Author: Andrew Sullivan

Readers begin to share their stories:

I appreciate your most recent coverage of the ongoing issue of mentally ill students on college campuses. As a current first-year undergraduate at a Northeastern liberal arts college, I have seen countless cases in which students who needed help were met with harsh discipline. A few of these cases have hit close to home. A good friend revealed to our tight-knit group that he has suicidal thoughts. After he seemed hesitant to get help, our group made the decision to alert the Health Services Department on his behalf.

The campus response was, in my opinion, disturbing.

Two campus police officers – not trained medical professionals at the Health Services Department – came to my friend’s door at 3 AM, pulled him out of bed, gave him a full body search, hand-cuffed him and then brought him to the campus police detention facility. In other words, his mental and emotional issues were treated as criminal issues. After he was quickly examined by health services officials, the administration gave him a forced leave of absence for a semester. He was removed from a close, caring group of friends and many other support structures on campus. Keep in mind, this is an 18-year-old kid who’s living away from home for the first time in his life – your typical college freshman.

I think this anecdote reflects just how paranoid universities are about an on-campus death (especially a suicide). Their efforts to avoid the repercussions of a suicide completely miss the point. Their primary goal is not to stop their students from committing suicide; their goal is to make sure that students don’t commit suicide on their campus. It’s not about a commitment to making students healthy; it’s a strategic plan to remove any students who show the slightest signs of mental health needs. Of course, there are so many negative consequences to this approach – the most detrimental being that in criminalizing and punishing students with mental health problems, the university discourages students from seeking help for very serious issues (potentially suicide). This is a grim outlook, but from what I have seen so far this is a recurring pattern.

Again, I really do appreciate your coverage on this topic. I think it deserves much more attention and I think it is a conversation that college officials around the country are failing to have.

One college official would beg to differ:

In the case of my particular campus (a small local campus of a very large research university), I have to say that we most definitely are not failing our students.  We only have about 800 students on our campus, but we made the commitment to hire a full-time personal counselor (MS-level education in counseling with certifications in adolescent and personal counseling and years of experience at another university and in social work) even though that was a huge expense to our smallish budget.  We did it because we could see that more and more students needed the help and because more and more students are arriving on our doorstep diagnosed with some sort of mental illness and/or cognitive/learning disabilities.

Every front-line department, including faculty, has a representative (or several) on our Student Success Committee, including the personal counselor.  We meet several times a semester and we often discuss the students we know who are having problems or who have been reported to us as possibly not adjusting well in addition to trying to deal with all the other factors that go into student success.  We take a team approach to these situations, with everyone involved trying to get the students in question to get help for whatever issue they have.  We never abandon a student until the student abandons us by withdrawing or flunking out.

Perhaps it’s because our campus is so small that we are able to dedicate so many personnel to this issue.  It helps that almost every student on campus knows at least one of us well, if not all of us.  Perhaps it’s that our faculty and staff also know each other well and keep each other up to date on what is happening in their classes/offices.  Maybe it’s our campus’ leadership, who have funded the personal counselor position, created the Student Success Committee and made it a priority for every department and faculty member to keep student success first in our minds and to emphasize that success does not apply only to the most academically successful.

All I know is that we have plenty of students with major emotional problems, but very few of them have withdrawn or acted out.  I can only think of one instance that, despite everything we did to try to help, led a student to cause a major incident on our campus.  And even that was relatively minor in retrospect.  The student in question had flunked out after not taking advantage of the help he had been offered after threatening an ex-girlfriend who, like him, lived in the dorms.  When, the next semester, he started sending threatening messages to her again and this time saying he was coming to campus with a gun, she and other students contacted our campus police and the campus was closed until the young man was arrested that night.  He finally got diagnosed and hospitalized and is going to another school to which he can commute and continuing his therapy as an outpatient.

It’s only been that one in the fifteen years I’ve been here and in the eight years since we committed to the full-time counselor and Student Success Committee.  Some might think we do too much to intervene with our students, but I think that’s a pretty good track record.

A reader writes:

A little story from my own life. Many years ago, I met a young man at a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I managed, despite my fear of rejection, to ask him out on a date and, miracle of miracles, he said yes. Just before our date, I stopped in a little neighborhood florist shop and bought him a single yellow rose. He loved it. From then on, we bought each other roses from this shop for every occasion, however little – we’re having hot dogs together! – or important – will you move in with me?

Finally the day came when I asked him to marry me and I went to buy him a single red rose from “our” florist.

In those days, we couldn’t legally marry, but my church, the Religious Society of Friends, would marry us anyway. When I told the florist how special and important this rose was, that I was asking my great love, a man, to marry me, she pulled back the rose and told me she was a good Christian and wouldn’t sell me the rose or roses ever again, not for something sick like that. We had been buying from this florist for five years and never happened to mention what they were for.

The place was always busy, we were in a hurry, so it never came up, but I was so bursting with pride and joy that I was asking the man I loved more than life itself to marry me, to be with me until death, I said something that day. I left empty-handed and broken-hearted. The joy in what I was about to do had a cold pail of hate thrown on it. I asked him to marry me without a rose from “our” shop. He said yes anyway and he was with me until he died from a fire in 1981.

I still bring a rose to his grave every year, but not from our florist.

Last week, Penguin agreed to remove all copies of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History from bookshelves in India and pulp them following a lawsuit by a Hindu nationalist organization that deemed the book offensive. Keating notes that Doniger is not the first author to have this problem:

Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses is banned in India, pulled out of a literary festival in Jaipur after receiving death threats. Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi was banned in 2011 because it suggested he may have been bisexual.

If, as expected, the Hindu nationalist BJP comes into power after this year’s elections, there’s good reason to expect things might get worse.

Jonathan Shainin considers the shaky state of free speech in India:

Free speech has innumerable enemies in India, and comparably few principled defenders—against whom vast legal, political, and social obstacles are arrayed.

A writer, publisher, or newspaper editor can fight a case in court, provided he has the patience to endure the interminable delays of the legal system. In the end, he may even win, though the relevant laws have been interpreted, over the decades, to carve out larger and larger exceptions to the right of free expression enshrined in India’s Constitution. No political leader will dare speak in defense of a text under attack unless the book in question targets his enemies; supporting the freedom of unpopular speech only costs votes and never wins them. And the state does not offer much protection from physical harm. When death threats are phoned to your home, or a mob comes to vandalize your office, you’re on your own.

Nilanjana Roy wants the country’s liberal intellectuals to defend their rights:

For all of the support expressed over Doniger, the resentment at “the bullies,” the Indian liberal response has frequently been to ask why the creative class must go out looking for trouble. …  The creative classes in India, especially the middle-class and the elite among them, have bought a precarious immunity through gestures of appeasement. They have not bought freedom; and it remains to be seen whether that sense of safety will last.

The decision to cave is backfiring on the publisher:

The backlash over Penguin’s move last week has been huge, with major literary figures lining up to condemn the withdrawal of The Hindus from India. Penguin took the decision following a four-year legal battle with a Hindu nationalist group which claimed Doniger’s well-reviewed tome violated the Indian penal code – which prevents religious insult – as it “hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus”.

Now the Penguin authors Jyotirmaya Sharma and Siddharth Varadarajan have written to the publisher asking for their books to be withdrawn and pulped. “[We] have asked Penguin to pulp our books and revert copyright so we can deal with any would-be bullies on our own terms,” said Varadarajan on Twitter.

ADHD medications help children concentrate, but they don’t seem to offer any long-term benefits – academic or otherwise. Katherine Sharpe delves into the research:

How can medication that makes children sit still and pay attention not lead to better grades? One possibility is that children develop tolerance to the drug. Dosage could also play a part: as children grow and put on weight, medication has to be adjusted to keep up, which does not always happen. And many children simply stop taking the drugs, especially in adolescence, when they may begin to feel that it affects their personalities. Children may also stop treatment because of side effects, which can include difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite and mood swings, as well as elevated heart rate.

Or it could be that stimulant medications mainly improve behavior, not intellectual functioning. In the 1970s, two researchers, Russell Barkley and Charles Cunningham, noted that when children with ADHD took stimulants, parents and teachers rated their academic performance as vastly improved. But objective measurements showed that the quality of their work hadn’t changed. What looked like achievement was actually manageability in the classroom. If medication made struggling children appear to be doing fine, they might be passed over for needed help, the authors suggested. Janet Currie, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says that she might have been observing just such a phenomenon in the Quebec study that found lower achievement among medicated students.

Previous Dish on ADHD here, here, here, and here.

In what is a truly depressing development, NRO’s Ryan Anderson insists the Kansas law permitting government officials and any individual person to discriminate against gay couples in civil marriages (which are banned in Kansas) is just a defense against oppression (which doesn’t yet exist). So NRO is now to the right of even the Kansas GOP on this. Anderson’s previous piece on the question actually describes the inclusion of gays and lesbians in routine anti-discrimination laws as “special privileges”, when every other minority group is protected by them, including religious believers. Anderson also claims the following:

Contrary to what some opponents of the bill have suggested, the Kansas policy would only protect religious individuals and organizations from being forced to provide services related to marriage, the celebration of marriage, or similar relationship. It would not allow businesses, individuals, or government employees from refusing to serve someone (or a couple) simply because of his or her sexual orientation.

But if a gay person were already in a relationship of even the vaguest sort, any vendor could decide to discriminate against them. Here’s the language of the Kansas bill, allowing anyone to refuse to provide

any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; provide counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits, related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement;

It seems pretty clear to me: any individual could refuse to provide employment to someone related to any living arrangement they disapprove of. That’s a massive category that could easily mean de facto publicly legislated discrimination against the tiny gay minority. That Anderson does not even consider the concerns of those of us worried by this vague, open-ended law or is in any way interested in the dignity or equality of gay citizens in Kansas (citizens who are currently denied any protection from discrimination in employment, and denied the right to any stable, lawful relationship as well) reveals the blind spot that so many on the far right have.

And he doesn’t explain why such a law should not also include marriages or relationships that are not gay and which nonetheless violate some aspect of religious conscience – like marriages that involved previously divorced people or those that violate some religious strictures against inter-faith marriage. If you’re really defending religious liberty and not just attacking gays, you’d think the law would be a lot broader in its targets.

National Review has four pieces up right now on marriage equality. All take it as a premise that civil marriage for gay people is a civilizational catastrophe and argue for a ramped up culture war against it. Those who once thought there could be some accommodation between gays and the GOP can only be further dismayed. Our liberties and dignity are meaningless to them – and there are close to no gay writers or thinkers on the right or center right that are allowed to participate in this debate. At some point, you begin to wonder whether this isn’t more than posturing. When they believe gays should be denied any legally supported relationship, when they oppose all anti-discrimination laws for gays (but are fine with them for every other minority), when they oppose hate crime laws for gays (but support them in every other category), you begin to realize that they are still living in the 1970s. If they cannot prevent us from being visible, they can at least put up walls to keep us from interacting with them in any way. And they wonder why the Jim Crow analogy seems so apposite to so many.

Wouldn’t that be an excellent idea? The choices an American president has to make today – from Mexico to Russia to Syria and Iran – are fiendishly tough, in the wake of Bush’s revelation of the severe limits on American military power. We could do with an airing of what exactly our options are in restraining Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Putin’s neo-fascist regime in Russia. But we appear stuck in a miasma of public forgetfulness – a state of affairs which only a few, like Rand Paul, seem to want to challenge. Matthew Feeney wonders how Paul will fare:

A lot could change before the 2016 presidential campaigns begin in earnest. However, assuming there is no major shift in American opinion before Paul’s widely expected White House bid begins, it unfortunately looks like Paul’s positions on foreign policy, which ought to be taken seriously given the current state of American foreign affairs, will be mostly overlooked by an American public that continues to be largely indifferent about foreign affairs.

Larison isn’t so sure:

Normally, no politician can run and win on a platform defined mainly by foreign policy views, but when a politician holds views that line up with public opinion they will still get the attention of quite a few voters. Because hawks in both parties are hostile to what Paul represents, there will also probably be disproportionate attention paid to Paul’s foreign policy views by critics, which will make more voters aware of them and could have the unintended effect of driving some voters in Paul’s direction.

Millman expects that, should Paul get the nomination, that “the general election will turn on economic issues.” He imagines a Clinton-Paul race:

Hillary Clinton has almost no incentive to bring up foreign policy, except to contrast her considerable experience with Paul’s greenness.

She won’t run on the need to confront evil in Syria, or Ukraine, or wherever; she’ll run on competence, not ideology. Her overwhelming incentive is going to be to focus on Paul’s economic and budgetary views, and his leadership role in some of the most ignominious moments of the Congressional GOP’s budgetary hostage-taking. (That, and play identity politics.) That is the contrast she is going to draw, and Paul is going to have to own it.

Larison pushes back:

As an advocate for arming the Syrian opposition, pushing for regime change in Libya, and backing escalation in Afghanistan, Clinton routinely took the more hawkish side in every internal administration debate, and that put her on what proved to be the wrong side of some of the most important decisions of the first term. For that matter, the main reason that Clinton is ever credited with foreign policy competence is that she reliably takes the conventional and “consensus” position on every major issue. In other words, her claim to competence is that she sticks to a predictably hawkish line.

Millman goes another round:

My point was not that Clinton actually has a record of competence in foreign policy; I don’t think she does. I agree, in fact, with pretty much all of Larison’s criticisms of her foreign policy record. I just don’t think Clinton is going to run on a platform of “She’ll keep us at war.” Rather, she will claim that she has the experience to know how to negotiate effectively and get results without war, and the clout to build a broad coalition of international support when the use of force is necessary. Whereas, she’ll portray Paul as a naive ideologue who doesn’t understand how the world works. Her actual foreign policy preferences are quite close to Senator McCain’s, but she won’t make jokes about bombing Iran, and won’t present herself as the heir to “bear any burden, pay any price.”

For my part, I wonder if we are currently under-estimating the public’s interest. We’re in a period before mid-terms when foreign policy is usually dormant. It may perk up as the presidential contest looms on the horizon. And I have to say a contrast between Paul’s principled non-interventionism and Clinton’s restrained McCainism would be quite a tonic. And I suspect Paul would score a few points.

(Photo: General view of Independence Square during clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police forces in Kiev on February 19, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. By Alexander Koerner/Getty Images.)

One week into a battle between opposition and pro-government demonstrators, things appear to be escalating:

Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López came out of hiding on Tuesday, as promised, and surrendered to the authorities to face charges of terrorism. Mr. López, a Harvard-educated former mayor of a wealthy section of Caracas, is the political face of ongoing demonstrations against President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

The protests began last Wednesday and turned violent almost immediately. Three people were killed on the first day, and on Thursday the government issued an arrest warrant for Mr. López. One more protester died and several were gravely injured since.

What the protests are about:

Venezuela is faced by economic, social, and political challenges: Inflation is at 56 percent, the currency is rapidly devaluing, shortages of staples like toilet paper and sugar are plaguing the nation, and the murder rate is one of the worst in the world.

What started out as roughly two weeks of small, student-led protests against the Maduro administration has turned into opposition-organized marches that involve stone-throwing and taunting met by tear gas and water cannons.

“These are legitimate issues that do need a popular voice and channel for expression,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society in New York. “What makes the protests particularly volatile is that other avenues to express these demands have been closed down,” Mr. Sabatini says, referring to the closure of opposition media over the past several years and the shuttering of multiple newspapers nationwide more recently due to paper shortages.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo warns of a bloodbath:

People who fear the breakout of a civil war in Venezuela don’t understand that only one side is armed: the government and its supporters. The Maduro regime, whose security apparatus is closely controlled by Cuba’s secret services, has already engaged in brutish repression of protestors. The army and the National Guard are firmly aligned with the government and there is little or no chance that they might balk at exercising unrestrained violence against unarmed civilians. Moreover, armed gangs of government supporters, called “tupamaros,” act freely with the complicity of the security services and were supposedly behind the killings of a couple of protesters last week. It’s hard to have a civil war when only one side is armed.

Greg Weeks notes that “neither side seems interested in dialogue”:

The military has already declared itself on the government’s side, which makes this a very different situation from Honduras in 2009 or even Venezuela in 2002. Chávez worked for years to transform the military, and in the absence of any obvious splits (of course, plenty is going on that we don’t know about) a coup is unlikely. If there is no dialogue, then it seems the country waits for the protests to peter out. Even if there is financing top keep it going and organized, people get tired of having their lives disrupted. Will they tire out?

James Bloodworth thinks it’s time for the left to abandon its love affair with Chávez:

Between 2007 and 2011 there was a reduction in extreme poverty in Venezuela by some 38 per cent. Impressive no doubt. But the percentage of people who escaped extreme poverty in Brazil during the same period was 44 per cent, in Peru 41 per cent and in Uruguay 63 per cent. None of these countries possess anything like Venezuela’s vast oil wealth, yet all managed to lift their poorest citizens out of penury without the human rights abuses which have characterised the governments of Chavez and Maduro. Boring social democracy may be less romantic, but it has been far more successful at tackling poverty than the Chavez/Maduro model.