Free Republic

Terrorism. Chaos. Fear of the future. In the age of Obama, America is undergoing a “fundamental transformation” – that much everyone knows. But what few seem to realize about this transformation is that the sheer stress of living in today’s America is driving tens of millions to the point of illness, depression and self-destruction. Consider the following trends: Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death for Americans. Even more disturbing, in the world’s greatest military, more U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat; Fully one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating...

History Tells Us That A Gold Crash + An Oil Crash = Guaranteed Recession By Michael Snyder April 17th, 2013 Is the United States about to experience another major economic downturn? Unfortunately, the pattern that is emerging right now is exactly the kind of pattern that you would expect to see just before a major stock market crash and a deep recession. History tells us that when the price of gold crashes, a recession almost always follows. History also tells us that when the price of oil crashes, a recession almost always follows. When both of those things happen, a...

Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Email Comments More . Susan Stewart collects fresh human placentas, takes them home and steams them with lemon, ginger and cayenne pepper. Once cooked, she puts the organs in a dehydrator overnight then grinds them and measures the powder out into gel capsules. The service – the Calgary single mother makes a living at this – costs about $200. Within a day, she presents new moms with their placentas in pill form – an average human placenta yields about 150 capsules – with promises of renewed energy, better lactation and no post-partum depression. They keep indefinitely. Placenta-eating...

Mental health advocates yesterday blasted a McDonald’s ad on the MBTA that appears at first to be a public service announcement targeting people suffering from depression. “It’s really too bad because it trivializes the whole issue of depression,” said Julie Totten, executive director of Waltham-based Families for Depression Awareness, which has been running an ad of its own on the T for its Strides Against Stigma Walk on April 27 at Boston University. “We’re trying to say when you need help, it’s not a laughing matter. We don’t want people to feel stigmatized or made fun of.”

Remember all those who denied that firearms confiscation as a result of New York’s new gun laws was too “insane” to even consider? That it was strictly in the realm of paranoid conspiracy theorists and the “it cant happen here crowd”? Those were and remain some of the standard replies to anyone who even thought about the possibility, let alone gave voice to it, despite the fact that Gov Cuomo and numerous other officials made public comments about such a plan, as I discussed in my article “Feinstein & Cuomo Admit Planning Australian Style Government Gun Buy Back” . Elected...

Drugs made from magic mushrooms could help treat people with severe depression, a new study suggests. Scientists believe that the chemical psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, can turn down parts of the brain that are overactive in severely depressive patients, the Guardian reported. The drug appears to stop patients dwelling on themselves and their own perceived inadequacies. However, a bid by British scientists to carry out trials of psilocybin on patients in order to assess its full medical potential has been blocked by red tape relating to Britain’s strict drugs laws. Professor David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at...

Edward C. Prescott, the 2004 Nobel Laureate in economics, says the U.S. economy is “slowly becoming more depressed” and that the spending being pursued by politicians in Washington will “create more poverty.”

Let It Bleed?J. Bradford DeLongMarch 29-2013 BERKELEY – In the 12 years of the Great Depression – between the stock-market crash of 1929 and America’s mobilization for World War II – production in the United States averaged roughly 15% below the pre-depression trend, implying a total output shortfall equal to 1.8 years of GDP. Today, even if US production returns to its stable-inflation output potential by 2017 – a huge “if” – the US will have incurred an output shortfall equivalent to 60% of a year’s GDP. In fact, the losses from what I have been calling the “Lesser Depression”...

Entrenched Deflation Threatens Economic Recovery Economics / DeflationMarch 26, 2013 - 10:30 AM GMT By: Andrew McKillop TWO VIEWS ONLY There are basically only two possible views. One is that entrenched deflation happens when there is persistent falling demand for credit and declining rates of money ciculation in the economy, driving down prices for goods, services and credit. This is confronted and made worse by increasing physical supply (and supply capacity) of goods and services. Due to generalized over-borrowing in the recent "economic cycle", QE Everywhere cannot fill the gap caused by secular deleveraging. All developed economies are "pushing on...

The papal conclave is a gripping political story, and not just because reform-minded cardinals are pitted against old-guard “Romans.” The white-smoke watch resonates beyond the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics because the Vatican is emblematic of a 21st-century ill: the failure of social institutions to adapt to the times, and the public’s loss of faith in them. The parallels leaped to mind while I read this sentence in TheNew York Times’soutstanding analysis of papal politics: “The next pontiff must unite an increasingly globalized church paralyzed by scandal and mismanagement under the spotlight in a fast-moving media age.” Let’s play Mad Libs...

Is the U.S. Becoming a Banana Republic Politics / US PoliticsMarch 05, 2013 - 02:40 PM GMT By: Michael Pento It is sad to say there are just two reasons why the U.S. is not yet a banana republic. The first reason is that the US dollar has not yet lost its world’s reserve currency status, which is helping to keep interest rates at record low levels. If the dollar, yen and euro were not involved in a currency war, the dollar’s intrinsic decline would become much more evident, causing domestic inflation to soar, and our bond market to immediately...

We think of the iconic images of the Great Depression as representative of a uniquely miserable period, long vanished from American history. The bread lines and soup kitchens of those abnormal times have gone. So, too, has the sight of thousands of men (there were very few women among them then) waiting all day outside a factory in a forlorn quest for work. But they're there still, in the many millions across the country—little changed in their total since the 1930s: 12.3 million today are fully unemployed, compared to 12.8 million in 1933 at the depth of the depression. The...

Five disorders from depression to autism share a genetic link, which could pave the way for new treatments Autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia overlap at a genetic level Two gene markers common to all of the disorders govern the balance of calcium in brain cells New understanding could help develop treatments The five most common mental health and developmental disorders share a common genetic root, a study has found. Scientists found a link between autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia. The findings, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, could revolutionise how doctors think...

The President has excoriated the Republicans for not bailing us out of the sequestration which is going to end life as we know it. He says the only way out is to keep borrowing more money – the sequestration was his idea on how to insure that we did some spending cuts when we raised the debt ceiling, but he has forgotten that I guess. Now the only hope for the nation is to raise taxes. Supposedly on the rich because there are plenty of tax rises that will affect us all coming inevitably. The notion is to blame the...

THE grieving process is in danger of being branded a medical condition if a mourner feels sad for more than two weeks and consults a GP, according to an international authority on death and dying. At present, mourners can feel sad for two months before being told they have a mental disorder, says Professor Dale Larson. Decades ago, a diagnosis could be made after a year.In a keynote address at an Australian Psychological Society conference in Melbourne on Saturday, Prof Larson will express his anger about the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual, DSM 5, which is used in many...

A television movie like An American Story couldn't get greenlit today. In fact, it's still surprising the Hallmark Hall of Fame and CBS joint production actually got broadcast back in 1992.  Yet this fictionalization of the Battle of Athens, the last and best modern example of American citizens forcefully asserting their Second Amendment rights, was actually shown only 21 years ago. The telepicture earned two Primetime Emmy nominations, one for music and another for cinematography.This well made TV movie, starring Brad Johnson and directed by John Gray, depicted the last time in modern American history when a large group of...

Recessions are deepening across the globe. Futures sagged today after GDP numbers for several countries fell. Japan's economy continued to shrink in the fourth quarter by 0.1%, a narrower dive from a 1.0% fall in the third quarter. Economists expected Japan to show a small amount of growth. Germany's contraction helped deepen the recession in the eurozone. German GDP dropped 0.6%, mostly on weak export demand. The eurozone economy as a whole shrank 0.6%, the fastest rate since 2009. For the full year, the eurozone showed sub-zero growth. The French economy fared worse than expected as well, contracting by 0.3%...

In February, 2009, I wrote for the Wall Street Journal an article entitled Reaganomics versus Obamanomics. The article explained that the emerging Obamanomics was pursuing exactly the opposite of every policy of the enormously successful Reaganomics, and predicted that it would produce exactly the opposite results. Well, the results are in, and under President Obama the American people have now suffered the worst 5 years since the Great Depression, as first explained by Steve McCann of the American Thinker on January 25. McCann writes, “From 2009 through 2012, the Obama cabal, and their allegiance to statist policies, has been in...

I had my first panic attack somewhere around the age of 12... I thought...I would grow out of such episodes over time...As I got older, the attacks and periods of depression only grew more frequent and intense... For those inexperienced with depression, it’s not simply a few bad days or fleeting moments of unhappiness, but a constant, oppressive feeling of hopelessness. It interferes with your day-to-day life. It was difficult to focus or do anything. Some days it would take me hours to get out of the house simply because I couldn’t summon the will to do anything. Several times...

...LDS women in Utah are at risk for depression due to "toxic perfectionism" and a host of other cultural factors, according to a recent study presented at Utah Valley University... UVU professor Kris Doty..conducted a "qualitative exploratory study" by repeatedly interviewing 20 women over a one-year period. The women were diagnosed as depressed, signed up for the study and identified themselves as active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In her findings, Doty identified five major factors that she said led to depression among the study's participants — genetics, history of abuse, family relationships, feeling judged...