Category: The Dish

by Tracy R. Walsh

Taking a page from Nellie Bly, the psychiatrist who blogs as “Simple Citizen” spent a day as an inpatient at the adolescent Residential Treatment Center where he ordinarily works:

I first learn how boring the morning is, and how many times you get woken up. First they shine a flashlight on you every 15 minutes during the night to make sure you are still in bed, alive, and not hurting yourself or trying to commit suicide. Then the phlebotomist wakes up anyone who needs their blood drawn for labs that have been ordered. (likely by me)

Then we get woken up again by the sound of “med-pass” when all the kids who take morning medications have to go to the nurse one by one, take their pills, swallow, open their mouths and move their tongues all around to show that they really swallowed and didn’t “cheek” the pill. Then it’s shower time. I have to push the button every 25 seconds to keep the hot water coming, and there is no bathroom door or shower door – there are curtains only. The curtains are only held up by Velcro, so you couldn’t use them to hang yourself.

After a day in the facility, he concludes:

I see how residential treatment can help. I also see how it can drive you up the wall, make you want to scream, and leave you overweight and out of shape when you leave after 90 days. I can see how it seems pointless at times. I felt a little bit of the helplessness these kids must feel, and that was even knowing that I wasn’t really locked in there. How would it be to spend 90 days there? How about 180 days like some kids I’ve seen?  Or worse – be told you’re going to Disneyland with a short stop on the way and then find out your parents lied to you and they’ve admitted you to a locked psychiatric facility?  (It’s happened multiple times.)

Dinah Miller praises this type of experiment while noting its limitations:

I don’t believe these experiences are anything like the real thing, nor do I believe they are meant to be. For one thing, the person having them has not gone through the lifetime of events, traumas, distresses that led the inmate or patient to be in those places. Or in the case of the patient, the doctor also is not experiencing both the internal discomfort that comes with the mental illness, or the side effects which come with the medications, or the emotional upheaval that comes from having been left there by their family … Still, I like that these people did this, it’s good that they want to try to understand what their charges are going through. Even if it’s not a complete understanding, it still acknowledges that the condition is different with a willingness to see and understand what the other is going through, for better or for worse.

by Jessie Roberts

Erika Thorkelson worries that camera phones encourage people to document others’ bad behavior rather than attempt to intervene:

Many professional journalists agonize over the ethics of this kind of reporting. Some argue that journalistic objectivity overrides any particular responsibility to act. Photojournalists train themselves to grab their cameras and start shooting before they fully recognize what’s happening around them, believing that documenting the moment does more long-term good than acting to stop it, or at least fulfills a separate but necessary societal obligation. But what happens when everyone with a camera phone sees him or herself as a journalist on a story, when everyone is a fly on the wall?

[This] brings to mind a classic This American Life story from 2007 about a craze for fake newscasts that took over an elementary school [see above video].

Children built elaborate cameras out of construction paper and toilet paper rolls, and began reporting on everything they saw. The school’s principal told Ira Glass that the trend reached its height when he discovered a brutal fight in the schoolyard, one student pummeling the other. Crowding around the fight, students were “breathlessly reporting” on what they saw, turning it into a news story rather than going for help.

Thanks to our phones, most of us carry cameras everywhere we go. Like journalists reporting on our own lives, our experiences become part of a narrative, honed in order to endear us to our various social media connections. We live with our faces angled toward the screens of our various devices, oblivious to the events beyond the viewfinder. Our bodies stilled to reduce shaking and our eyes trained on the screen, our filming—no matter how well-framed or widely shared, no matter how much attention we receive for it afterward—remains passive. We project the control we exert over the image we’re creating onto the experience itself, giving us a false sense of power, when in reality we have done very little.

by Katie Zavadski

Laila Alawa is tired of talking about it:

Ultimately, the issue at hand is not the discussion of being Muslim in America. The problem is the thought surrounding the discussion, an idea that it is not possible to consolidate the two identities – Muslim and American – in our community today. Although it might have been integral to confront in the community initially, it has reached a point where we are continuing still to overemphasize the topic, a decision that overshadows the real issues our community faces, point blank. The overshadowing serves, then, to validate the premise of mutual exclusivity between the two identities, throwing the Muslim American identity of many today into paralysis and confusion, as they suddenly are faced with the need for reconciliation between the two. We push ourselves two steps back by throwing identity into the way of oncoming traffic, and it only serves to harm rather than help us as a community.

Iram Ali disagrees, arguing that the issue is more complicated:

The notion of being Muslim in America is … inherently different from being a Muslim American, not because they identify two different groups of Muslims but because they are simply two different linguistic formations of a similar idea.

Sidelining “Muslim in America” as being problematic only decreases the lexicon for developing our Muslim American narrative. I am a Muslim American, but I can also face issues of being a Muslim in America, which is distinct from a Muslim anywhere else in the world. Acknowledging that Muslims in America have different circumstances from Muslims in other regions will also pave the necessary groundwork for us in other important matters that Alawa mentions, such as mental health or arts development. Muslims in America do not need one cultural identity or a single-mindedness about where to settle down in this globalized world in order for us to be a collective community. Our identity issues, accumulating in this melting pot of different cultures and ideas, are an integral dimension of our Americanness.

(Photo: Muslim-American men greet each other at the annual Eid al-Adha prayer held at the Teaneck Armory in Teaneck, New Jersey. Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who in accordance with tradition then provided a lamb in the boy’s place. By Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

by Jonah Shepp

Mike Konczal tears down the right-wing trope that private charity can be an adequate substitute for government social insurance, looking at the historical role of the state in building and maintaining America’s safety net:

One problem with the conservative vision of charity is that it assumes the government hasn’t been playing a role in the management of risk and social insurance from the beginning. It imagines that there is some golden period to return to, free from any and all government interference. As Senator Lee has said, “From our very Founding, we not only fought a war on poverty—we were winning.” How did we do it? According to Lee, it was with our “voluntary civil society.” We started losing only when the government got involved.

This was never the case, and a significant amount of research has been done over the past several decades to overturn the myth of a stateless nineteenth century and to rediscover the lost role of the state in the pre-New Deal world.

The government’s footprint has always grown alongside the rest of society. The public post office helped unite the national civil society Alexis de Tocqueville found and celebrated in his travels throughout the United States. From tariff walls to the continental railroad system to the educated workforce coming out of land-grant schools, the budding industrial power of the United States was always joined with the growth of the government. The government played a major role throughout the nineteenth century in providing disaster relief in the aftermath of fires, floods, storms, droughts, famine, and more.

James Kwak backs him up:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are basic economic reasons why public social insurance is superior to voluntary charity. The goal here is to protect people against risk: of unemployment, of health emergency, of outliving one’s savings, and so on. For a risk-mitigation scheme to work, there are a few things that are necessary. One is that people actually be covered. This is something you can never have with a private system (unless it’s regulated to the point of being essentially public), since charities get to pick and choose whom they want to help. …

Another thing you want is the assurance that the system has the financial capacity to actually protect you in the event of a crisis. That’s why you don’t depend on your neighbors to rebuild your house if it burns down. Besides the fact that they may not like you, they probably don’t have enough money—especially if you lose your house in a fire that burns down the entire neighborhood. As I’ve said many times before, there is no other entity in the country—and not really one in the world—with the financial capacity of the federal government. Even state governments scramble to cut benefits when push comes to shove, which is one reason why some states provide Medicaid coverage to almost no one.