Free heroin dispensing on the NHS is getting closer. For seven years now the Department of Health has pumped our money into its ‘injectable opiate treatment trials’ to prove that it ‘works’. Now, according to announcement this week, it plans to pour good money after bad, efficacious or not and regardless of other austerity measures. With lifesaving drugs being denied to people in need, there can be no justification for its ‘Phase Two programme roll out’

According to NTA accounts we have already funded this ‘experiment’ to the tune of £4.5 million, and nearly £2 million just in the last two years. The total spent since 2005 when the trials started, I have not yet been able to elicit, though one dedicated centre cost a cool half million to set up and run. The press officer I was directed to could not tell me. Nor did he know how much had been budgeted for the future of this ‘programme’.

The DoH declared on the press release that Injectable Opioid Treatment (IOT) is a ‘clinically-effective second-line treatment’ for people with chronic heroin addictions. This is based on its trial results. An alternative view of them, however, is that they prove the adage that an addict always wants more. For the 127 addicts initially involved in the trials it must have seemed all their Christmases had come at once.

Full story at The Daily Mail

The boom of the plane hitting the towers, the gray pieces floating in the air, and the people jumping out were parts of the scene replayed in physician Margaret Dessau’s mind for years after the 9/11 disaster. She remembers looking out her apartment window to see a “guy with this white towel, and he’s waving it.” After he jumps, she hears children scream from a nearby school.

Nearly 10 years later, she described these memories as part of her post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, to writer Anemona Hartacollis for the New York Times. Many PTSD sufferers replay disastrous events as memories that intrude on everyday life — intrusive memories — or in nightmares. They complain of not sleeping or concentrating. They may overreact to loud noises, become excessively alert and hypervigilant, and avoid reminders of the disaster. Dessau, who witnessed the attacks from her window, avoids looking at the skyline.

Intrusive memories are only part of a larger picture that often includes a sense of isolation, hopelessness, anger, and emotional numbness.

Full story at The Atlantic

According to recent research, some people are becoming depressed after using Facebook. If you can’t understand this, maybe you don’t have Facebook. I have always found it depressing. Where else can you have 500 friends and still feel like nobody really knows who you are.

And where else but Facebook can you go to see constant updates on what everyone is doing all the time. Status update: i’m taking out the trash. Status update: going to grandma’s house. Status update: Stacy’s coming over for soup…so excited! Seems depressing to me.

Utah Valley University conducted research last year which indicated that people are becoming depressed after viewing Facebook, and not because they find stays updates monotonous like I do. A sample of 425 undergraduate students was surveyed and for those who spent the most amount of time on Facebook, depression was more likely. Why?

Full story at Web Pro News

“There were no means of transport, so they prepared a bicycle. She lost a lot of blood and when she arrived at the district hospital, she wasn’t paid much attention. Around 6 a.m., both the mother and baby died. I witnessed it. The woman was 38 years-old.” These are the words of a man from the Kisumu district in Kenya, describing a pregnant woman in his community who had died while giving birth during the post-election violence that rocked the country in early 2008.

This kind of scenario plays out every day, around the world; more than 350,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth every year. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occur in developing countries, where the lack of access to quality health care and information results in high fertility rates and closely spaced births, increasing women’s and girls’ risk of death and disability. Indeed, pregnancy can be a matter of life or death for women and girls in these places; and, their infants’ lives are in jeopardy as well.

Full story at Huffington Post

When Brandi Braegger, of Cedar City, was 13 years old she had a major depressive episode that served as the beginning of a rollercoaster ride that would eventually include self medication, binge drinking, nine hospitalizations, post-partum hallucinations and four suicide attempts.

“When I’d wake up it would be a huge despair (thinking) ‘I’m still here,’” Braegger says of the attempts that involved taking excessive amounts of pills.

It’s a situation to which Josh Barker, of St. George, can relate. For years this 34-year-old experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, combined with certain obsessions and compulsions that often dictated his actions, yet he never really knew that his behavior wasn’t normal.

“For a while I thought this was how everybody operated,” Barker says.

It’s taken therapy and proper medication to help him realize that isn’t the case.

Full story at The Spectrum