CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health articles from September 2004

CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health archives from September 2004

Note from the editor.(Editorial)
September 22, 2004... I remember a fellow student in high school who was withdrawn and quiet. She often missed school, but nobody seemed to know exactly why. Several years later, I heard that she had committed suicide. I couldn't help but wonder whether there was...

CAMH receives $16 million to continue redevelopment.(news from CAMH)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... The Honourable George Smitherman, Ontario's minister of health and long-term care, visited CAMH on June 24 to announce a $16 million planning and design grant for the first phase of the redevelopment of the Queen Street site. This is a...

Jean Simpson Art Studio--a space for our artists to create.(news from CAMH)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... June 30 marked the official opening of the Jean Simpson Studio at CAMH. Named after Jean Simpson, CAMH's former chief operating officer, the studio gives CAMH artists the opportunity to embark on more ambitious works in a supportive, sale,...

New privacy legislation.(news from CAMH)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... The Personal Health Information Protection Act will come into effect November 1. This Act governs the collection, use, disclosure, retention and destruction of and access to personal health information and will apply to the entire health sector...

CAMH publications awarded Curriculum Services Canada's Seal of Recommendation.(news from CAMH)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Two CAMH resources, Can I Catch It Like a Cold? and Antisocial and Violent Youth: Volume II, were recently awarded Curriculum Services Canada's Seal of Recommendation and are new recommended as a reference for teachers and other school...

Pharmacists deserve recognition for their expanding role.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... Wende Wood's review of Samuel Baronde's Better than Prozac in the spring issue of CrossCurrents identifies the undervalued role of the pharmacist in the health care system. Since the 1980s, there have been reports indicating the costs and...

Regent Park focus keeps budding media mavens on track.(Profile)
September 22, 2004... It's a common fault adults make--judging teens by the clothes they wear. And certainly Justin Walters, 17, looks every inch the hip hop deejay, his slight frame lost somewhere inside a slouchy white tracksuit. It's just two minutes until...

Nature vs. nurture revisited: toward a truly integrative psychiatry.(news)
September 22, 2004... The heart is just a muscle, a powerful mass of chambers and walls. Yet popular wisdom holds that emotions live there. A happy person is "lighthearted" and a depressed one is "downhearted." Mental health professionals generally prefer to see the...

Cocaine-exposed children benefit from healthy home environment.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Babies born to mothers who used cocaine heavily during pregnancy de net have lower IQ scores than other children, although they may have problems with specific skills. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, tracked...

Moderate alcohol use may be safe after heart attack.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Drinking up to 10 alcoholic beverages per week does not increase the risk of heart failure among individuals who have had a heart attack, say researchers at the University of Texas in Houston. Researchers assessed the outcomes of 2,231...

Concurrent disorders prevalent among needle exchange program users.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Psychiatric and substance use comorbidity is common among users of syringe exchange programs, according to a study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Participants were 422 male and female intravenous opioid users who accessed a...

Food additives linked to ADHD symptoms.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Food additives may be associated with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to researchers at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. The study was conducted over a four-week period on 277...

Alternative and conventional medicine need more communication, collaboration.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Among people turning to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) for mental health issues, co-occurring treatment by conventional medical providers is common, but communication or co-ordination of care is rare, according to researchers at...

PTSD common after orthopaedic trauma.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... About half of people with an orthopaedic traumatic in jury develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas. Researchers administered the Revised Civilian Mississippi Scale for...

Mental illness under-treated globally.(research update)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders and depression, are common and under-treated in many developed and developing countries, according to the World Health Organization Mental Health Survey Consortium. The study was based on a...

Brazil's new drug policy emphasizes prevention and community action.(news)
September 22, 2004... "Rather than being the victim of the drug problem, society is the solution!" That, in a nutshell was the theme of a presentation on Brazil's drug policy given by General Paulo Roberto Yog de Miranda Uchoa, Brazil's national anti-drug secretary,...

Never too late to learn: one student's journey through addiction and recovery.(focus)
September 22, 2004... AS A CHILD, I LOVED EVERYTHING ABOUT SCHOOL. LEARNING was exciting. I did well. I enjoyed my friends and teachers. But through a series of events, my school experiences were about to change. At age six, I was diagnosed with juvenile...

Opening the doors to success: students benefit from school and mental health system collaboration.(focus)
September 22, 2004... ANOTHER ASSIGNMENT NOT HANDED IN. THIS IS BECOMING a habit for Joanne, 17, who has just returned to school after being hospitalized with severe obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. Her teachers have tried to be encouraging and have...

Teaching the tough ones: special programs create hope for students with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.(focus)
September 22, 2004... AFTER FOUR YEARS OF STRUGGLE WITH THE PUBLIC education system in Whitehorse, Yukon, Roberta Humberstone felt she was out of choices. So she pulled her nine-year-old daughter Plum out of school to home school her instead. Why the dramatic move?...

Healthy schools healthy students: positive school culture promotes student success and well-being.(focus)
September 22, 2004... FOR STUDENTS AT SHERWOOD PUBLIC SCHOOL, A HEALTHY school is a place that promotes positive peer relationships and healthy ways of dealing with feelings. The elementary school in Oshawa, Ontario, has developed "Girl Talk," a discussion group for...

Too scared to learn: ESL teachers play key role in helping newcomers adjust.(focus)
September 22, 2004... IF YOU VISIT ACROSS BOUNDARIES DURING ONE OF Caroline Fei-Yeng Kwok's adult ESL classes, chances are you'll be greeted by a familiar tune on the piano and several voices crooning somewhat off key, followed by a chorus of laughter. "Songs are...

Zero tolerance school policies--effective or disruptive? Bruce Cameron is the central co-ordinating principal for school services at the Toronto District Public School Board. He is responsible for safe schools and alternative programs.(q & a)
September 22, 2004... What is "zero tolerance"? How is it applied in Ontario? The term "zero tolerance" mandates prescribed responses to certain behaviours in schools. The term is not used in the Ontario Education Act, but it is used in school board policy. In...

Alcohol: no ordinary commodity blending research and public policy.(Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... A PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE At a time in our history when government regulation of alcohol is being slowly eroded at the provincial and federal levels, Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity should be required reading for those interested in...

An academic perspective.(Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity is no ordinary book about alcohol and the primary prevention of damage associated with it. This useful volume deserves a prominent place on the reference shelf of those who are interested in an up-to-date critical...

Downloaded.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Back to School From schoolyard bullying to binge drinking on campus, many issues crop up at this time of year, over and above school projects and papers. ramp for Teens (Toronto Public Library) http://ramp.torontopubliclibrary.ca...

Ritalin in schools: a tool to compensate for insufficient educational resources?(the last word)
September 22, 2004... THE DEBATE ABOUT USING STIMULANT medications such as Ritalin to manage a child's difficult behaviour has been raging across North America for 30 years. Why is inattention such a big issue? Is it because increased class sizes create inevitable...

Conferences.(Calendar)
September 22, 2004... CANADA Borderline Personality Disorder--Origins, Treatments, Recovery October 2, Hamilton, Ontario Contact: Debra Coates tel 905 573-4801, ext. 8211 e-mail debbi@cogeco.ca www.neabpd.org Annual Meeting of the...

A durable fire.(Editorial)
September 22, 2004... From the first outraged my-parents-never-did-that-to-get-me, the sheer incongruity of sex with the rest of life is confounding. Even in the act--whichever "the" act is in question--there are moments of weird alienation from the beloved person,...

Sex and mysticism.
September 22, 2004... In one of his sermons on the Song of Songs, St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of being united to Christ the Lord in a holy kiss. (1) In a later sermon he explained: "When the beloved Soul shall have been perfected, the Bridegroom will make with...

Sex and the sacred.
September 22, 2004... At a meeting of scholars from the world's various religions, a Chinese scholar reported that in China now they are starting to put free condoms in hotel drawers. Mustering as straight a face as I could I said: "We don't do that in the United...

Jesus in Gender Trouble (1).
September 22, 2004... The seminal question posed by feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Can a male saviour redeem and save wo/men?" (2) sounds like an innocent question, one that could be raised by a child. But it was not a simple question, because it...

Dissecting the lamb of god: the other devastation of clergy sexual abuse.
September 22, 2004... What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God would turn aside from it, I would keep to the truth and let God go. --Meister Eckhart In October 2003, a group of psychotherapists from Male Survivor (the National Organization...

Female sexuality today: challenging cultural repression.
September 22, 2004... In the first millennium B.C.E., human cultures clearly experienced an Axial Period in a striking transformation of human consciousness. The transformation occurred independently in three geographic regions: in China, in India and Persia, and in...

What's love got to do? (& other stories of black women's sexualities)*.
September 22, 2004... While walking with friends in downtown Brooklyn in July 2003, our small group passed an assemblage of black men from the Israelite Church of God and Jesus Christ who were proclaiming from soapboxes. They were dressed in costumes reminiscent of...

Heroic heretical heterosexuality.
September 22, 2004... [Christian churches] seem cunningly designed to condemn same-sex desire and to elicit it, to persecute it and to instruct it. I sometimes call this the paradox of the "Beloved Disciple": "Come recline beside me and put your head on my chest,...

The Great Work begins: theater as theurgy in Angels in America.(Theater Review)
September 22, 2004... "To do this, every Kabbalist on earth would sell his right nut." --Rabbi Chemelwitz, Act 5, Scene 6, Perestroika Before we sell the family jewels, it would be wise to consider Tony Kushner's Angels in America as theurgic theater, a door...

After the Fall.
September 22, 2004... My first pregnancy scare occurred the week of my eighteenth birthday, three months after my baptism. My boyfriend (who was a few years older) was gentle, Christian, and not trying to take my virginity. We had been reading something about the...

Running Out the Clock.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... --For JPO When we started living together we used to sit at a wooden table Side by side studying, touching each other between the legs, Remember, and in a sense we have gone on doing that. We carry each other's minds everywhere for...

From "Song of Songs" (8 sessions with Dr. Solomon).(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Love is strong as death Craving as the grave The following is an excerpt from The Book of Anna, a series of long narrative poems interspersed with prose diary entries written in the voice of a fictional poet, Anna Ach Asher. Asher, a...