I want to do right now is come to Eric’s defense. I want to talk about my boy.”

Like, I get it, you know? The first time I saw the Pod Room, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Eric, either. He bullies Sean, he actively refuses to be of any help in solving the puzzle, he makes lewd comments about Mira (and for the record, the problem I have with this is the fact that he says these things around a child, not the comments themselves; people should be allowed to experience and express sexual attraction and that is a hill I will die on). After the puzzle itself, we learn about Eric’s deepest trauma and after that I see people either feel bad for hating him and begin to sympathize with him fully, or go, “Yeah, that sucks for him, but it still doesn’t forgive a damn thing. He’s the worst and I hate him and I hate this game for making him exist.” I am firmly in the first camp, if you couldn’t tell.

Lest we forget: This is the route at the end of which Eric commits suicide. A murder-suicide, granted, but still. He takes his own life. The Pod Room is the start of Eric’s descent into rock bottom and I just... can’t hate him for that, especially not when I recognize some of myself in him. I have never killed another person (I promise); I don’t have homicidal thoughts. I don’t know personally what would compel someone to commit a murder-suicide and I don’t even want to speculate. But his homicidal tendencies aside, Eric and his suicidality have always spoken to me personally.

I’ve done plenty of analysis of Eric in the past under the lens of personality disorders, and my most general conclusions are that he suffers from PTSD, dependent personality disorder, and possibly borderline personality disorder as well. Suicidality is highly correlated with all three of those disorders, and as such I find it highly unlikely that his decision to kill himself in this route is a spontaneous one. If he is anything like me, when he isn’t actively, imminently suicidal, he probably still spends a lot of time imagining worst-case scenarios in which suicide would be a no-brainer. For me, my worst-case scenarios often involve the loss of my parents; they are my Safe People, people around whom my AvPD symptoms are less extreme and my behavior is less inhibited, and I seriously fear for my ability to function without them in my life. Sufferers of many different personality disorders have “special people” like this in some way or another. DPD and BPD have, respectively, Depended People and Favorite People, the objects of the sufferer’s attachment. Mira clearly fulfills both of these roles in Eric’s life, and lots of his worst-case scenarios must involve the loss of her.

Before her death is even confirmed, we can see how much he struggles to function without her there in the puzzle room. I read Eric’s behavior in the Pod Room as him flailing in the absence of his special person. The Let’s Players I’m watching have even made derisive comments about how he doesn’t even know how to be a person, and I’m sitting here like, yeah. You’re right. He doesn’t know how to be a person, not right now. His identity and self-worth are tied to a person who has disappeared under mysterious and stressful circumstances; without her, he feels useless and helpless, which is why he’s overwhelmed by something as simple as a sliding block puzzle. Without her, he loses his grip on his self-control, which is why he has no filter to stop him from saying inappropriate things and why can’t stop his worse impulses to mistreat people. I’m not trying to say that anything he does in the Pod Room is right, but there is a reasonable explanation for why he acts the way he does.

And then, they find Mira’s body. One of Eric’s worst-case scenarios has come true, and in the process he has lost not only the person most important to him but the very sense of self that said person helped him feel. It’s just as bad as he always imagined, and even worse, she was killed in exactly the same way his brother was, triggering a PTSD flashback. His trauma is further compounded by being shown graphic video of Junpei and Akane’s deaths (and later just being shown their dismembered bodies in person).The devastation he must be feeling in this moment is beyond what I can even comprehend and I fully understand why he snaps.

Again, I don’t want to speculate as to why his mind goes “revenge first, suicide second” and why he kills people he could be reasonably sure are innocent. All I can say for sure is that, when he does ultimately kill himself, it’s not out of guilt and it’s not out of fear of consequences. His last words are promising Mira that he’ll be with her soon. The suicide is about her. It was always about her. It’s not just that he’ll miss her; he genuinely cannot picture a life for himself where she is not a part of it, at least not a good one.

(Quick sidenote here to talk about one other thing that Eric does in this route: shooting out the X-Pass authenticator. Once Mira’s body is found, six people have died, meaning that Eric, Sean, and Q are free to leave. But Eric shoots out the authentication device before this is possible. When this happened in the Let’s Play, the players called him an idiot for destroying his own means of escape, which really annoyed me. Here’s the thing: Eric is already actively suicidal at this point. He destroys his key to the outside world because he can no longer imagine a life for himself in the outside world. Shooting the authenticator was in itself an act of suicide, even though he wasn’t pulling the trigger on himself.)

All of this is not to say that Eric is okay in the true end and should be left to his own devices. He’s a man in pain, a man in constant crisis, and he’s in desperate need of intervention to prevent him from harming himself or others. I like him and Mira together and she will likely always be a special (Depended, Favorite) person to him, but he can’t and shouldn’t rely on his relationship with her to keep his head above water and keep him from acting the way he did in the Pod Room. Eric needs professional help; but call me optimistic, I think that learning from Sean about how he acted on the other routes, what it looks like when he is truly at rock bottom, might inspire him to seek that help.

Anyway. Sorry for the rant, I hope it was interesting at least. I’m going to go refill my medications and schedule an appointment with my therapist because, as fun and cathartic as this was to write, it’s definitely not healthy to get this riled up over fictional characters; plus, I can’t rightly advocate for a fictional character to get help when I’m not taking care of myself, can I?

[madd-information]

Have you watched Kati Morton's new video about Maladaptive Daydreaming? What do you think about it?

[intro]

For years, I believed maladaptive daydreaming to be a form of dissociation, but it could also be added to the DSM as its own diagnosis, since it does have its own set of unique symptoms. Either way, at this time maladaptive daydreaming is not listed in the DSM as a diagnosable mental illness.

I was concerned because her last couple videos on the topic were very confusing to watch and seemed to conflate MD with the inner-worlds of DID.  It looks like she has done some more research on it and is going to make a more informed video. This is great and I deeply appreciate that she’s taking the time to do a proper dive into this. 

The closest diagnosis would be DPDR, or depersonalization derealization disorder. And this is the diagnosis given to those of us who struggle with dissociation. [explanation of DPDR]

Gonna need you to source that Katie, I’ve never heard an MD researcher say something like this.  When they talk about MD they call it a behavioral addiction with OCD features which is related to dissociative absorption (different from derealization and depersonalization, these two dissociative experiences are not particularly significant in MD, though they can happen.)

These experiences are extremely common. It's estimated that half of all adults have had at least one episode of DPDR. 50% of people. That is a huge amount of people.

Cool but not sure it’s at all relevant to the video topic. 

Also, it's important to mention that in 2016, four researchers put together the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, or MDS. This is a 14-item self-reported scale, meaning that you as the patient answers 14 questions based on your own maladaptive daydreaming experience.

It’s a 16 item scale now, it was changed very early on and has been 16 for years.  This is a very small and forgivable knitpick, just fyi. 

The MDS focuses on the content of our daydreams, how intense the urge to continue daydreaming is, and how much it impairs our ability to function in our lives, and the benefits and costs of our daydreaming. I am not personally familiar with this scale, nor have I used it in my practice, but I've linked the research article in the description if you wanna learn more about it.

A good description, and here’s that link again for anyone who wants to read about the finer details of this scale. 

When it comes to maladaptive daydreaming, it isn't just feeling out of body or environment. We can create very intense and detailed daydreams with plots, characters, and very lifelike issues and storylines. Some people will get the plots for their daydreams from their real lives, while others can create a utopian place unlike their current experience.

Yep, decent overview of content, though content doesn’t matter that much.  Also, use of “we”.  Is Katie Morton an MDer or was this a creative choice?  I don’t know, just a passing thought. 

We can find ourselves staying in these daydreams for various amounts of time. And some of my patients have reported staying in them for hours. And many of you have let me know that you struggle to get out of them at all, spending days in this other life that we've created.

Yep, good overview, but more importantly she’s listening to her patients and the feedback of MDers in her audience.

...there are many causes for this, and the first I wanna address is trauma triggers. If we've experienced a trauma in our life, things that remind us of that time or situation can pull us into a flashback, cause us to dissociate, or in many cases push us into our maladaptive daydreams.

When our brain and the rest of our nervous system feels overwhelmed and unable to deal with what's going on in the moment, it can pull us out of our current situation through dissociation. I always talk about that, like our brain pulling the ripcord. And it can also utilize maladaptive daydreaming. It's a way to cope or get through an overwhelming situation when we don't have other skills to help calm our nervous system down. So we just rely on what we know, and that can be daydreaming or dissociating. It's almost like this coping skill protects us from having to feel traumatized again and so it takes us away, you know, drops us into a much safer and happier place.

Trauma is always talked about first when people do overviews of MD.  She’s not wrong but just to add more information;  about a quarter of MDers report trauma, the other 75(ish)% don’t.  It’s a significant number but trauma is not the only pathway to MD.  Sometimes people walk away from these videos feeling like “well, I don’t have any trauma, maybe I don’t really have MD”.  That’s not a comment on what Katie has presented, she does go into other things below, just adding on.

Another cause or trigger can be high levels of stress or anxiety. We can slowly feel ourselves become more and more overwhelmed until our brain pulls us out of our reality and into a new one, aka our maladaptive daydreams. In short, we can want to stay in these daydreams to feel better and safer, but it can get in the way of us functioning in our life.

Yep

[audience anecdotes]

...Which is why even the term maladaptive daydreaming is used. Maladaptive means it's not providing adequate or appropriate adjustment to the environment or situation. So the daydreaming is only holding off the bad things. It's not actually making anything better or helping us process any of the upset. It's really just a temporary check-out, which can be helpful sometimes, but if it's happening all the time or making it hard for us to focus at work, school, or with our friends and family, we should find other, better ways to cope.

Exactly.

Which moves us into how we can better cope so that we don't get sucked into our daydreams for hours, days, or even weeks. And first up is mindfulness. Now, I know that term is overused now and super annoying but in order for us to know when we even need to use other coping skills, we have to know when the daydreaming urges are happening. So often we aren't aware of what we were feeling or thinking until it's too late and we're already pulled into our daydream. And at that point it's more difficult or even impossible for us to pull ourselves out. Therefore, we have to start being more aware of what we're going through.

[continues explanation]

Perfection.

And so next is figuring out ways to calm our system down. This can take the form of a distraction technique like going for a walk or organizing a part of our home, coloring, watching a show, playing a video game, you name it. These calming things could also be more process-based, things like journaling or talking to your therapist or a friend about it, or even using an impulse log. [Continues with calming things]

Good examples, MD researchers specifically recommend keeping a log.

We're also going to have to find some coping skills that we can use when we're starting to feel overwhelmed and wanting to go back into the daydream. Maybe we hold an ice cube in our hands, clap our hands, count the number of things in the room that are blue, brown, black… whatever works for you, do it.

Good stuff. 

And it's okay for something not to work. We just have to try it to know and then move on to something else.

Important point to make, happy to see this. 

Once we have a few things that work, write them down in your phone or on a post-it note so that you can see it and be reminded when you need it. We will also need to come up with some ways to pull ourselves out of the daydream. And I know this is gonna be harder and we may even wanna call upon helpful and supportive people in our lives to assist us.

Good advise. 

We could, because it's our daydream, right, we could put a big door in our daydream and we can choose to go through it and pull ourselves out, or have people in the daydream that remind us of our real life and tell us to go back.

A good suggestion.  Q, on the Parallel Lives Podcast (I can’t remember which episode off the top of my head), did something like this by turning to his characters and saying “ok, take 5 guys, we’ll pick it up at xtime”, and many people have found that to be a clever and helpful method. 

Now, I know this is really, really hard… which rolls into my final tip, which is to work with a therapist to heal from the trauma or to learn how to better cope with the anxiety or stress we're feeling. Working to heal or process through the reason our maladaptive daydreaming exists in the first place will ensure that we don't need it anymore.

Absolutely seek professional support if you can. 

... if we heal the issue we're struggling to cope with, the urge to use those unhelpful coping skills will go away altogether.

[outro]

I think this last point will frighten a lot of MDers.  It’s probably the brevity of the video that didn’t allow her to really expand on this, and I certainly don’t want to put words into her mouth that she may not have intended.  Don’t be afraid of losing your MD.  “Curing” Maladaptive Daydreaming does not mean “I’ll never see my world again.”  You’ll always have the capacity to daydream like this, you were born this way, but it *doesn’t* have to be maladaptive. Like overeating, you will never not eat, you will fix your relationship with food. 

Good video overall, brief but accurate and includes the standard helpful advise. 

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds

Joe Pierre M.D.

Psych Unseen         Psychology Today

Part 1: What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon.

August 12, 2020

“Where we go one, we go all.” — QAnon mantra

Ever since I started writing about conspiracy theories, readers have occasionally written in to ask for advice about a family member who has fallen down the rabbit hole of belief. To be honest, beyond expressions of sympathy and referring them back to my posts about why people are attracted to conspiracy theories in the first place, I often feel at a loss to offer anything helpful. The stark reality is that becoming obsessed with conspiracy theory beliefs has significant potential to drive a wedge between loved ones that can irreparably damage relationships.

Recently, however, I was invited on KQED radio to talk about this issue as it relates to QAnon, which prompted me to consider a more thoughtful response that I’ll cover here in a series of blog posts.

In Part 1 of this series on “What to Do When Someone You Love Becomes Obsessed with QAnon,” we’ll explore why it is that some people are so drawn to QAnon. Understanding that is a vital starting point if we hope to help loved ones climb of out the QAnon conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

Understanding the Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds

QAnon is a curious modern phenomenon that’s part conspiracy theory, part religious cult, and part role-playing game.

Some of the psychological quirks that are thought to drive belief in conspiracy theories include need for uniqueness and needs for certainty, closure, and control that are especially salient during times of crisis. Conspiracy theories offer answers to questions about events when explanations are lacking. While those answers consist of dark narratives involving bad actors and secret plots, conspiracy theories capture our attention, offer a kind of reassurance that things happen for a reason, and can make believers feel special that they’re privy to secrets to which the rest of us “sheeple” are blind.

With an invisible leader (it’s not even clear if “Q” is a single individual or several), no organizational structure, and no coercive element for membership (people are free to “come and go” as they please), it would be a stretch to call QAnon a religious cult. But it has been increasingly modeled as something of a new religious movement, especially inasmuch as it’s often intertwined with an apocalyptic version of Christianity. Previous research on cults has revealed that people who join them are more likely to have symptoms of anxiety and depression and are often lonely people looking for emotional and group affiliation.1 Anecdotal evidence suggests that a similar psychological profile may also account for why some might find QAnon appealing.

Beyond conspiracy theory and online cult, QAnon has also been described as “an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game” where online players who refer to themselves as “bakers” eagerly await the chance to decipher cryptic clues in the form of “bread crumbs” or “Q-drops.” These rewards are dispensed within an irregular "variable ratio reinforcement schedule" that highlights how QAnon represents an immersive form of entertainment that, like online gaming or gambling, provides an ideal set-up for a kind of compulsive behavior that resembles addiction.

The puzzle-solving, role-playing dimension of QAnon acts as another reinforcing intoxicant of sorts, providing believers with an exciting new identity as a "Q Patriot." Back in the 1980s, parents worried that kids playing Dungeons and Dragons would get so invested in their magical role-playing characters that they might lose touch with the real world. Today, QAnon is a kind of live-action role-playing game in which the conflation of fantasy and reality isn’t so much a risk as a built-in feature.

Understanding the multifaceted aspects of QAnon in this way helps to understand its appeal as well as why believers might be unwilling to unplug and walk away. For those immersed in the world of QAnon, climbing out of the rabbit hole could represent a significant loss—of something to occupy one’s time, of feeling connected to something important, of finally feeling a sense of self-worth and control during uncertain times.

Without replacing QAnon with something else that satisfies one's psychological needs in a similar way, escape may be unlikely. Of course, leaving QAnon would allow believers to reclaim significant time and energy that might be better channeled into healthier real-life relationships, work, and recreational pastimes. But for many, the very lack of such sources of meaning might have led them to seek out QAnon in the first place, such that there would be little guarantee of finding them anew.

From that perspective, life down in the rabbit hole might look pretty good. As one QAnon believer put it , “Q is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

How can we convince our loved ones to walk away from that?

For more answers, stay tuned for Part 2.References

1. Rousselet M, Duretete O, Hardouin JB, Grall-Bronnec M. Cult membership: what factors contribute to joining or leaving? Psychiatric Research 2017; 257:27-33.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202008/the-psychological-needs-qanon-feeds

_______________________________________

Joseph M. Pierre, M.D. is a Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Acting Chief of Mental Health Community Care Systems at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. His work focuses on the treatment of individuals with severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and co-occurring substance use disorders. Although his clinical practice centers on the care of hospitalized patients who suffer from psychotic disorders, he has a longstanding interest in the grey area between psychopathology and normality and the psychological underpinnings of everyday life. Psych Unseen draws from the perspectives of psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, and evidence-based medicine to address timely topics related to mental illness, human behavior, and how we come to hold popular and not-so-popular beliefs.

AUTHOR OF Psych Unseen

Psych Unseen: Brain, Behavior, and Belief draws from the perspectives of psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, and evidence-based medicine to address timely topics related to mental illness, human behavior, and how we come to hold popular and not-so-popular beliefs. Read now.

___________________________________________

Part 2  How Far Down the QAnon Rabbit Hole Did Your Loved One Fall?

What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon, 

Psychology Today      August 21, 2020

Joe Pierre M.D.  

___________________________________________

Part 3 What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon

Psychology Today      September 1, 2020

Joe Pierre M.D.

___________________________________________

Born on the dark fringes of the internet, QAnon is now infiltrating mainstream American life and politics

CNN      July 3, 2020

by Paul P. Murphy

___________________________________________

The thin line between conspiracy theories and cult worship is dissolving

An information war is being waged.

bigthink.com     May 18, 2020            

by Derek Beres

___________________________________________

I’m dating a conspiracy theorist. But it feels like I’m the one going crazy.

Washington Post     August 16, 2020

by Trent Kay Maverick  

___________________________________________

The Birth of QAmom

Rolling Stone    September 2020

by EJ Dickson

___________________________________________

Christian Groups That Resist Public-Health Guidelines Are Forgetting a Key Part of the Religion’s History  

TIME

___________________________________________

The Prophecies of Q

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.

Story by Adrienne LaFrance ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARSH RAZIUDDIN The Atlantic   June 2020 issue

This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

___________________________________________

[duchessofostergotlands]

Hi, jess! Since we’re talking about reality tv, I’d really like to know your opinion on sth that’s been the hot topic in my country these last couple of months. What do you think about people with mental disorders participating in reality shows? I’m currently watching a (now popular - because of the pandemic) reality show called “a fazenda” (the farm). It’s a bit like big brother, but with somewhat famous people (a couple of big celebrities + lots of b-c listers) having to deal with farm duties, like taking care of cows, chickens, etc. It’s wonderful, kinda trashy and I love it! The network that streams the show is very shady (it supported bolsonaro) and it clearly doesn’t know or care about how to approach delicate subjects. Here’s the thing: one of the participants has borderline - the show hasn’t disclosed this info, the audience found out by googling her after she had her first major fight on the show (she has a highlight on her ig in which she talks about being borderline). The discussion we’re having: is the network exploiting her by using her mental disorder as entertainment? Should they release an official statement about it to avoid public misconceptions about her? The participants who aren’t her friends have said incredibly prejudiced things about her, suggesting she likes being “crazy”, “retarded” and “not normal” because this supposedly “helps her get extra tv time” - this is infuriating because she’s clearly in pain when they provoke her. These horribly ignorant people even found out how to triger her and are actively using this to try to make her physically attack them, which would lead to her being expelled. From what the audience can gather from short clips now and there, she’s taking her meds as usual and is being assisted by a psychologist (at least!). Personally I don’t think there’s a problem with having a person with a mental disorder on a reality show, because she has the right to participate and shouldn’t be discriminated because of it - but as long as the show doesn’t exploit her and approach the subject responsibly. The silver lining is that I’m seeing LOTS of people supporting her on social media and completely disagreeing with the other participants’ behavior - her public approval is much bigger than theirs; the admin who’s taking care of her social media during this period has been posting about the subject and invited a psychologist to talk about it and answer a q&a sent by followers. Anyway sorry for the huge text! I really value your opinion and would love to know your insights

Hey :) Well thank you for asking for my opinion, that’s always sweet! We had The Farm here ages ago, I never watched it but I remember it making tabloid headlines because one of the celebrity contestants “stimulated” a pig. 

Well firstly I don’t think a mental illness should disqualify anyone right off the bat. Different conditions will have different challenges, different people with the same diagnosis will present differently, and different reality shows will bring out different challenges - like it would be different to be on something like Bake Off which is generally supportive and you can go home and be with your family in between challenges versus Love Island which is a show here largely based on attractive people getting off with each other so there’s a lot of tabloid attention, a lot of pressure to look a certain way and they’re all cooped up with no contact with the outside world for weeks and often plied with alcohol. There’s also a difference between having a diagnosis and actually still displaying symptoms at a clinical level. Lots of people with BPD like me show less symptoms as they get older until they’re sub clinical but they may still be branded with the diagnosis by others or feel they want to keep it themselves. And even someone like me who very much still deals with their condition on an active basis, I still have legal competence to make my own decisions and it’s infantilising to suggest a diagnosis of a mental illness automatically disqualifies you. So as much as possible it needs to be an individualised process to decide and the reality show needs to be honest about what it will entail. I don’t know about over there but we have psychiatric evaluations for our reality shows. I don’t know how good these are but if they are robust and informed by people with the specific conditions then I think these can be a good way of deciding if someone can actually handle the specific challenges of that show. One evaluation is not going to work for everyone, it needs to be someone with specific expertise in that condition. 

If someone with a mental illness is accepted on the show then something that’s missed out a lot in the UK and probably elsewhere is the care during and after the show. Firstly they should have a specialist on hand who can identify when the contestant is having a more difficult time and if it’s necessary to have private, off camera check ins with them about their mental health. And for BPD and other severe conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar these people can’t just be psychologists. Being a psychologist doesn’t mean you have the knowledge to deal with the specific condition. There have been some suicides of reality show contestants over the last few years here and a lot of blame has been pointed at the producers and studios for not supporting people when they leave the show and are suddenly famous. There should be a clear care plan that is specific to their needs and the producers and studios need to commit to ensuring that the level of care provided is fit for purpose. Sending an email with the name of a psychologist with general expertise is not enough. Some people may require regular sessions with people with specific qualifications and they need to be willing to commit to that for the safety of their participants.

I also think when it comes to the point around disclosure, nothing should ever be confirmed without the person’s explicit consent and them being able to approve any wording about it. Even if they’ve talked about it openly prior to going on the show, it would be exploitative to me to release a statement about a contestant’s specific health issues without first checking with them. If they do feel that the way things are being portrayed could negatively impact her long term health then I think they have a duty to raise it with her even if the show is ongoing and decide if she would be happy for it to be shared. If it is, I think the tv channel or whoever is releasing the statement should accompany it with links to support services and helplines and should invest time in promoting resources which explain BPD - or the condition the person has - and humanises people so that the bigoted views being spouted on the show are not able to go unchallenged. I’m really glad to hear the person managing her social media is using the opportunity to share info and that people are responding well to it. If the show does ever acknowledge it then I think they would have a responsibility to participate in those efforts, it shouldn’t be down to her team alone.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

maybe a dumb q but is it uncommon to not relate to any grip/loop behaviour patterns? I for sure must have been in a loop/grip at some point in my life, but i just dont think i relate to just a single particular set of stress behaviours. i read the descriptions and arent they just generally... a bit vague? being irritable, withdrawal from others, self doubt, sleeplessness or oversleeping. how are these related to just one function? arent these things just common traits of a depressive episode? /1

even thinking of the times ive had depression all i did was: self loathe, play pc games, sleep, cook all the damn time even tho i barely ate anything to the point i couldnt fit any more food into my fridge, self isolate, not speak to anyone, despair, overthink, and cry. isnt that mroe or less just... common depressive behaviour? how is anyone suppose to relate that kind of disordered behaviour to any type? sorry if this is stupid btw lol i can be kinda dense /2

-----------------------------------------

Hi anon,

I don’t know if it’s common or not but I’m pretty sure it’s more normal to feel this way than not to feel this way, and here’s why.

You actually might not have ever been in a grip or loop in your life! There was a good shitpost a while ago which was like “remember how you once thought you were so twisted and unredeemable and it turned out you were just like, 15” and I think that the “I am damaged, I am unhealthy, I have undergone such trauma” mindset gets really unhealthily amplified on Tumblr and in typology circles, and it’s one that should get shut down far more than it does, and while that’s a whole other post, the summary is lots of people are like “I think I’m TERRIBLY UNHEALTHY and I’ve been looping for YEARS” and 99.9% of the time either they have a very standard and reasonably treatable mental illness, they are mistyped and so their standards for what healthy looks like are wildly incorrect for who they actually are, or they’re just like, cranky and melodramatic and need to take a nap.

It’s also of course entirely possible you have been in a grip or loop if you were, chances are your mind was on something else and your memories of that time are not going to be Ah yes, I recall when my tertiary function’s impulses were used to validate the worst impulses of my dominant function which then reinforced those tertiary function behaviors; they’re going to be “I remember when I was going through some really bad times.”

I don’t know which descriptions you read because the ones I have linked aren’t quite that vague, but things like irritability, withdrawal, self-doubt, and sleeplessness are indeed pretty universal stress behaviors (and this includes acute stress that falls short of mental illness - like, a breakup or finals week can lead to this sort of behavior). They can’t and shouldn’t be linked to any specific type.

Which brings me to my point, which is I think I have, at least for the past couple years, been increasingly clear in that I think typing off of stress behaviors is an unequivocally bad idea. It’s bad because a lot of stress behaviors are widespread symptoms of either normal levels of stress or various mental illnesses (ie, you are 100% justified in asking how one could possibly relate the general behaviors you describe to a type). It’s bad because it pushes you to focus on yourself at your worst instead of at your normal baseline functioning, which absolutely, in my opinion, is going to perpetuate that edgy I Am Damaged mentality for people who are completely average in terms of health, and make it easier for people who actually are dealing with mental illness to think it’s just who they are instead of a treatable situation that can be improved. It’s bad because people are the least likely to be able to consider themselves objectively and calmly in those moments, and neurologically, it’s actively hard to remember things when you’re depressed, stressed, or grieving - like, if you are clinically depressed for a couple of months, you will not form new memories of that time in the same way you normally would! So typing off of stress basically is like ‘hey take this thing about which you have little in the way of valid information and which makes you feel bad about yourself and hyperfixate on this only and use it to consider something that’s supposed to be a model of your personality at large’. It is such a bad idea and I have theories as to why it caught on but it doesn’t matter because it just needs to stop.

This isn’t to say looping and gripping aren’t worth considering, but if you read Was That Really Me, the text that defined gripping, there are some worthwhile takeaways. First: this book is the observations of an external party (the psychologist who wrote it), not the observations of people actually living it. Second, while there’s some advice on what to do, it’s from the perspective of that therapist, a person who has been explicitly brought in by those people experiencing stressors to help.

I don’t think the intent of introducing the concept of gripping was to help people type themselves or avoid the step of seeking some kind of help during a period of stress, but rather to provide some explanations for patterns of behavior, perhaps indicate some warning signs, and show how psychologists who use MBTI apply it.

More generally, understanding the loop and grip for your type can help show you the specific thought process behind certain stress behaviors you have as an individual that are not explicitly symptoms of depression or anxiety, but it’s a thing to look at after you already have figured out your type from other means, and it’s a potential pitfall, not a thing that you’ve necessarily experienced.

[official-transsexual]

FAQ

(last updated September 11, 2019)

Q: What is dysphoria? A: Dysphoria is a diagnostic term meaning “profound distress or discomfort.” It is a common symptom of many psychiatric disorders. It's been used this way for over a century (example 1, example 2, example 3). “Gender dysphoria” refers to dysphoria that occurs as a result of incongruence between a person’s assigned sex and gender identity.  To meet the diagnostic criteria for the psychiatric disorder “Gender Dysphoria” the DSM-V specifically states that the incongruence must cause “significant distress or problems functioning.” Sex/gender incongruence that doesn’t cause this distress or dysfunction is NOT considered disordered.

Q: I was told that the APA defined gender dysphoria as “conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.” A: This particular line is a quote from a page on the APA website that was meant to briefly summarize the diagnostic criteria for Gender Dysphoria. It is not the full diagnostic criteria, which is described further down the page. Along with the checklist of traits, the diagnostic criteria for both children and adults include “distress or inpairment functioning” as specific necessary condition: “In adolescents and adults gender dysphoria diagnosis involves a difference between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, and significant distress or problems functioning [...] In children, gender dysphoria diagnosis involves at least six of the following and an associated significant distress or impairment in function, lasting at least six months.” Again: that “distress or problems functioning” criteria is mandatory; this is why the line meant to summarize gender dysphoria uses the word “conflict” instead of a more neutral term like “incongruence” or even “difference.” The APA’s endorsed expert opinion on the subject states more explicitly that “not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria.” According to members of the APA workgroup responsible for writing the Gender Dysphoria diagnostic criteria, the term “dysphoria” was chosen based on the logic that “if the new diagnosis would focus more on the dysphoria aspect (e.g., in the name) than does the current one, no separate distress criterion would be necessary, because the distress would be defined as inherent to the diagnosis” (sci-hub pdf). Note that they ended up keeping the distress criterion in the diagnosis despite the redundancy, presumably because they were afraid that it might not be clear enough that they were referring to distress while using a medical term that literally means “significant distress.” The exact DSM-5 criteria (which I transcribe here) further makes it clear that gender dysphoria requires distress, rather than simply gender incongruence.

Q: Why does it matter how we define dysphoria? A: It’s a matter of relevance. When discussing gender dysphoria in the context of the medical model, the relevant definition is the one that gets used within the medical system.

Q: But what if we worked to change the medical definition of gender dysphoria? A: I’ve see this idea brought up in my notes a few times, and it’s honestly just a terrible idea. The overpathologization of distress responses is a huge concern within psychology, and it’s one of the reasons the medical definition of gender dysphoria is so limited. Extending that definition to include things like “feeling bad when you’re mistreated” is, at best, a step backward. 

Q: What makes a person transgender, if not dysphoria? A: An incongruence (mismatch) between their gender identity and their assigned sex category.

Q: How can someone know they're trans without dysphoria? A: Many non-dysphoric trans people cite "gender euphoria" as their main clue. Others simply describe feeling a strong desire to be a certain gender that differed from their assigned gender. 

Q: Isn't that just dysphoria? A: No. As I've already pointed out, dysphoria is a diagnostic term referring specifically to profound distress. While it's certainly common for these other signs of gender incongruence to be accompanied by distress or discomfort, these are not themselves always inherently distressing experiences. The very epicurian idea that gender euphoria is simply a result of gender dysphoria is a false dichotomy based on a zero-sum understanding of pain and pleasure.

Q: Does this mean being transgender is a choice for non-dysphoric trans people? A: No. While all of us, dysphoric or otherwise, have a choice in what labels we use & which identities we claim, the process through which gender identity is formed is incredibly complex and not incredibly well understood. Non-dysphoric trans people may have less incentive to come out or transition than those of us who do experience dysphoria, but this isn't the same thing as choosing to have a transgender identity.

Q: Why would someone who’s 100% comfortable with their body transition? A: First off, most people aren’t 100% comfortable with their bodies, and there’s a wide range of experiences that exist between” complete and total comfort” and “significant distress.” Non-dysphoric trans people seek out medical transition for various reasons, including legal barriers to social transition (eg medical requirements to update ID), feelings of euphoria associated with specific traits, or simply a desire to present in a way that is more congruent with their identities.

Q: But why would non-dysphoric trans people seek out treatment for a condition they don’t have? Isn’t that like a doctor prescribing chemo drugs to someone without cancer? A: Many people- cis and trans alike- take HRT for reasons other than treatment of a disorder, including preventive care against future poor health or the potential for quality of life improvements. As of 2016, an estimated 1.67% of adult men under the age of 65 were making insurance claims to cover testosterone supplements, most of whom are cis men; the authors note that men over the age cutoff of the paper were expected to use testosterone supplements at higher rates due to age-related hypogonadism (in this case, the natural, non-disordered decrease in testosterone production cis men experience as they age). Additionally, doctors actually do prescribe chemo drugs to people without cancer fairly regularly, it’s called “off-label use.” A common example of this is Methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug which is regularly prescribed to treat noncancerous conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and ectopic pregnancy. Hormonal transition is itself considered an off-label use of HRT, regardless of whether the person transitioning is dysphoric 

Q: What sources say that you don’t need dysphoria to be transgender? (Note: this list is not intended to be exhaustive) A: The American Psychiatric Association explicitly says that dysphoria is not necessary “ Not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria and that distinction is important to keep in mind. Gender dysphoria and/or coming out as transgender can occur at any age.”  The World Health Organization's ICD-10 acknowledges the existence of non-dysphoric trans people with its description of "transsexualism" as "usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort... or inappropriateness." The American Psychological Association: “A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder.” The American Academy of Pediatrics describes gender dysphoria as a potential consequence of being trans: “ Some youths experience gender dysphoria when the incongruence between assigned sex at birth and asserted gender identity becomes so distressing that it impairs the youth in school, relationships and overall functioning... However, there is no evidence that risk for mental illness is inherently due to a gender-diverse identity.” The Canadian Paediatric Society provides this definition of Gender Dysphoria: “Describes the level of discomfort or suffering associated with the conflict that can exist between a person's assigned sex at birth and their true gender. Some transgender children experience no distress about their bodies, but others may be very uncomfortable with their assigned sex, especially at the start of puberty when their body starts to change.” The World Medical Association cites the APA definition of dysphoria: “The WMA asserts that gender incongruence is not in itself a mental disorder; however it can lead to discomfort or distress, which is referred to as gender dysphoria (DSM-5).” WPATH states that "the criteria currently listed for [Gender Dysphoria] are descriptive of many people who experience dissonance between their sex as assigned at birth and their gender identity... The DSM-5 descriptive criteria for gender dysphoria were developed to aid in diagnosis and treatment to alleviate the clinically significant distress and impairment that is frequently, though not universally, associated with transsexual and transgender conditions” (emphasis added). 

Q: I was told the American Psychiatric Association isn't trustworthy, so why do you use it as a source? A: I've written a big post here analyzing criticism of the APA (and particularly, their handling of trans identities); the short version is that the APA has been very heavily criticised in the past for supporting many of the same positions truscum advocate in favour of today. While the APA & DSM aren't perfect, they aren't exactly the mess truscum claim they are either.

Q: What about brain scan research? Doesn't that prove dysphoria is required? A: No. Brain sex research in interesting, but the results are nowhere near as clear-cut as many people believe. Yes, there's been studies that have observed similarities between the brains of dysphoric binary trans people and cisgender people who share their identities. This is correlational research that can't be used to infer causation without further evidence, and researchers still aren't sure what exactly it means. There's also the problem of attempting to apply a body of research to non-dysphoric trans people that includes few, if any, results from non-dysphoric trans participants.

Q: How can someone transition without a dysphoria diagnosis? A: Depending on where you are, there may be clinics in your area that operate on an informed consent model of transition. Unlike the traditional gatekeeper model of transition, informed consent models allow anyone who is competent to make their own medical decisions to receive transition care. Note that this does not mean that they block (or should block) mentally ill people from transitioning, even those with delusional disorders; instead, this is about ensuring that a transitioning person is capable of understanding the changes to their body that transition care would lead to, and minimizing the risk of a crisis during a dangerous situation.

Q: What about John Money/David Reimer? Is this evidence that gender is not actually a construct? A: John Money was a conversion therapy advocate who believed that he could force a child to identify with the gender of his choosing, and that there was no point in someone identifying as male without a functioning penis. Nothing about this disproves the idea that our genders are constructed, though it does demonstrate that the process of gender construction is beyond human control, at least on an individual level. Some of the terms Money coined may still be in use, but his claims about being able to force children to identify as a specific gender are pretty thoroughly rejected outside of the conversion therapy crowd. Additionally, bringing up the fact that certain terms were coined by Money without recognizing that those terms are currently used in a context that otherwise rejects his views is often used as an attempt to poison the well.

Q: What does "radscum" mean? A: it's an old term for the category of rad/fem than includes what we now call "TE/RFs" and "SW/ERFs." It was still commonly used when the term "truscum" was coined to refer to post-HBS transmedicalism. In the communities I was active in, the term "truscum" caught on specifically because of how it reflected the relationship between the two groups (transmeds and radscum have a long history of co-operation, regardless of how any individual truscum today feels about that).

Q: Is it true that the person who coined the word “tucute” was a cis woman pretending to be trans? A: No, it’s not.

Q: Why did you remove my response with sources from the replies of your post? A: I didn’t.

Q: Will you promo my discourse blog? A: Sorry, no.

Q: Will you promo my fundraiser?  A: Please add a link to this post as a reblog or comment instead of messaging me. About the mod:

Q: what are your pronouns? A: Ey/em (like “they” without the “th-”)

Q: Why do you call yourself "transsexual"? A: I've been using the term transsexual for myself for roughly a decade, and I refuse to give it up because some kids decided they own that word now.

Q: Do you ID as queer? A: That's one of the labels I use, yes.

Q: What other identity labels do you use? A: I'm being intentionally vague about certain aspects of my ID on this blog because it's interesting to watch what assumptions truscum make, but in general I'm neither straight nor cis & I use a variety of labels depending on the context I'm speaking in and the information I'm trying to communicate to my audience.

Q: How old are you? A: Over 30 (which is part of the reason why I stick to responding to people who interact with me first instead of seeking out bad posts to argue against)

[artthetransguy]

‼️ You do NOT need dysphoria to be trans‼️

Starting off I should say I'm a binary trans person, I have dysphoria, I've been out for 6-7 years I think, I am medically transitioning (been on T over 3 years and almost 7 months post op top surgery), and I used to identify as a truscum and transmed. I'm going to rebut the common arguments that truscum, transmeds, terfs, and transphobes make. I will also attempt to answer questions others have (I originally posted this on Facebook and some of my friends had questions). I will mostly be arguing by citing information, but I will also tell my thoughts and opinions, as well as personal experience. 😡Arguments truscum/transmeds, terfs, & transphobes make😡 ⭕️"You need dysphoria to be trans". Not true. So first off, what is dysphoria? The medical definition of dysphoria defined by Merriam-Webster is "a state of feeling unwell or unhappy"(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysphoria). Anyone can have dysphoria, even cisgender people, so this argument makes no sense. Does this mean that cis people who have dysphoria (which they can and do experience) are trans? no of course not. Why? because that's not what being trans means. I do realize that trans people will shorten 'gender dysphoria' to just 'dysphoria' like when they say "my dysphoria is really bad today" you know they are (usually) talking about gender dysphoria. What else is wrong with this argument? When I rebut this argument (which I do a lot) I usually say: 💬"how do you know?", I get responses such as "It's common sense", "you're so stupid/a dumbass", "it's science", but they can never, and have never provided a (reputable) source that says this. (I say reputable because I have gotten, and I'm paraphrasing, "my 20 year old friend who is about to get top surgery and has been on T for years says you need it" to which I replied "I'm also 20 and just had top surgery a few months ago and have been on T for over 3 years. Does that make me credible?" He didn't think so). 💬"What kind of dysphoria?" They then may say "you need some kind of dysphoria" or "you can't like *insert body parts here* and be trans". Well, what about the people who have finished their transition and no longer have dysphoria? are they still trans? Not all people will have dysphoria about the same parts. Some trans people have hair dysphoria, voice dysphoria, chest dysphoria, bottom dysphoria, social dysphoria, and the list goes on. ⭕️"Trans is short for transitioning so if you don't (medically/physically) transition, you aren't trans". No, it is not. Trans is short for transgender, not every trans person can or wants to transition. They may not transition for medical reasons, safety reasons, or they just don't want to. ⭕️"Having dysphoria doesn't mean you hate yourself/you have to suffer" This argument before made sense to me because I was misinformed about what gender dysphoria was, as are many others. What is gender dysphoria? The medical definition of gender dysphoria defined by Merriam-Webster is "a distressed state arising from conflict between a person's gender identity and the sex the person has or was identified as having at birth 'A significant incongruence between gender identity and physical phenotype is known as gender identity disorder; the experience of this state, termed gender dysphoria, is a source of chronic suffering'. — Louis J. Gooren, The New England Journal of Medicine, 31 Mar. 2011"(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictiona…/gender%20dysphoria). Another important point in this is the "a distressed state" in that definition. Distress is defined by Merriam Webster as "pain or suffering affecting the body, a bodily part, or the mind...a painful situation...state of danger or desperate need"(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/distress#synonyms). Seeing this definition and knowing what these words mean, we know that gender dysphoria is quite literally defined as pain and suffering. ⭕️"Being trans literally is the definition of dysphoria" Well, we already got the definition of dysphoria out of the way. No, it is not the definition of dysphoria. The APA (American Psychological Association) says "Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth". (https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx). ⭕️"You need gender dysphoria to be trans" So now knowing that being transgender just means that your gender and sex aren't the same, and knowing what gender dysphoria is, we could say that we know this isn't true. But don't take my word for it, let's hear it from the experts: ☑️"Not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria and that distinction is important to keep in mind. Gender dysphoria and/or coming out as transgender can occur at any age"(https://www.psychiatry.org/…/gender-dysphoria/expert-q-and-a). ☑️"It is important to note that not all gender diverse people experience gender dysphoria"(https://gic.nhs.uk/info-support/gender-dysphoria/). ☑️"For some transgender people, the difference between the gender they are thought to be at birth and the gender they know themselves to be can lead to serious emotional distress that affects their health and everyday lives if not addressed. Gender dysphoria is the medical diagnosis for someone who experiences this distress. Not all transgender people have gender dysphoria. On its own, being transgender is not considered a medical condition. Many transgender people do not experience serious anxiety or stress associated with the difference between their gender identity and their gender of birth, and so may not have gender dysphoria"(https://transequality.org/…/frequently-asked-questions-abou…). ☑️" Many, but not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria at some point in their lives"(https://www.lgbthealtheducation.org/…/Understanding-and-Add…). ☑️" Do all transgender people have gender dysphoria? No they do not, because not every transgender person experiences the distress associated with gender dysphoria"(https://www.lambdalegal.org/…/article/trans-related-care-faq). ☑️"Gender dysphoria refers to distress that 'some' TGNC [transgender and gender nonconforming] individuals may experience at some point in their lives as a result of incongruence between their gender identity and birth sex, which may include discomfort with gender role and primary and secondary sex characteristics. Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition. However, transgender is an identity, not a disorder, and the diagnosis is only applicable when TGNC people experience distress or impaired social / occupational functioning as a result of the incongruence"(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4809047/#R15). ⭕️"Being transgender is a mental illness" This argument is used both by people who try to say that a trans person is delusional and therefore their identity isn't valid, and by trans people who don't want to de-medicalize transgender identity. We know this argument is not true from some of the other points I've made. Being transgender isn't a mental illness, not even gender dysphoria is considered one. "Gender dysphoria is a recognized medical condition, for which treatment is sometimes appropriate. It's not a mental illness"(https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/). Also "The World Health Organization will no longer classify being transgender as a mental health disorder, the public health agency announced Monday.

Transgender and genderqueer identities, which WHO refers to as “gender incongruence,” are in a section about sexual health conditions in a newly updated version of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD)"(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/being-transgender-no-longe…). ⭕️"There are only 2 genders" When people say this they usually mean sex, but even then it is untrue. Both sex and gender are on a spectrum and aren't binary. "Sex is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females and males. The criteria for classification can be genitalia at birth or chromosomal typing before birth, and they do not necessarily agree with one another"(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243287001002002). The binary classifications of male and female leaves out everyone who does not fit into these categories because of genital makeup, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, or hormone levels. When people say that there is only male and female, they forget that intersex people exist. A good read that I'd recommend that I read for school is "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough" by Anne Fausto-Sterling. In it, Anne says "Western culture is deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes. Even language refuses other possibilities; thus to write about Levi Suydam I have had to invent conventions-- s/he and his/her-- to denote someone who is clearly neither male nor female or who is perhaps both sexes at once. Legally, too, every adult is either man or woman, and the difference, of course, is not trivial. For Suydam it meant the franchise; today it means being available for, or exempt from, draft registration, as well as being subject, in various ways, to a number of laws governing marriage, the family and human intimacy. In many parts of the United States, for instance, two people legally registered as men cannot have sexual relations without violating anti-sodomy statutes. But if the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party sexual system, they are in defiance of nature. For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes-- and perhaps even more"(http://capone.mtsu.edu/phollowa/5sexes.html). Another thing is that gender is a social construct, which I know is said a lot and is misunderstood. Pretty much everything has been socially constructed, so what is a social construct? "Social constructs or social constructions define meanings, notions, or connotations that are assigned to objects and events in the environment and to people’s notions of their relationships to and interactions with these objects. In the domain of social constructionist thought, a social construct is an idea or notion that appears to be natural and obvious to people who accept it but may or may not represent reality, so it remains largely an invention or artifice of a given society". So how is gender a social construct? The page goes on to say "Gender, which represents ways of talking, describing, or perceiving men and women, is also a socially constructed entity. Generally distinguished from sex (which is biological), notions of gender represent attempts by society, through the socialization process, to construct masculine or feminine identities and corresponding masculine or feminine gender roles for a child based on physical appearance and genitalia".(https://www.encyclopedia.com/…/socio…/social-constructionism). ⭕️"Non-binary doesn't exist because there is only male and female" Well for one, tell that to all the non-binary people. But no this is not correct. As we know, sex and gender are not binary so this identity makes sense. And also, whether or not you believe in them, they will continue to exist. ⭕️"You're a transtrender" People say a transtrender is someone who isn't "actually" trans, and just uses the label or pretends to be trans because its cool, or because they want attention. This is an argument made by transphobic people, including truscum and transmeds. People usually call others this for many reasons like: disagreeing with them, not fitting into their gendered stereotypes, not passing, not having dysphoria, not being the ideal trans person, they are experimenting with gender and gender expression, and/or being non-binary. Non-binary people are a big target of this argument. Heres the thing about this argument, no one thinks its cool or fun to be seen as trans in the sense that we are marginalized, are attacked, are killed, and so on. Also, Not every trans person is the same and wants to conform to gender norms. I'd also like to add that I get this comment a lot, despite being a binary trans person with dysphoria. They use it as a way to immediately discredit you and don't even know who you are. ⭕️"You're/you were just pretending to be trans" This is very similar to the last point but I wanted to go into more detail about this one. Some people may transition and then detransition for whatever reason (I'll go into this later). I know a few people had identified as trans and used a few different names and wanted to go by different pronouns then found out it wasn't who they were. Does this mean that they were faking it or pretending for fun? No, of course not. They thought they were trans and experimented and found out that they weren't. People should be able to experiment with their gender without getting accused of pretending to be trans. Most, if not all trans people go through an experimentation stage where they cut or grow out their hair, wear different clothes, go by a different name and pronouns, and so on. If we never went through an experimentation stage, how would we have known that we were trans? ⭕️"Most trans people detransition afterwords so you are going to regret this" This is usually said by cisgender transphobic people when trans people go on hormones or get surgeries. But what is the reality? "Surgical regret is actually very uncommon. Virtually every modern study puts it below 4 percent, and most estimate it to be between 1 and 2 percent (Cohen-Kettenis & Pfafflin 2003, Kuiper & Cohen-Kettenis 1998, Pfafflin & Junge 1998, Smith 2005, Dhejne 2014). In some other recent longitudinal studies, none of the subjects expressed regret over medically transitioning (Krege et al. 2001, De Cuypere et al. 2006). These findings make sense given the consistent findings that access to medical care improves quality of life along many axes, including sexual functioning, self-esteem, body image, socioeconomic adjustment, family life, relationships, psychological status and general life satisfaction. This is supported by the numerous studies (Murad 2010, De Cuypere 2006, Kuiper 1988, Gorton 2011, Clements-Nolle 2006) that also consistently show that access to GCS reduces suicidality by a factor of three to six (between 67 percent and 84 percent)... When asked about regrets, only 2 percent of respondents in a survey of transgender people in the UK had major regrets regarding the physical changes they had made, compared with 65 percent of non-transgender people in the UK who have had plastic surgery"(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/myths-about-transition-reg…). ⭕️"If you don't have dysphoria, how would you even know you're trans?" You can know that you are trans because you have a disconnect with your body which is called gender incongruence. "Gender incongruence is characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex"(https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en…). So it could be argued that gender incongruence is like gender dysphoria with presentations similar to the DSM-V definition, but does not require significant distress or impairment. There is also something called gender euphoria, which is the opposite of gender dysphoria. "That is, euphoria or happiness upon being correctly gendered, upon naming their identity, and being validated and recognized as their authentic self"(https://everydayfeminism.com/…/these-5-myths-about-body-dy…/). ⭕️"If you don't have dysphoria that means you are comfortable in your body, ok with being your agab (assigned gender at birth) and those pronouns, and ok with dressing as your agab so you aren't trans" This is not true either. Just because someone doesn't have dysphoria, that doesn't mean they are comfortable with their agab. Like I said before, trans people have a disconnect with their body, the same goes for non-dysphoric trans people. They have a disconnect but do not have distress, or pain and suffering, because of the disconnect. ⭕️"What if you don't REALIZE it's dysphoria? What if you thought EVERYBODY felt like you?" I see people making this argument like, "they just don't know what they are feeling is dysphoria". People know themselves better than anyone else. Also, if you are not a therapist or anything like that, you do not get diagnose someone else. This could also just be a genuine question. Some people (like myself) didn't know what transgender or dysphoria was and some still may not. I didn't know what being trans meant and I didn't know that what I was struggling with was dysphoria. For me personally, I thought I was struggling alone for the longest time. ⭕️"Non-dysphorics, non-binary, people who don't use he/him or she/her pronouns make the community look bad and make everyone hate the trans community more." The people who hate trans people will hate us regardless of if we have dysphoria, are non-binary, use different pronouns that aren't common, and so on. Why not learn about those in your community (or learn about those in the community if you are not in it) instead of bullying and attacking those you don't understand and siding with transphopic people. ⭕️Fake trans people are taking resources away from 'real' trans people (like hormones, dr. appointments, surgeries, therapy, etc.)" If this is true, why be mad at the "fake trans" people and instead be mad at the gatekeepers, be mad because there is a shortage of doctors that treat trans patients (very few doctors that would take me around here but I have had one for a while now so its good), and be mad at the lack of education doctors, nurses, therapists, and so on, have on trans people. It isn't other trans peoples fault we have to fight to get our resources, it's the world we live in where we are marginalized and oppressed. (Important to note that I am not talking about myself here. The transphobia, marginalization, and oppression I have endured cannot be compared to that of trans women, black and other poc trans people, non-binary people, and places where it is illegal or punished by death to be trans/queer in. I have a lot of privilige here and I know this). 🙂Other questions or comments🙂 🔶"Are there degrees of dysphoria? Like, "you have to have dysphoria about 35% of your body to make it into 'Transgender Circle'?" Yes, not all trans people have the same or the same amount of dysphoria. Some say its like waves where one day they feel really good and other days dysphoria is really bad. Some peoples dysphoria is much worse than others, but as long as it is distressing, it is still dysphoria. Every exclusionist is different. Some say "you just need some type of dysphoria" and others say "you need to have chest, bottom, social, etc. dysphoria to be trans". But the truth is, neither is true. 🔶"What is the difference between BDD (Body dysmorphic disorder) and (GD) gender dysphoria?" BDD is "a pathological preoccupation with an imagined or slight physical defect of one’s body to the point of causing significant stress or behavioral impairment in several areas (as work and personal relationships)"(https://www.apa.org/…/und…/ptacc/body-dysmorphic-traynor.pdf). GD is "a distressed state arising from conflict between a person's gender identity and the sex the person has or was identified as having at birth 'A significant incongruence between gender identity and physical phenotype is known as gender identity disorder; the experience of this state, termed gender dysphoria, is a source of chronic suffering'. — Louis J. Gooren, The New England Journal of Medicine, 31 Mar. 2011"(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictiona…/gender%20dysphoria). (I am not a medical professional but I will try to explain this) BDD and GD are very similar because they are both distressing and about the body, but there are differences. BDD is where your perception of your body is not the reality, where in GD you know what your body looks like and it doesn't match your gender identity. BDD is also compared to OCD. "The intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors exhibited in BDD are similar to the obsessions and compulsions of OCD. BDD is distinguished from OCD when the preoccupations or repetitive behaviors focus specifically on appearance"(https://adaa.org/…/other-relat…/body-dysmorphic-disorder-bdd). 🔶"Why doesn’t it harm the community to include people who experience euphoria instead of/not only dysphoria?" People say "having non-dysphorics and non-binary people makes the trans community look like a joke" but these people aren't going away and they are supported by the science. As I've said before, the people who hate trans people will hate us whether we have dysphoria or not. Bullying the trans people you don't understand won't change anything in regards to trans rights. What do you do when you encounter bullying? If someone is bullied for how they look, their skin, their hair, or their religion, should they change themselves? The easiest way would be to say yes but that isn't how things change. We need people to know that some people are different and that is ok and they deserve to be respected just like everyone else. If you are going to argue the "fake trans take away resources" I rebutted that argument earlier. 🔶"Why do people insist that you need dysphoria to be trans?" This is an interesting one because I used to be a truscum/transmed. But before I dive into this I first want to preface this by asking Well why do people believe things are true when we know they are demonstrably false? Look at flat-earthers for example (hang in here with me). They can't comprehend how the earth can be round, despite the demonstrable evidence that shows us the earth is round. They believe it because it makes more sense to them. They make arguments where they say the evidence is for a globular earth is fake and also argue things that they experience like "I don't feel the earth spinning" or "the horizon looks flat to me" or "we can't see gravity so it doesn't exist". They can't conceptualize the things they don't experience in their life. People are afraid that the de-medicalization of trans people will result in medical professionals taking away hormones and surgeries. It may also be the case that they know this is true but ignore the evidence because they think the de-medicalization of trans people will make it so we can no longer get hormone treatment or surgeries. I can tell you right now that the people of the ICD, APA, DSM, and WHO are not gonna let that happen. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition that is treated with hormone therapy and gcs (gender confirmation surgery). Gender dysphoria is distressing and that is certain, medical and psychological experts know this and aren't going to take it away. People may become afraid or offended because hearing "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" goes against what they have known to be true for so long. For me personally when I was a truscum/transmed I was young, I just found out what trans was, and "you need dysphoria" made the most sense to me because gender dysphoria was how I knew I was trans. I followed truscum/transmed blogs and youtube channels and I never questioned it really. I really only changed after I started taking science classes at college and learned what scientific papers were, and also, the biggest reason I changed was because things started coming out saying "trans isn't a mental disorder" which I thought it was. After I got out of the truscum/transmed community, only then did I realize how toxic it was. I hurt so many with my words and I was spreading false information solely based on my beliefs. The truscum/transmed community The truscum/transmed community is filled with people saying things like "I just don't understand *blank*" or "How could you be trans when *blank*" and these are as a way to say "your identity is confusing to me so I'm making fun of it". A lot of the scum/med arguments are questions where people "don't understand" which is the first step to learning. If you don't understand something, look it up or ask a trans person (with their approval of course). Asking non-dysphoric trans people is how I was able to comprehend how non-dysphoric people felt. I was able to ask and I always treated them with respect and got respect in return. If you sincerely ask people instead of making fun of them, you might get the answers you need to understand. Important note, many trans people are tired of having to explain to others why they exist so if you ask and you are confronted with hostility that is probably why, and it is completely understandable. I'd be angry too if everyone constantly invalidated me, attacked me, told me I'm a faker, and said my gender doesn't exist. I know I went on a tangent here but I feel this is important also. ❤️I am willing to answer questions if you have any. Share this if you would like. Also, feel free to use this post for your own arguments❤️

[tuesytuesday]

Name: Jeanne Melenni Q. Barroso

Issue: Rape

Thesis Statement: I am Against Sexual Violence in the World.

          Rape is a crime of violence and assault that not only affects a victim for a moment, but it destroys her entire life.

          According to the Britannica Encyclopedia, rape is defined as “any kind of unlawful sexual activity, usually sexual intercourse, carried out forcibly or under threat of injury and against the will of the victim.” This definition has been redefined to cover same-sex attacks and attacks against those who are incapable of valid consent, including persons who are mentally ill, intoxicated, drugged, etc. (rape). Because rape crimes affect all races, cultures, ages, and economical classes.

          The effects of rape can include both the initial physical trauma as well as deep psychological trauma. Although rape victims commonly report injuries and issues with their reproductive health after the sexual assault, rape doesn't always involve physical force. The most common and lasting effects of rape involve mental health concerns and diminished social confidence.

I.             Rape Victims

          94% of women who are raped experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the two weeks following the rape (D.S. Riggs, T. Murdock & W. Walsh, 1992).

          A big percentage of the rape victims face traumas although as stated earlier, rape victims commonly report injuries and issues with their reproductive health. These traumas go far beyond the victims impacting their closest relationships as well as impacting communities and our society at large.

          Guilt, shame, self-blame, embarrassment, fear, distrust, sadness, vulnerability, isolation… These are some of the emotional impacts that up until now affects victims and survivors of sexual assault.  Each survivor reacts to sexual violence in their own unique way. Personal style, culture, and context of the survivor’s life may affect these reactions. Some express their emotions while others prefer to keep their feelings inside. Some may tell others right away what happened, others will wait weeks, months, or even years before discussing the assault, if they ever choose to do so. It is important to respect each person’s choices and style of coping with this traumatic event. Whether an assault was completed or attempted, and regardless of whether it happened recently or many years ago, it may impact daily functioning. A wide range of reactions can impact victims.

          This point can be very difficult, it can be very tempting to “take over” for a while in an attempt to help the survivor deal with the rape. It is important to remember that because of the rape, the survivor felt a loss of control over their life. Reestablishing that control is very important. Try to defer to a survivor’s decisions, even if they decide to let you make some decisions. Then at least that was their choice and not yours. If a survivor wants to talk, try to be an open listener. If they prefer not to talk about the assault, then try to be supportive in other ways, letting them know that you care about him/her and are willing to listen at a later time if so desired.

II.            Are Women Responsible For Rape??

          This discussion clearly makes a distinction between victims who took precautions and those who didn’t. Such distinctions make some feminists uncomfortable, but they shouldn’t. Good people err in judgment, especially when they’re young. But no one does women a favor by treating them like children bearing no responsibility for their own safety.

          This has nothing to do with sexual mores. A woman of sound mind has a right to hook up with however many men she wants to and engage in whatever sexual activity she and the partner agree on. But there are risks involved. Skydivers don’t have armies of helpers running along the ground with safety nets.

          Law enforcement is ill-equipped to play the chaperone. It basically does cleanup. And people injured in car accidents are taken to the hospital whether they wore seat belts or not.

          Let’s end with clarity. Women raped by a date, co-worker or husband should be cared for as those assaulted by a stranger in a park. They deserve criminal justice. But rapes by total strangers are the most horrendous. They should be more troubling to the police — and the public, as well.

III.          What to Do?

          A great deal of harm is done, often unintentionally, to survivors because the people around them believe the myths that surround rape. Rape is never the fault of the survivor, but rather the fault of the rapist. Although this sounds like a simple, even obvious, fact, much of the misinformation that exists points to the victim as being responsible for the rape. Educating yourself allows you to provide informed, compassionate support.

          Many women will not seek help because they fear that no one will believe them. A victim of sexual assault should be treated with dignity and respect. Nonjudgmental belief in her at this time is very crucial. Focusing on the facts as reported by the victim and recording them completely can be very reassuring to her. In the rare instances where false accusations of rape are made, nothing will be lost by a supportive attitude. In all other cases, doubting her credibility can devastate the victim.

          The success of the victim’s recovery depends heavily upon the attitudes of those who are important in her life. The fear of being alone is common after an assault. Friends can help by making sure she is not left alone during the days, sometimes weeks, following the rape. Provide her with a sense of protection while also reinforcing that the rape was not her fault. Many victims blame themselves - focusing on how they might have been able to prevent the rape. Remind her that the rapist is to blame, not her. And, most importantly, provide reassurances of love and care.

          I would like to tell the victims that it is not their fault, rape is a crime and justice must prevail. It is their right to fight for themselves, everyone does have a right to fight for what is right. Nonjudgmental belief in her at this time is very crucial. A victim of sexual assault should be treated with dignity and respect.

[ts-sideblog]

I’m writing this mostly to get all of those thoughts out of my brain because there’s an amazing post going around about Anxiety and his role and the fanders perception of him and it got my brain into overdrive. I’m sorry about my English, it’s not my native language. Please keep in mind that all of this is only my personal view. I don’t have an anxiety disorder so if anything is false or offensive feel free to correct me.

I recognize that an Anxiety disorder is very serious and in no way helpful at all but as I already mentioned in my opinion Anxiety (from Sanders Sides) is not the mental disorder but the natural feeling that we all have. And that is necessary. So, I just wanted to point out the important roles that Anxiety played in the vids so far.

„New year’s lies“ – Logan, Roman and Patton are fighting because they want Thomas to do more what they think he needs to do more in the next year. While the ideas are basically good (learn more, healthier living, act more) it’s clear that the amount that they want him to do is not realistic. Without Anxiety, it would mostly go two ways: - They fight and nothing gets resolved. No resolutions this year and likely a bummed-out Thomas. - Thomas makes three big resolutions to appease his sides. They are in no way doable and later he’ll get down because he can’t do them. Entering Anxiety who tells him in the face that he never managed to get through with his resolutions in the past (Reality check) and Thomas recognizes that he’s right and… comes up with a realistic, doable solution. (mostly out of spite but he does it). Little things that he can manage and that’ll make him feel good. Side effect – the others don’t fight anymore

“The dark side of Disney” – Anxiety points out a different meaning in the films. I think it’s important because you can’t see the world just from one view. There are different points of perception and even if our opinions about some things don’t always match it is important to recognize that there are different views and not only our own.

“On a Disney Show” – Again, Anxiety is the only one who has a grasp on reality at the end. Even Logics next step is unrealistic. “I know your limits!” – and to know our limits is extremely important. Also, his suggestion is not only possible but fits Thomas personality more than even Patton’s one.

“Alone on Valentine’s Day” -  And again, not only is his suggestion on how to do things the most realistic one, it’s him that points out the absurdity of freaking out and trying to force yourself on a date for one day. You can fight me on this but I still interpret his face on 6:53 as a “Finally, he got it. More work than it should be”-face.

“Losing my Motivation” and “My personality Q&A” – can’t think about anything. Feel free to add something.

“Am I Original” – He is kind of an asshole about the whole thing but I still think the theme is something that one should be aware of. Like Thomas said, it’s ok to give something your own spin but you should be aware that the original idea is not from you so that you can be respectful of the source and can credit the original inventor of the idea.

“Anxiety vs Logic” – I love this video because of the ways they accomplished that Thomas feels better in the end. They worked through his insecurities in a logical and realistic way. Thomas is aware that he made mistakes, but can look at them and measure them more realistic. That would not have been possible without Anxiety bugging Logan on to think through it.   Without this Thomas would have gotten a pat on the back from Patton or a “nonsense you did great” from Roman which would have felt fine in the moment but would’ve only made it worse if he isn’t cast in the show later. (personal opinion from me)

“Growing up” – Anxiety, and Roman and Logan, push Thomas to think about his place and his plans for the future. This is important to do from time to time. They act like assholes but it’s still an important theme I think.

“Making some Changes” – And again it’s only Anxiety that’s aware that they are in danger of getting away from their friends and points it out to him. It’s no problem to hold the friendship of those dear to you but only if you’re aware of the changes so you can act accordingly. Without this awareness, it’s a good possible that those bonds just fade away with time.  (And honestly, replacing your friends with clones? I thought at least Patton would have agreed with Anxiety that the idea is crap)  

I don’t say that what he does is completely good, he is Anxiety and he blows many things way out of proportion but most positive progress in our lives only comes from confronting negative emotions. We need those emotions to make us aware of things that need our attention and that is Anxiety’s job. The emotion in itself may not feel good, but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t.

And I want to mention again that I talk about the healthy, basic amount of Anxiety. Anxiety disorder is a serious mental illness.

It’s very important that we remember that Anxiety from Sanders Sides, Anxiety the emotion and Anxiety Disorder are three different things altogether. Connected in some parts but separated subjects that should not be treated as the same thing.

If you haven’t already seen the discussion I mentioned then you can find it here. It was started by a post from @princey-and-hottopic and I think it’s very interesting to read all the different opinions.

[psychotherapyconsultants]

What It Takes to Be a Mental Health Advocate: An Interview With Christina Huff

Christina Huff

At one point Christina Huff was living her dream: thriving as a paralegal in Chicago and newly in love. Five years and one divorce later, she’s still piecing together the debris – living with bipolar disorder and accepting a different kind of life. She has translated her passion for law to mental health advocacy, helping others rise from difficulty with gracefulness and determination, and is a beautiful model of turning pain into service.

Living with bipolar, anxiety, eating disorders, and chronic pain, she beautifully weaves bits of her life and advice from other warriors on her site, Bipolar Hot Mess, ranked number five out of the top 100 bipolar blogs on feedspot, and on her other site is Askabipolar.com. I asked Christina about her life as an advocate, advice for persons for bipolar, and where she finds the strength to overcome her many challenges.

Therese: What made you want to become a bipolar advocate?

Christina: When I was first diagnosed in 2006, I didn’t know anyone who had bipolar and I didn’t know anything about the illness. My immediate response was turning to the internet to look and search for information and first-person accounts so I knew what to expect. But, to my disappointment, I found very little. I did find a website called Ask A Bipolar and so I followed it for a few days and searched it. They put up an ad that they were looking for new authors and one of the qualifications was that you had to have bipolar. I applied, and then within a few months, I was learning so much, I was helping the site grow. The site owner and I became partners and off we went.

It sort of happened by accident that I became an advocate. Since the site was such a strict Q & A format, I wanted to be able to write more freely about my life and about bipolar and such, so I started my own website Bipolar Hot Mess. It started slow then one day just took off and now, if you google “bipolar hot mess” I fill the page. It amazes me every single day!

Therese: What is most challenging/rewarding about it?

Christina: The most challenging is that I do still have the illness that I’m an advocate for, so there are times that I crash. I still have the side effects and have to take care of myself the same way I advocate and help people to realize they need to do to take care of themselves too.  The rewarding part is when I’m mentoring someone and I see how much progress they make, or when someone sends me an email saying how much a post, or an interview, or something I’ve done or said has helped them. Those are the things that make it all worthwhile. Or when someone was so down and was suicidal and the next time you speak they are doing well, have their life back on track, and have found happiness. Just knowing you helped that person find the light or find the path they needed, sometimes all they need is a nudge.

Therese: What would your advice be to people just diagnosed with bipolar?

Christina: Make sure you see your psychiatrist as frequently as they suggest and take ALL MEDICATION AS DIRECTED! That is super important. If your meds aren’t correct, everything else isn’t going to help properly.

Next, find a therapist. They are going to help you sort things out. When you are first diagnosed things are so confusing, they help a lot.

Work with your family and try to explain what is going on. This is a hard one, but if you are living with them, they are going to see the ups and downs everyday, so they should have a general idea of what to expect.  If you have a spouse, I highly recommend the book Loving Someone With Bipolar Disorder, by Julie Fast. It’s a very good book for your spouse to read to let the, know what to expect, how they could handle things etc. In addition to some great websites, there are now a lot of books you can purchase for more information. Facebook has a lot of “private” support groups that you could try out. NAMI.org will give you info and you can find your nearest support group or events like book readings and signings etc. DBSAlliance.org will do the same.

Therese: What keeps you going during the really hard stretches where you want to give up?

Christina:My family, friends, and boyfriend. They help me see that this is just another bump in the road and I am going to make it out again alive. They show me that they still love me and will still love me on the other side and on the other side, I’m going to be even stronger than I was when I crashed.  Each time I crash, I come out stronger and more aware of my symptoms, how to combat them and fight back. Granted, not every time can be a fight back moment and sometimes we just have to let it take its course, but if we know that and are aware of that ahead of time, we can at least be prepared to settle in to acceptance that we have an illness that sometimes we can control but sometimes we just have to accept we can’t control.

Therese: Do you have things you do every day to stay well?

Christina: I need to take my medication in the morning and evening, need to maintain a regular sleep schedule, eat regularly (that is for my eating disorder recovery), try to get a decent amount of sun, and try not to isolate and make contact with friends or family daily, and try to accomplish at least one task a day so I don’t sit in bed all day which could spark a depressive cycle.

The medication part though is absolutely key though. If I miss my medication even one day, it affects not just my brain chemistry but my body and takes days or weeks to even get back to normal.

Therese: What is your biggest work challenge due to bipolar disorder?

Christina:Well, I was able to work for over four years in corporate America as my dream job as a paralegal at a prestigious Chicago law firm, but unfortunately, life got in the way and triggered my bipolar symptoms and I was put on disability.  It amazes me now how many are on disability. I never really thought about it until it happened to me. I guess that’s true for a lot of us for a lot of things.

Now, I work on my website bipolarhotmess.com and sell things on eBay.  It’s tough most days because of my concentration and sometimes lack of motivation, but I know that if I don’t do anything, I’m going to get into the depressive slump. It’s so much easier to get IN the slump than get OUT. If I don’t work on the website I feel like I’m letting my followers down and I have to list items on eBay because the site is funded only by me. Those are some great motivators.

To conquer the concentration issue, I try different working areas and try taking more frequent breaks. That seems to help. I also make sure to keep my projects at a reasonable size.  I used to make a to do list a mile long and beat myself up for not getting it done.  Now I create one that is more manageable and that I know I can complete so I feel better at the end of the day, not defeated.  That tip took a very long time to master!!! I’m an overachiever so it was so difficult, but if I could do it, so can you!

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-be-an-mental-health-advocate-an-interview-with-christina-huff/

[angryacegiant]

Cannibalism: Whats up with that?

Cannibalism in humans is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings. A person who practices cannibalism is called a cannibal. The expression cannibalism has been extended into zoology to mean one individual of a species consuming all or part of another individual of the same species as food, including sexual cannibalism.

Etymology:  < Spanish caribe, adjective and noun (late 15th cent.) < a Proto-Cariban base with the sense ‘man, human being, indigenous person’, probably originally transmitted via an Arawakan language. Compare Middle French, French †caribe , noun (1568). In γ. forms after French caraïbe, adjective and noun (1658). Compare slightly earlier cannibal n.1 and the discussion at that entry.

Compare also Garifuna n.

The origin of the French form with -aï- is unexplained; compare Spanish †caraibe (c1550 in an apparently isolated attestation with reference to Chile).

Some of the variants with final -e may reflect the trisyllabic pronunciation of the Spanish etymon; compare Caribbee n.

The β. forms reflect the pronunciation of intervocalic -b- in Spanish.

The Caribbean was apparently originally inhabited by peoples speaking Arawakan languages, while Cariban languages were spoken in the north-east of South America. Speakers of Carib then expanded aggressively into the Antilles region (prior to contact with Europe), which led to the development of a new language known as Island Carib, which is structurally Arawakan, but shows strong Carib influence in its vocabulary. This is the language described by R. Breton in French as caraïbe in the 17th cent. Similarly, English Carib and related words are also sometimes used to refer to the Island Carib language and people (compare e.g. quots. 1666 at Caribbean adj. and 1807 at Caribbee adj.). The Black Carib (Garifuna) language is a form of Island Carib. For a more detailed discussion compare N. L. Whitehead Arawak Linguistic & Cultural Identity through Time, in J. D. Hill & F. Santos-Granero Comparative Arawakan Histories (2002) 51–73.Originally: a member of an indigenous Central and South American people inhabiting the Lesser Antilles and neighbouring mainland coastal regions at the time of the arrival of Columbus; (subsequently) a descendant of these, now inhabiting mainly coastal regions of French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, and Venezuela, and on some Antillean islands, such as Dominica and Trinidad. Also in early use: †any member of an indigenous people; esp. a Central or South American; (more generally) a barbaric native, a savage (often formerly equated esp. by Europeans with warlike and savage behaviour, esp. cannibalism (cf. cannibal n.1 1a)) (obs.). Cf. Caribbean adj.

In 16th cent. plural Canibales, < Spanish Canibales, originally one of the forms of the ethnic name Carib or Caribes, a fierce nation of the West Indies, who are recorded to have been anthropophagi, and from whom the name was subsequently extended as a descriptive term.

Professor J. H. Trumbull, of Hartford, has pointed out that l , n , r interchange dialectally in American languages, whence the variant forms Caniba , Caribe , Galibi : and that Columbus’s first representation of the name as he heard it from the Cubans was Canibales , explained as ‘los de Caniba or Canima’; when he landed on Hayti, he heard the name of the people as Caribes and their country Carib ; the latter was afterwards identified with Puerto Rico, named by the Spaniards ‘Isla de Carib’, ‘which in some islands’, Columbus says, ‘they call Caniba , but in Hayti Carib ’. Apparently, however, it was only foreigners who made a place-name out of that of the people: according to Oviedo ( Hist. Gen. ii. viii.) caribe signifies ‘brave and daring’, with which Prof. Trumbull compares the Tupi caryba ‘superior man, hero, vir ’. Calib- (in Caliban n.) is apparently another variant = carib-an; compare Galibi above-mentioned.

Columbus’s notion on hearing of Caniba was to associate the name with the Grand Khan, whose dominions he believed to be not far distant; he held ‘que Caniba no es otra cosa sino la gente del Gran Can’. To connect the name with Spanish can, Italian cane, Latin canis dog, was a later delusion, entertained by Geraldini, Bp. of San Domingo, 1521–5; it naturally tickled the etymological fancy of the 16th cent., and may have helped to perpetuate the particular form canibal in association with the sense anthropophagi. See Prof. Trumbull’s article, in N. & Q. 5th Ser. IV. 171.

1. Thesaurus »

a. Orig.: †a name given to the Carib people of the West Indies, who were said to eat human flesh (obs.). In (later) extended use: a person who eats human flesh; = man-eater n. 1.

1553 R. Eden tr. S. Münster Treat. Newe India sig. Gviijv, Columbus. sayled toward ye South, & at ye length came to the Ilandes of the Canibals.

 The Island Carib people of the Lesser Antilles, from whom the word cannibalism derives, acquired a long-standing reputation as cannibals following the recording of their legends in the 17th century. Fiji was once known as the "Cannibal Isles". Cannibalism has been well documented around the world, from Fiji to the Amazon Basin to the Congo to the Māori people of New Zealand. Neanderthals are believed to have practiced cannibalism, and Neanderthals may have been eaten by anatomically modern humans.

Cannibalism has recently been both practiced and fiercely condemned in several wars, especially in Liberia and Congo. It was still practiced in Papua New Guinea as of 2012, for cultic reasons and in ritual and in war in various Melanesian tribes. Cannibalism has been said to test the bounds of cultural relativism as it challenges anthropologists "to define what is or is not beyond the pale of acceptable human behavior."

Cannibalism has been occasionally practiced as a last resort by people suffering from famine, including in modern times. Famous examples include the ill-fated Westward expedition of the Donner Party and, more recently, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, after which some survivors ate the bodies of dead passengers. Also, some mentally ill people obsess about eating others and actually do so, such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish. There is resistance to formally labeling cannibalism as a mental disorder.

Reasons  

In some societies, especially tribal societies, cannibalism is a cultural norm. Consumption of a person from within the same community is called endo-cannibalism; ritual cannibalism of the recently deceased can be part of the grieving process or be seen as a way of guiding the souls of the dead into the bodies of living descendants.

Exo-cannibalism is the consumption of a person from outside the community, usually as a celebration of victory against a rival tribe.

In most parts of the world, cannibalism is not a societal norm, but is sometimes resorted to in situations of extreme necessity. The survivors of the shipwrecks of the Essex and Méduse in the 19th century are said to have engaged in cannibalism, as did the members of Franklin's lost expedition and the Donner Party. Such cases generally involve necro-cannibalism as opposed to homicidal cannibalism. In English law, the latter is always considered a crime, even in the most trying circumstances. The case of R v Dudley and Stephens, in which two men were found guilty of murder for killing and eating a cabin boy while adrift at sea in a lifeboat, set the precedent that necessity is no defense to a charge of murder.

In pre-modern medicine, the explanation given by the now-discredited theory of humorism for cannibalism was that it came about within a black acrimonious humor, which, being lodged in the linings of the ventricle, produced the voracity for human flesh.

Medical aspects  

A well-known case of mortuary cannibalism is that of the Fore tribe in New Guinea, which resulted in the spread of the prion disease kuru. Although the Fore's mortuary cannibalism was well documented, the practice had ceased before the cause of the disease was recognized. However, some scholars argue that although post-mortem dismemberment was the practice during funeral rites, cannibalism was not. Marvin Harris theorizes that it happened during a famine period coincident with the arrival of Europeans and was rationalized as a religious rite.

In 2003, a publication in Science received a large amount of press attention when it suggested that early humans may have practiced extensive cannibalism. According to this research, genetic markers commonly found in modern humans worldwide suggest that today many people carry a gene that evolved as protection against the brain diseases that can be spread by consuming human brain tissue. as it claimed to have found a data collection bias, which led to an erroneous conclusion. This claimed bias came from incidents of cannibalism used in the analysis not being due to local cultures, but having been carried out by explorers, stranded seafarers or escaped convicts. The original authors published a subsequent paper in 2008 defending their conclusions.

Myths, legends and folklore

Cannibalism features in the folklore and legends of many cultures and is most often attributed to evil characters or as extreme retribution for some wrong. Examples include the witch in "Hansel and Gretel", Lamia of Greek mythology and Baba Yaga of Slavic folklore.

A number of stories in Greek mythology involve cannibalism, in particular cannibalism of close family members, e.g., the stories of Thyestes, Tereus and especially Cronus, who was Saturn in the Roman pantheon. The story of Tantalus also parallels this.

The wendigo is a creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian people. It is thought of variously as a malevolent cannibalistic spirit that could possess humans or a monster that humans could physically transform into. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risk, and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as taboo. The Zuni people tell the story of the Átahsaia - a giant who cannibalizes his fellow demons and seeks out human flesh.

Accusation to demonize colonized peoples and indigenous groups  

William Arens, author of The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, questions the credibility of reports of cannibalism and argues that the description by one group of people of another people as cannibals is a consistent and demonstrable ideological and rhetorical device to establish perceived cultural superiority. Arens bases his thesis on a detailed analysis of numerous "classic" cases of cultural cannibalism cited by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists. He asserts that many were steeped in racism, unsubstantiated, or based on second-hand or hearsay evidence.

Accusations of cannibalism helped characterize indigenous peoples as "uncivilized," "primitive," or even "inhuman." These assertions promoted the use of military force as a means of "civilizing" and "pacifying" the "savages". The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and its earlier conquests in the Caribbean where there were widespread reports of cannibalism, justifying the conquest. Cannibals were exempt from Queen Isabella's prohibition on enslaving the indigenous. Another example of the sensationalism of cannibalism and its connection to imperialism was in the Japan's 1874 expedition to Taiwan. As Eskildsen describes, there was an exaggeration of cannibalism by Taiwanese aboriginals in Japan's popular media such as newspapers and illustrations at the time.

History  

Among modern humans, cannibalism has been practiced by various groups. It was practiced by humans in Prehistoric Europe, Mesoamerica South America, among Iroquoian peoples in North America, Maori in New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, parts of West Africa Evidence of cannibalism has been found in ruins associated with the Anasazi culture of the Southwestern United States as well as.

Pre-history  

There is evidence, both archaeological and genetic, that cannibalism has been practiced for tens of thousands of years. Human bones that have been "de-fleshed" by other humans go back 600,000 years. The oldest Homo sapiens bones show signs of this as well. Cannibalism in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic may have occurred because of food shortages. It has been also suggested that removing dead bodies through ritual cannibalism might have been a means of predator control, aiming to eliminate predators' and scavengers' access to hominid bodies. Jim Corbett proposed that after major epidemics, when human corpses are easily accessible to predators, there are more cases of man-eating leopards, so removing dead bodies through ritual cannibalism might have had practical reasons for hominids and early humans to control predation.

In Gough's Cave, England, remains of human bones and skulls, around 15,000 years old, suggest that cannibalism took place amongst the people living in or visiting the cave, and that they may have used human skulls as drinking vessels.

Researchers have found physical evidence of cannibalism in ancient times. In 2001, archaeologists at the University of Bristol found evidence of Iron Age cannibalism in Gloucestershire. Cannibalism was practiced as recently as 2000 years ago in Great Britain.

Early history  

Cannibalism is mentioned many times in early history and literature. Cannibalism was reported by Flavius Josephus during the siege of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD, and according to Appian, during the Roman Siege of Numantia in the 2nd century BC, the population of Numantia was reduced to cannibalism and suicide.

St. Jerome, in his letter Against Jovinianus, discusses how people come to their present condition as a result of their heritage, and he then lists several examples of peoples and their customs. In the list, he mentions that he has heard that Atticoti eat human flesh and that Massagetae and Derbices kill and eat old people.

Herodotus in "The Histories” claimed, that after eleven days' voyage up the Borysthenes  a desolated land extended for a long way, and later the country of the man-eaters  was located, and beyond it again a desolated area extended where no men lived.

Reports of cannibalism were recorded during the First Crusade, as Crusaders were alleged to have fed on the bodies of their dead opponents following the Siege of Ma'arrat al-Numan. Amin Maalouf also alleges further cannibalism incidents on the march to Jerusalem, and to the efforts made to delete mention of these from Western history. During Europe's Great Famine of 1315–1317 there were many reports of cannibalism among the starving populations. In North Africa, as in Europe, there are references to cannibalism as a last resort in times of famine.

The Moroccan Muslim explorer Ibn Batutta reported that one African king advised him that nearby people were cannibals. However, Batutta reported that Arabs and Christians were safe, as their flesh was "unripe" and would cause the eater to fall ill.

For a brief time in Europe, an unusual form of cannibalism occurred when thousands of Egyptian mummies preserved in bitumen were ground up and sold as medicine. The practice developed into a wide-scale business which flourished until the late 16th century. This "fad" ended because the mummies were revealed actually to be recently killed slaves. Two centuries ago, mummies were still believed to have medicinal properties against bleeding, and were sold as pharmaceuticals in powdered form.

In China during the Tang dynasty, cannibalism was supposedly resorted to by rebel forces early in the period, as well as both soldiers and civilians besieged during the rebellion of An Lushan. Eating an enemy's heart and liver was also claimed to be a feature of both official punishments and private vengeance. References to cannibalizing the enemy have also been seen in poetry written in the Song dynasty, although the cannibalizing is perhaps poetic symbolism, expressing hatred towards the enemy.

Charges of cannibalism were levied against the Qizilbash of the Safavid Ismail.

There is universal agreement that some Mesoamerican people practiced human sacrifice, but there is a lack of scholarly consensus as to whether cannibalism in pre-Columbian America was widespread. At one extreme, anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward, since the Aztec diet was lacking in proteins. While most historians of the pre-Columbian era believe that there was ritual cannibalism related to human sacrifices, they do not support Harris's thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet. Others have hypothesized that cannibalism was part of a blood revenge in war.

Early modern era  

European explorers and colonizers brought home many stories of cannibalism practiced by the native peoples they encountered, but there is now archeological and written evidence for English settlers' cannibalism in 1609 in the Jamestown Colony under famine conditions.

In Spain's overseas expansion to the New World, the practice of cannibalism in was observed by Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean islands, and the Caribs were greatly feared because of their practice of it. Queen Isabel of Castile had forbidden the Spaniards to enslave the indigenous, but if they were guilty of cannibalism then they could be justifiably enslaved. Cannibalism became a pretext for attacks on indigenous groups and justification for the Spanish conquest. In Yucatán, shipwrecked Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar, who later became a translator for Hernán Cortés, witnessed fellow Spaniards sacrificed and eaten, but escaped from captivity where he was being fattened for sacrifice himself. In the Florentine Codex compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún from information provided by indigenous informants has abundant evidence of Mexica cannibalism, including a specific Nahuatl word for the practice, tlacatlacualli . Franciscan friar Diego de Landa reported on Yucatán instances, and there have been similar reports by Purchas from Popayán, Colombia.

In early Brazil, there is extensive reportage of cannibalism among the Tupinamba. It is recorded about the natives of the captaincy of Sergipe in Brazil: "They eat human flesh when they can get it, and if a woman miscarries devour the abortive immediately. If she goes her time out, she herself cuts the navel-string with a shell, which she boils along with the secondine, and eats them both." In modern Brazil, a black comedy film, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, mostly in the Tupi language, portrays a Frenchman captured by the indigenous and his demise.

There are also reports from the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia, where human flesh was called "long pig". According to Hans Egede, when the Inuit killed a woman accused of witchcraft, they ate a portion of her heart.

The 1913 Handbook of Indians of Canada, claims that North American natives practicing cannibalism included "... the Montagnais, and some of the tribes of Maine; the Algonkin, Armouchiquois, Iroquois, and Micmac; farther west the Assiniboine, Cree, Foxes, Chippewa, Miami, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Illinois, Sioux, and Winnebago; in the south the people who built the mounds in Florida, and the Tonkawa, Attacapa, Karankawa, Caddo, and Comanche; in the northwest and west, portions of the continent, the Thlingchadinneh and other Athapascan tribes, the Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Nootka, Siksika, some of the Californian tribes, and the Ute. There is also a tradition of the practice among the Hopi, and mentions of the custom among other tribes of New Mexico and Arizona. The Mohawk, and the Attacapa, Tonkawa, and other Texas tribes were known to their neighbours as 'man-eaters.'" The forms of cannibalism described included both resorting to human flesh during famines and ritual cannibalism, the latter usually consisting of eating a small portion of an enemy warrior.

As with most lurid tales of native cannibalism, these stories are treated with a great deal of scrutiny, as accusations of cannibalism were often used as justifications for the subjugation or destruction of "savages". However, there were several well-documented cultures that engaged in regular eating of the dead, such as New Zealand's Māori. In an 1809 incident known as the Boyd massacre, about 66 passengers and crew of the Boyd were killed and eaten by Māori on the Whangaroa peninsula, Northland. Cannibalism was already a regular practice in Māori wars. In another instance, on July 11, 1821, warriors from the Ngapuhi tribe killed 2,000 enemies and remained on the battlefield "eating the vanquished until they were driven off by the smell of decaying bodies". Māori warriors fighting the New Zealand government in Titokowaru's War in New Zealand's North Island in 1868–69 revived ancient rites of cannibalism as part of the radical Hauhau movement of the Pai Marire religion.

Other islands in the Pacific were home to cultures that allowed cannibalism to some degree. In parts of Melanesia, cannibalism was still practiced in the early 20th century, for a variety of reasons—including retaliation, to insult an enemy people, or to absorb the dead person's qualities. One tribal chief, Ratu Udre Udre in Rakiraki, Fiji, is said to have consumed 872 people and to have made a pile of stones to record his achievement. Fiji was nicknamed the "Cannibal Isles" by European sailors, who avoided disembarking there. The dense population of Marquesas Islands, Polynesia, was concentrated in the narrow valleys, and consisted of warring tribes, who sometimes practiced cannibalism on their enemies. W. D. Rubinstein wrote:

This period of time was also rife with instances of explorers and seafarers resorting to cannibalism for survival. The survivors of the sinking of the French ship Méduse in 1816 resorted to cannibalism after four days adrift on a raft and their plight was made famous by Théodore Géricault's painting Raft of the Medusa. After the sinking of the Essex of Nantucket by a whale on 20 November 1820, the survivors, in three small boats, resorted, by common consent, to cannibalism in order for some to survive. Sir John Franklin's lost polar expedition is another example of cannibalism out of desperation. On land, the Donner Party found itself stranded by snow in a high mountain pass in California without adequate supplies during the Mexican–American War, leading to several instances of cannibalism. Another notorious cannibal was mountain man Boone Helm, who was known as "The Kentucky Cannibal" for eating several of his fellow travelers, from 1850 until his eventual hanging in 1864.

The case of R v. Dudley and Stephens 14 QBD 273  is an English case which dealt with four crew members of an English yacht, the Mignonette, who were cast away in a storm some from the Cape of Good Hope. After several days, one of the crew, a seventeen-year-old cabin boy, fell unconscious due to a combination of the famine and drinking seawater. The others decided then to kill him and eat him. They were picked up four days later. Two of the three survivors were found guilty of murder. A significant outcome of this case was that necessity was determined to be no defence against a charge of murder.

American consul James W. Davidson described in his 1903 book, The Island of Formosa, how the Chinese in Taiwan ate and traded in the flesh of Taiwanese aboriginals.

Roger Casement, writing to a consular colleague in Lisbon on August 3, 1903 from Lake Mantumba in the Congo Free State, said: "The people round here are all cannibals. You never saw such a weird looking lot in your life. There are also dwarfs in the forest who are even worse cannibals than the taller human environment. They eat man flesh raw! It's a fact." Casement then added how assailants would "bring down a dwarf on the way home, for the marital cooking pot ... The Dwarfs, as I say, dispense with cooking pots and eat and drink their human prey fresh cut on the battlefield while the blood is still warm and running. These are not fairy tales my dear Cowper but actual gruesome reality in the heart of this poor, benighted savage land."

World War II    

Many instances of cannibalism by necessity were recorded during World War II. For example, during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, reports of cannibalism began to appear in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds, rats and pets were eaten by survivors. Leningrad police even formed a special division to combat cannibalism.

Some 2.8 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody in less than eight months during 1941–42. According to the USHMM, by the winter of 1941, "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". This deliberate starvation led to many incidents of cannibalism.

Following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad it was found that some German soldiers in the besieged city, cut off from supplies, resorted to cannibalism. Later, following the German surrender in January 1943, roughly 100,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner of war. Almost all of them were sent to POW camps in Siberia or Central Asia where, due to being chronically underfed by their Soviet captors, many resorted to cannibalism. Fewer than 5,000 of the prisoners taken at Stalingrad survived captivity.

The Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo tribunal, led by prosecutor William Webb, collected numerous written reports and testimonies that documented Japanese soldiers' acts of cannibalism among their own troops, on enemy dead, as well as on Allied prisoners of war in many parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In September 1942, Japanese daily rations on New Guinea consisted of 800 grams of rice and tinned meat. However, by December, this had fallen to 50 grams. According to historian Yuki Tanaka, "cannibalism was often a systematic activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers".

In some cases, flesh was cut from living people. An Indian POW, Lance Naik Hatam Ali, testified that in New Guinea: "the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese. The remainder of us were taken to another spot away where 10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died."

Another well-documented case occurred in Chichi-jima in February 1945, when Japanese soldiers killed and consumed five American airmen. This case was investigated in 1947 in a war crimes trial, and of 30 Japanese soldiers prosecuted, five were found guilty and hanged. In his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, James Bradley details several instances of cannibalism of World War II Allied prisoners by their Japanese captors. The author claims that this included not only ritual cannibalization of the livers of freshly killed prisoners, but also the cannibalization-for-sustenance of living prisoners over the course of several days, amputating limbs only as needed to keep the meat fresh.

New Guinea  

The Korowai tribe of south-eastern Papua could be one of the last surviving tribes in the world engaging in cannibalism. A local cannibal cult killed and ate victims as late as 2012. The Batetela, "like most of their neighbors were inveterate cannibals." According to Dhanis' medical officer, Captain Hinde, their town of Ngandu had "at least 2,000 polished human skulls" as a "solid white pavement in front" of its gates, with human skulls crowning every post of the stockade. One young Belgian officer wrote home: "Happily Gongo's men ate them up. It's horrible but exceedingly useful and hygenic ... I should have been horrified at the idea in Europe! But it seems quite natural to me here. Don't show this letter to anyone indiscreet." After the massacre at Nyangwe, Lutete "hid himself in his quarters, appalled by the sight of thousands of men smoking human hands and human chops on their camp fires, enough to feed his army for many days."

The self-declared Emperor of the Central African Empire, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, was tried on October 24, 1986, for several cases of cannibalism although he was never convicted. Between April 17, and April 19, 1979, a number of elementary school students were arrested after they had protested against wearing the expensive, government-required school uniforms. Around 100 were killed. Bokassa is said to have participated in the massacre, beating some of the children to death with his cane and allegedly ate some of his victims.

Further reports of cannibalism were reported against the Seleka Muslim minority during the ongoing Central African Republic conflict.

Cannibalism has been reported in several recent African conflicts, including the Second Congo War, and the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. A UN human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go "far beyond rape" and include sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism. This may be done in desperation, as during peacetime cannibalism is much less frequent; at other times, it is consciously directed at certain groups believed to be relatively helpless, such as Congo Pygmies, even considered subhuman by some other Congolese. It is also reported by some that witch doctors sometimes use the body parts of children in their medicine. In the 1970s the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was reputed to practice cannibalism.

In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army has been accused of routinely engaging in ritual or magical cannibalism.

North Korea  

Reports of widespread cannibalism began to emerge from North Korea during the famine of the 1990s and subsequent ongoing starvation. Kim Jong-il was reported to have ordered a crackdown on cannibalism in 1996. Chinese travellers reported in 1998 that cannibalism had occurred. Three people in North Korea were reported to have been executed for selling or eating human flesh in 2006. Further reports of cannibalism emerged in early 2013, including reports of a man executed for killing his two children for food.

There are competing claims about how widespread cannibalism was in North Korea. While refugees reported that it was widespread. In her 2010 book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Barbara Demick wrote that it did not seem to be.

China  

Cannibalism is documented to have occurred in China during the Great Leap Forward, when rural China was hit hard by drought and famine.

During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, local governments' documents revealed hundreds of incidents of cannibalism for ideological reasons. Public events for cannibalism were organised by local Communist Party officials, and people took part in them together in order to prove their revolutionary passion. The writer Zheng Yi documented incidents of cannibalism in Guangxi province in 1968 in his 1993 book, Scarlet Memorial: Tales Of Cannibalism In Modern China.

Tibet    

Flesh pills were used by Tibetan Buddhists. It was believed that mystical powers were bestowed upon people when they consumed Brahmin flesh.

Modern era  

Further instances include cannibalism as ritual practice, in times of drought, famine and other destitution, as well as those being criminal acts and war crimes throughout the 20th century, and also 21st century.

In West Africa, the Leopard Society was a cannibalistic secret society that existed until the mid-1900s. Centered in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, the Leopard men would dress in leopard skins, and waylay travelers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth. The victims' flesh would be cut from their bodies and distributed to members of the society.

As in some other Papuan societies, the Urapmin people engaged in cannibalism in war. Notably, the Urapmin also had a system of food taboos wherein dogs could not be eaten and they had to be kept from breathing on food, unlike humans who could be eaten and with whom food could be shared.

The Aghoris are Indian ascetics who believe that eating human flesh confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging. They claim to only eat those who have voluntarily willed their body to the sect upon their death, although an Indian TV crew witnessed one Aghori feasting on a corpse discovered floating in the Ganges, and a member of the Dom caste reports that Aghoris often take bodies from the cremation ghat.

During the 1930s, multiple acts of cannibalism were reported from Ukraine and Russia's Volga, South Siberian and Kuban regions during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. ... At least 2,505 people were sentenced for cannibalism in the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, though the actual number of cases was certainly much higher.

Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed in an accident, then cooked and ate it. He reported, "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."

In his book, The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described cases of cannibalism in 20th-century USSR. Of the famine in Povolzhie he wrote: "That horrible famine was up to cannibalism, up to consuming children by their own parents — the famine, which Russia had never known even in Time of Troubles  ..."

He said of the Siege of Leningrad: "Those who consumed human flesh, or dealt with the human liver trading from dissecting rooms ... were accounted as the political criminals ..." And of the building of Northern Railway Labor Camp Solzhenitsyn reports, "An ordinary hard working political prisoner almost could not survive at that penal camp. In the camp Sevzheldorlag in 1946–47 there were many cases of cannibalism: they cut human bodies, cooked and ate."

During the dekulakization process in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, many deportees were forced to eat one another by genocidal Soviet authorities, e.g. on the Nazino island or during Holodomor.

The Soviet journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg was a former long-term political prisoner who spent time in the Soviet prisons, Gulag camps and settlements from 1938 to 1955. She described in her memoir, Harsh Route, of a case which she was directly involved in during the late 1940s, after she had been moved to the prisoners' hospital.

...The chief warder shows me the black smoked pot, filled with some food: 'I need your medical expertise regarding this meat.' I look into the pot, and hardly hold vomiting. The fibers of that meat are very small, and don't resemble me anything I have seen before. The skin on some pieces bristles with black hair A former smith from Poltava, Kulesh worked together with Centurashvili. At this time, Centurashvili was only one month away from being discharged from the camp and suddenly he surprisingly disappeared. The wardens looked around the hills, stated Kulesh's evidence, that last time Kulesh had seen his workmate near the fireplace, Kulesh went out to work and Centurashvili left to warm himself more; but when Kulesh returned to the fireplace, Centurashvili had vanished; who knows, maybe he got frozen somewhere in snow, he was a weak guy  The wardens searched for two more days, and then assumed that it was an escape case, though they wondered why, since his imprisonment period was almost over  The crime was there. Approaching the fireplace, Kulesh killed Centurashvili with an axe, burned his clothes, then dismembered him and hid the pieces in snow, in different places, putting specific marks on each burial place. ... Just yesterday, one body part was found under two crossed logs.

When Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into the Andes on October 13, 1972, the survivors resorted to eating the deceased during their 72 days in the mountains. Their story was later recounted in the books Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors and Miracle in the Andes as well as the film Alive, by Frank Marshall, and the documentaries Alive: 20 Years Later and Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains.

Cannibalism was reported by the journalist Neil Davis during the South East Asian wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis reported that Cambodian troops ritually ate portions of the slain enemy, typically the liver. However, he, and many refugees, also report that cannibalism was practiced non-ritually when there was no food to be found. This usually occurred when towns and villages were under Khmer Rouge control, and food was strictly rationed, leading to widespread starvation. Any civilian caught participating in cannibalism would have been immediately executed.

On July 23, 1988, Rick Gibson ate the flesh of another person in public. Because England does not have a specific law against cannibalism, he legally ate a canapé of donated human tonsils in Walthamstow High Street, London. A year later, on April 15, 1989, he publicly ate a slice of human testicle in Lewisham High Street, London. When he tried to eat another slice of human testicle at the Pitt International Galleries in Vancouver on July 14, 1989, the Vancouver police confiscated the testicle hors d'œuvre. However, the charge of publicly exhibiting a disgusting object was dropped and he finally ate the piece of human testicle on the steps of the Vancouver court house on September 22, 1989.

Is eating another person against the law?

Surprisingly no. In the United States and most European countries there are no outright laws against the consumption of human flesh. Most criminals who commit acts of cannibalism are charged with murder, desecration of corpses, or necrophilia.

Because the victims often consent to the act it can be difficult to find a charge, which was what happened with the famous Miewes case in Germany. His victim responded to an internet ad: “looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed." He's now serving a life sentence.  

What do humans taste like?

The answer is overwhelmingly pork, which may be why the idiomatic culinary term for human flesh is "long pig." Miewes, our favorite German cannibal, said in an interview from his jail cell that: "The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger. It tastes quite good."

In the 1920s a couple of German serial killers sold human meat on the black market labelled as pork.

In 1981, a Japanese man Issei Sagawa, cannibalized a Dutch student. He's currently free, living in Japan since the French declared him insane and refused to send the court documents to Japan in order to prosecute him for murder. In an interview with Vice, he said that human meat is odorless and not gamey. If given the chance, he'd like to eat a Japanese woman, "I think either sukiyaki or shabu shabu is the best way to go in order to really savor the natural flavor of the meat."

If you had to eat a human, what part should you eat?

The brain and muscles are probably your best bet according to Yale certified nutritionist Dr. Jim Stoppani. Muscles offer protein and the brain would provide slow-burning energy since it's high in fat and glucose. Yet the brain does present an added risk since it's the part of the body with the highest concentration in prions, which give rise to the fatal disease Kuru.  

The liver and kidneys are filled with waste products since they're part of the body's filtration system so best to avoid those. Eyes contain an acidic solution which can make humans sick, fingers and toes are filled with cartilage, which your body won't digest and penises are spongy and have little nutritional value.

The one part of the human body that's cool to eat (as cool as eating can be) is the skin. Eating human skin is basically like eating the skin of any large omnivore and isn't any more dangerous than eating pork rinds.

What happens when you eat a human being

Spoiler: You might die.

the United States Department of Agriculture prefers lean proteins to fatty red meats, which will overburden your daily limit of empty calories. We Americans, bursting on a culture of hamburgers and thick steaks, consume large quantities of empty calories that create a decidedly full figure. Therefore, nutritionally, cannibalism is not the diet for beach season.

"Yum, Prions!" said no one ever. Prion diseases, a group of uncommon and deadly brain diseases, can be spread by eating the contaminated flesh of humans or other animals. The human brain is more contaminated with prions than other body parts, though bone marrow, the spinal cord and the small intestine also contain these fatal brain-eating malformations. Prion diseases occur when the prion protein misfolds, causing a cascade of misfolding prion proteins that clump in the brain and damage or destroy nerve cells, creating sponge-like holes. Current examples include kuru and Creutzfeld-Jacob disease in humans, and mad cow disease in animals, both of which cause brain deterioration, loss of motor control and ultimately death.

It may take some time, but if you develop a taste for human brains you'll also develop the dreaded Kuru disease, a long-gestating disorder that deteriorates your brain at a rapid pace and acts like a human version of Mad Cow Disease. Scientists who have studied this condition have noted that Kuru can gestate for up to 60 years before it begins to take hold, but it can also act within months of your first meal. So, if you are going to eat human brains, make sure you've crossed everything else off your bucket list. See also  

Some of the most famous cannibals in the world are the Old Christians Club rugby union who crashed in the Andes Mountain range in 1972 and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. While on the mountain they noted that eating nothing but protein and water gave them constipation that lasted up to 35 days. The take away from this story is to make sure that you eat some leafy greens and some fiber with your meal of melted ice and charred human leather.

Let's say you're being smart about this whole cannibalism thing and you've decided to eschew feasting on brains, thus avoiding all degenerative brain diseases. There's no way that anything bad could happen, right? Wrong! If you eat someone with HIV, Hep C, or any other blood born disease you could be swimming in sickness before dessert. So remember to cook your human meat, or just eat something else.

MORE CANNIBALS

Alexander Pearce

Alferd Packer

Androphagi

Asmat people, a Papua group with a reputation of cannibalism

Chijon family, a Korean gang that killed and ate rich people

Custom of the Sea

Homo antecessor, an extinct human species, suspected of practicing cannibalism

Human fat has been applied in European pharmacopoeia between the 16th and the 19th centuries.

Idi Amin Ugandan dictator who is alleged to have consumed humans.

Issei Sagawa, a popular Japanese celebrity who killed and ate a fellow student

List of incidents of cannibalism

Manifesto Antropófago,, a Brazilian poem

Noida serial murders, a widely publicized instance of alleged cannibalism in India

Placentophagy, the act of mammals eating the placenta of their young after childbirth

R v Dudley and Stephens, an important trial of two men accused of shipwreck cannibalism

The Road, Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel concerning post-apocalyptic conditions on Earth, and humankind's consequent struggle for food.

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a progressive condition that affect the brain and nervous system of many animals, including humans

Vorarephilia, a sexual fetish and paraphilia where arousal occurs from the idea of cannibalism

Wari’ people, an Amerindian tribe that practiced cannibalism

[healthserv]

Trump’s Brain: What’s Going On?

BY STEVEN FINDLAY

In late May the science and health news site STAT ran a provocative article titled: “Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?”

Not surprisingly, the piece went viral.   After all, aren’t most of us wondering whether something is up with the President’s—how shall I say it—state of mind, psychological status, character, personality, and yes, mental health?

For over a year, there’s been speculation about this. Most of the talk is loose and politically inflected. But substantive reflections by mental health professionals and serious commentators are on the rise.

At first, media outlets were very careful. They didn’t want to say the president was “lying” let alone possibly crazy.   Their caution was grounded mostly in journalistic ethics and policies. But that caution was also attributable to a thing called the “Goldwater Rule,” which warrants explaining because it infuses this whole issue.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, successfully sued a now-defunct magazine called FACT (for $50,000) after the magazine ran a pre-election special issue titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.”

The two main articles in the magazine contended that Goldwater was mentally unfit to be president.   According to Wikipedia, the magazine “supported this claim with the results of a poll of board-certified psychiatrists. FACT had mailed questionnaires to 12,356 psychiatrists, receiving responses from 2,417, of whom 1,189 said Goldwater was mentally incapable of holding the office of president.”

The other 1,228 psychiatrists declined to render a judgment. Most of them cited a de facto rule among mental health professionals that speculating about the mental health status or diagnosis of people not in their own care—and especially public figures—was unethical and very unwise.

Though it took a few more years, the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 codified this practice by adding what is now called the Goldwater Rule to its ethics guidelines.

So, to be clear, the Goldwater Rule applies to mental health professionals, but because of the successful lawsuit came to apply to media as well. Idle chatter or speculation about the mental health of public figures was to be generally avoided.   And it was, for many years.

Fast forward to spring 2016. The presidential campaign is in full swing and Trump is saying and doing some very strange, unconventional things. In response, a small band of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, under the banner of an ad hoc group called “Duty to Warn,” decided to violate the Goldwater Rule.

In articles and blogs, the group claimed that Donald Trump displays “an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and ‘malignant narcissism.’” Separately, the group’s leader, psychologist John Gartner, said Trump “has a dangerous mental illness.”

The media and social media, of course, picked up on this, and commentaries begin to appear. Most were online but some found their way into the mainstream media. Most notably, on March 7, 2016 The New York Times publishes an essay titled, “Should Therapists Analyze Presidential Candidates?” by Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Klitzman’s conclusion: mental health professionals and the media should stand firm on the Goldwater Rule and not speculate on the mental health of presidential candidates, including Trump. Four days later, on March 11, 2016, in letter to the Times, the president of the American Psychological Association agreed.

As Trump’s chances of electoral success seemed remote to everyone, the discussion subsided. Then, surprisingly, Trump wins the Republican nomination and the presidency.

And much of the nation is in shock.

The issue of whether Trump is mentally (clinically) afflicted in some way is no longer academic, or a fun pastime subject.   Millions of people – the vast majority of them Democrats, of course—think something is seriously wrong with the man. And they talk about it all the time. At home and around the proverbial water cooler, in bars, and on the web.

Indeed, Trump commentary and jokes quickly becomes a national pastime, as the president-elect and then president fails spectacularly to honor his pledge to “become really presidential, so presidential” or conform to behavioral norms. Much of the commentary and humor is tinged with the implicit or explicit talk of Trump’s mental stability. This become a meme, if you will.

As the months go by, idle chat becomes more formal and liberal op-ed columnists—especially those affiliated with the Times and The Washington Post—are less and less restrained in suggesting President Trump suffers from a clinical disorder.

The words narcissism and “instability” are invoked over and over. But there’s also reference to the president’s erratic behavior, aggression, malevolence, lying, paranoia, impulsiveness, inconsistency, poor judgment, and self-destructive behavior.  And, of course, there’s that painful-to-watch inability to form coherent thoughts when not scripted. (Yes, we are getting back to that and the STAT story in just a minute.)

But first, fast forward again to Feb. 13, 2017 when in response to a column in the Times by Charles Blow, Dr. Lance Dodes and 34 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers publish a letter in the Times. http://ift.tt/2l39zhR   It said:

“Silence from the country’s mental health organizations…. has resulted in a failure to lend our expertise to worried journalists and members of Congress at this critical time. We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.   Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).

In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.”

Following that, on April 5, 2017, Rolling Stone magazine (which has had its troubles lately) bucked the Goldwater Rule with an article by Alex Morris titled “Why Trump Is Not Mentally Fit to Be President” and the subtitle “Diagnosing the president was off-limits to experts – until a textbook case entered the White House.”

The article concludes that Trump fits all the criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” a formal diagnostic entity in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

In May, psychologist John Gartner, Duty to Warn’s founder, re-entered the fray with an op-ed in USA TODAY.   I guess you could say USA TODAY entered the fray, too.

Mincing no words, Gartner said Trump was “psychotic” and suffered from “malignant narcissism.”   He claimed that more than 53,000 people, including thousands of mental health professionals, had signed a petition stating Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment because he is “too mentally ill to competently serve.” (Of note: Gartner is the author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography.)

One politician is also not mincing words about Trump. And he’s a doctor. Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, at campaign events and in TV ads routinely calls Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

“We want to be medically correct,” he recently quipped in a radio interview, according to an article in the Washington Post.

The STAT Analysis

Now, back to the STAT analysis of Trump’s speech patterns and communication style. Veteran science and medical journalist Sharon Begley and her colleagues gathered decades of Trump’s old unscripted on-air interviews and compared them to interviews and unscripted speeches and media Q&A sessions since his inauguration. They then asked experts in neuro-linguistics and cognitive scientists, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to carefully compare the clips and samples.

“The differences are striking and unmistakable,” Begley writes. The experts she tapped, from both political parties, agreed there was marked deterioration.

In interviews, even lengthy ones, from the 1980s and 1990s, Begley says Trump more often than not “spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print.”

By comparison, Trump’s speech in recent interviews is fragmented, even incoherent or disoriented at times, and uses much simpler words. In addition, he frequently repeats the same point, words or phrases and routinely strays into tangential points or unrelated topics.

Begley cites several examples, including this one from an interview with the Associated Press in April 2017:

“People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it — you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

We have all noticed this. Some of us are bothered by it, others not so much. What Begley then brings to the table is a solid discussion of the possible causes of this particular Trump impairment, if indeed it is one. To her credit, she doesn’t speculate on whether this impairment is linked to Trump’s overall mental health, or other possible diagnoses.

Her experts—some clearly with the Goldwater Rule in mind—agreed that the changes in Trump’s speech patterns and language likely reflect cognitive decline. But they differed on the key point of whether that decline is due to “normal aging” or something more serious, even the beginnings of dementia or other neurodegenerative disease.   Some also noted that linguistic decline is commonly triggered by stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue and lack of sleep.

As I was writing this piece I happened upon a Q&A interview in TIME magazine with Sir Harold Evans (June 12, 2017 issue, page 60).   An esteemed editor and writer for decades, Evans has written a new book titled Do I Make Myself Clear.   http://ift.tt/1OrsBFx

The interview has this interesting exchange (edited slightly for length):

Q: Which presidents have been the least clear in their writing, and where does Donald Trump rank?

A: Donald Trump can actually be very clear. But the thought is zero, virtually.   The real problem with him not the clarity of language.

Q: You talk about the seduction of Trump’s “insistent certainty”….

A: Exactly, It’s very seductive…..Trump has an ability to be clear when he wants to be and is aware surely of the immortality of falsehoods. “We’re going to stop immigration” We’re going to have a wall.”

Evans is not the first to suggest that Trump’s simplistic rhetoric and repetitive speech is quite intentional.   That brings to mind H.L. Mencken’s quip: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Summing up

The Goldwater Rule makes all kinds of sense—morally, ethically, and legally. But we are in uncharted waters with President Trump on so many levels. At the very least, the mental health community, ethicists, philosophers, media professionals, and legal scholars should engage in a wider discussion of the points raised by the Duty to Warn folks.

At the same time, a serious public debate seems warranted about (a) whether candidates for president should receive a more formal vetting as to their health, including mental health, and (b) whether an age cut-off should be imposed for the presidency.

Yes, I know, both those suggestions may appear shocking, even laughable. But we’ve had two presidents in the past 50 years—Nixon and now Trump—whose mental health (or character, forged in part by possibly unsound mental health, in the case of Nixon) has been called into serious question.

And we’ve had one president—Reagan—who was very likely cognitively impaired in his final years in office.

Research is clear on cognitive decline with age. We may be wiser at 70 or 75 but none of us are as sharp, mentally agile or energetic at that age as we are at 50 or 60. And, recent studies suggest, for a growing number of seniors that decline lies somewhere between the minor deterioration associated with “normal aging” and the more-serious decline of dementia.

Neurologists call this mild cognitive impairment, or MCI. Online sources define MCI as “problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes.”

Of course, none of this means that seniors—with or without MCI—can’t be productive members of society, or continue working. Maybe just not as President of the United States.

Both areas—mental health status and age—together and apart, are tough and fraught subjects. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to what public opinion polls would reveal on these subjects, or where a robust public debate would end up.

In fact, it’s quite feasible we’d end up with this tacit or default approach: there’ll always be a risk we’ll get mental and character-challenged bad apples as presidents (or members of Congress or governors) because there’s no way to prevent that in an open democracy like ours, and/or because we think such bad apples reflect society as much as good apples do.

For now, I’m just saying we ought to be having the discussion.

[Addendum: STAT also published a “reporter’s notebook piece by Sharon Begley on May 25 about how her piece on Trump came about.

  Trump’s Brain: What’s Going On? published first on http://ift.tt/2sUuvu3

[isaacscrawford]

Trump’s Brain: What’s Going On?

BY STEVEN FINDLAY

In late May the science and health news site STAT ran a provocative article titled: “Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?”

Not surprisingly, the piece went viral.   After all, aren’t most of us wondering whether something is up with the President’s—how shall I say it—state of mind, psychological status, character, personality, and yes, mental health?

For over a year, there’s been speculation about this. Most of the talk is loose and politically inflected. But substantive reflections by mental health professionals and serious commentators are on the rise.

At first, media outlets were very careful. They didn’t want to say the president was “lying” let alone possibly crazy.   Their caution was grounded mostly in journalistic ethics and policies. But that caution was also attributable to a thing called the “Goldwater Rule,” which warrants explaining because it infuses this whole issue.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, successfully sued a now-defunct magazine called FACT (for $50,000) after the magazine ran a pre-election special issue titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.”

The two main articles in the magazine contended that Goldwater was mentally unfit to be president.   According to Wikipedia, the magazine “supported this claim with the results of a poll of board-certified psychiatrists. FACT had mailed questionnaires to 12,356 psychiatrists, receiving responses from 2,417, of whom 1,189 said Goldwater was mentally incapable of holding the office of president.”

The other 1,228 psychiatrists declined to render a judgment. Most of them cited a de facto rule among mental health professionals that speculating about the mental health status or diagnosis of people not in their own care—and especially public figures—was unethical and very unwise.

Though it took a few more years, the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 codified this practice by adding what is now called the Goldwater Rule to its ethics guidelines.

So, to be clear, the Goldwater Rule applies to mental health professionals, but because of the successful lawsuit came to apply to media as well. Idle chatter or speculation about the mental health of public figures was to be generally avoided.   And it was, for many years.

Fast forward to spring 2016. The presidential campaign is in full swing and Trump is saying and doing some very strange, unconventional things. In response, a small band of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, under the banner of an ad hoc group called “Duty to Warn,” decided to violate the Goldwater Rule.

In articles and blogs, the group claimed that Donald Trump displays “an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and ‘malignant narcissism.’” Separately, the group’s leader, psychologist John Gartner, said Trump “has a dangerous mental illness.”

The media and social media, of course, picked up on this, and commentaries begin to appear. Most were online but some found their way into the mainstream media. Most notably, on March 7, 2016 The New York Times publishes an essay titled, “Should Therapists Analyze Presidential Candidates?” by Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Klitzman’s conclusion: mental health professionals and the media should stand firm on the Goldwater Rule and not speculate on the mental health of presidential candidates, including Trump. Four days later, on March 11, 2016, in letter to the Times, the president of the American Psychological Association agreed.

As Trump’s chances of electoral success seemed remote to everyone, the discussion subsided. Then, surprisingly, Trump wins the Republican nomination and the presidency.

And much of the nation is in shock.

The issue of whether Trump is mentally (clinically) afflicted in some way is no longer academic, or a fun pastime subject.   Millions of people – the vast majority of them Democrats, of course—think something is seriously wrong with the man. And they talk about it all the time. At home and around the proverbial water cooler, in bars, and on the web.

Indeed, Trump commentary and jokes quickly becomes a national pastime, as the president-elect and then president fails spectacularly to honor his pledge to “become really presidential, so presidential” or conform to behavioral norms. Much of the commentary and humor is tinged with the implicit or explicit talk of Trump’s mental stability. This become a meme, if you will.

As the months go by, idle chat becomes more formal and liberal op-ed columnists—especially those affiliated with the Times and The Washington Post—are less and less restrained in suggesting President Trump suffers from a clinical disorder.

The words narcissism and “instability” are invoked over and over. But there’s also reference to the president’s erratic behavior, aggression, malevolence, lying, paranoia, impulsiveness, inconsistency, poor judgment, and self-destructive behavior.  And, of course, there’s that painful-to-watch inability to form coherent thoughts when not scripted. (Yes, we are getting back to that and the STAT story in just a minute.)

But first, fast forward again to Feb. 13, 2017 when in response to a column in the Times by Charles Blow, Dr. Lance Dodes and 34 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers publish a letter in the Times. http://www.lancedodes.com/new-york-times-letter   It said:

“Silence from the country’s mental health organizations…. has resulted in a failure to lend our expertise to worried journalists and members of Congress at this critical time. We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.   Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).

In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.”

Following that, on April 5, 2017, Rolling Stone magazine (which has had its troubles lately) bucked the Goldwater Rule with an article by Alex Morris titled “Why Trump Is Not Mentally Fit to Be President” and the subtitle “Diagnosing the president was off-limits to experts – until a textbook case entered the White House.”

The article concludes that Trump fits all the criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” a formal diagnostic entity in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

In May, psychologist John Gartner, Duty to Warn’s founder, re-entered the fray with an op-ed in USA TODAY.   I guess you could say USA TODAY entered the fray, too.

Mincing no words, Gartner said Trump was “psychotic” and suffered from “malignant narcissism.”   He claimed that more than 53,000 people, including thousands of mental health professionals, had signed a petition stating Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment because he is “too mentally ill to competently serve.” (Of note: Gartner is the author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography.)

One politician is also not mincing words about Trump. And he’s a doctor. Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, at campaign events and in TV ads routinely calls Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

“We want to be medically correct,” he recently quipped in a radio interview, according to an article in the Washington Post.

The STAT Analysis

Now, back to the STAT analysis of Trump’s speech patterns and communication style. Veteran science and medical journalist Sharon Begley and her colleagues gathered decades of Trump’s old unscripted on-air interviews and compared them to interviews and unscripted speeches and media Q&A sessions since his inauguration. They then asked experts in neuro-linguistics and cognitive scientists, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to carefully compare the clips and samples.

“The differences are striking and unmistakable,” Begley writes. The experts she tapped, from both political parties, agreed there was marked deterioration.

In interviews, even lengthy ones, from the 1980s and 1990s, Begley says Trump more often than not “spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print.”

By comparison, Trump’s speech in recent interviews is fragmented, even incoherent or disoriented at times, and uses much simpler words. In addition, he frequently repeats the same point, words or phrases and routinely strays into tangential points or unrelated topics.

Begley cites several examples, including this one from an interview with the Associated Press in April 2017:

“People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it — you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

We have all noticed this. Some of us are bothered by it, others not so much. What Begley then brings to the table is a solid discussion of the possible causes of this particular Trump impairment, if indeed it is one. To her credit, she doesn’t speculate on whether this impairment is linked to Trump’s overall mental health, or other possible diagnoses.

Her experts—some clearly with the Goldwater Rule in mind—agreed that the changes in Trump’s speech patterns and language likely reflect cognitive decline. But they differed on the key point of whether that decline is due to “normal aging” or something more serious, even the beginnings of dementia or other neurodegenerative disease.   Some also noted that linguistic decline is commonly triggered by stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue and lack of sleep.

As I was writing this piece I happened upon a Q&A interview in TIME magazine with Sir Harold Evans (June 12, 2017 issue, page 60).   An esteemed editor and writer for decades, Evans has written a new book titled Do I Make Myself Clear.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Evans

The interview has this interesting exchange (edited slightly for length):

Q: Which presidents have been the least clear in their writing, and where does Donald Trump rank?

A: Donald Trump can actually be very clear. But the thought is zero, virtually.   The real problem with him not the clarity of language.

Q: You talk about the seduction of Trump’s “insistent certainty”….

A: Exactly, It’s very seductive…..Trump has an ability to be clear when he wants to be and is aware surely of the immortality of falsehoods. “We’re going to stop immigration” We’re going to have a wall.”

Evans is not the first to suggest that Trump’s simplistic rhetoric and repetitive speech is quite intentional.   That brings to mind H.L. Mencken’s quip: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Summing up

The Goldwater Rule makes all kinds of sense—morally, ethically, and legally. But we are in uncharted waters with President Trump on so many levels. At the very least, the mental health community, ethicists, philosophers, media professionals, and legal scholars should engage in a wider discussion of the points raised by the Duty to Warn folks.

At the same time, a serious public debate seems warranted about (a) whether candidates for president should receive a more formal vetting as to their health, including mental health, and (b) whether an age cut-off should be imposed for the presidency.

Yes, I know, both those suggestions may appear shocking, even laughable. But we’ve had two presidents in the past 50 years—Nixon and now Trump—whose mental health (or character, forged in part by possibly unsound mental health, in the case of Nixon) has been called into serious question.

And we’ve had one president—Reagan—who was very likely cognitively impaired in his final years in office.

Research is clear on cognitive decline with age. We may be wiser at 70 or 75 but none of us are as sharp, mentally agile or energetic at that age as we are at 50 or 60. And, recent studies suggest, for a growing number of seniors that decline lies somewhere between the minor deterioration associated with “normal aging” and the more-serious decline of dementia.

Neurologists call this mild cognitive impairment, or MCI. Online sources define MCI as “problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes.”

Of course, none of this means that seniors—with or without MCI—can’t be productive members of society, or continue working. Maybe just not as President of the United States.

Both areas—mental health status and age—together and apart, are tough and fraught subjects. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to what public opinion polls would reveal on these subjects, or where a robust public debate would end up.

In fact, it’s quite feasible we’d end up with this tacit or default approach: there’ll always be a risk we’ll get mental and character-challenged bad apples as presidents (or members of Congress or governors) because there’s no way to prevent that in an open democracy like ours, and/or because we think such bad apples reflect society as much as good apples do.

For now, I’m just saying we ought to be having the discussion.

[Addendum: STAT also published a “reporter’s notebook piece by Sharon Begley on May 25 about how her piece on Trump came about.

  Article source:The Health Care Blog