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The 19-year-old daughter of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio admitted in a YouTube video released on Christmas Eve that she sought treatment for alcohol and drug addiction after years of also battling depression. Chiara de Blasio said in the nearly five-minute video that she'd been suffering from clinical depression since her adolescence and used alcohol to cope with her sadness and anxiety. She said she hopes that by sharing her story, she will inspire others to get help. De Blasio said she thought her problems would be solved by leaving home and going to California for college, 3,000 miles away. But,...

At a time when Wall Street is absolutely swimming in wealth, New York City is experiencing an epidemic of homelessness. According to the New York Times, the last time there was this many homeless children in New York City was during the days of the Great Depression. And the number of homeless children in the United States overall recently set a new all-time record. Americans like to think of themselves as "the wealthiest nation on the planet", and yet the number of young kids that don't even have a roof over their heads at night just keeps skyrocketing. There truly...

Ellen Richardson went to Pearson airport on Monday full of joy about flying to New York City and from there going on a 10-day Caribbean cruise for which she’d paid about $6,000. But a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with the Department of Homeland Security killed that dream when he denied her entry. “I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others. The Weston woman...

Media ‘Saturday Night Live’ Mocks Obama Scandals by Offering ‘Second Term Strength’ Anti-Depressants Nov. 17, 2013 8:05am Oliver Darcy Related: Barack Obama, Beyonce, DOJ Snooping, IRS Intimidation, Libya: The Truth?, Obamacare, Saturday Night Live, Video Late night comedy show “Saturday Night Live” featured a parody commercial on last night’s episode aimed at highlighting the several scandals plaguing President Barack Obama’s second term in office. The skit was a parody advertisement for an anti-depressant dubbed “Paxil: Second Term Strength” which the ad said was “the only anti-depressant strong enough for an embattled second term.”

Officials at Harvard conducted a 12-year study on 43,000 women and found higher rates of depression in those consumed more pasta and other refined grains, according to Newser. The study found that women who cosumed more soda, red meat and refined grains like pasta, white bread and chips were 29 to 41 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression when compared to women who consumed more wine, coffee and vegetables.

Of all the bitter fruit of the Barack Obama disaster, the most bitter may be the sense of hopelessness that has descended on Americans, especially the young. Has there ever been anything like it in our history? Even on the eve of the Civil War, was there this much pessimism about our future? Gallup wasn’t around in those days, but I wonder. For a simple measure of how the Obama administration has crushed any sense of hopefulness in the American people, take a look at the survey that Rasmussen Reports does periodically on whether America’s best days are behind her,...

China as finally come out in very strong terms and told the U.S. to get its financial house in order. This is now in public. Their warning was straightforward as compared to previous warnings that were generally of the “read between the lines type.” They hold $1.3 trillion worth of treasuries and well over $3 trillion in dollar denominated assets. No matter what anyone says, China now has the ability to “pull our strings” in Washington. Without going any further I should add that I believe that they certainly will pull our strings AND pull the plug on this whole...

The 32-year-old Californian elementary school teacher and mother-of-two who admitted performing sex acts on a 12-year-old student was sentenced on Friday to six-years in prison with no option for parole. Malia Brooks, from Southern California, pleaded guilty in June to three counts of committing lewd acts with a child under 14 and faced up to 12-years in prison, but Judge Kevin McGee imposed a sentence half that because of the fact she was experiencing manic episodes at the time.

It's amazing how little President Obama has learned about economics in his four and a half years in the White House. Growth, incentives, tax reform, tax increases, private investment, the middle class, a second great depression, the sequester—all these issues have one thing in common: Obama doesn’t understand their role in our economy. The jobless rate is 7.3 percent. But if the millions who’ve dropped out of the job market altogether since Obama took office in January 2009 were counted, the unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent. “In other words, the United States faces a permanently larger pool of jobless...

The more things change, the more things stay the same. The Great Depression actually started in 1929, but as you will see below, as late as 1933 the Associated Press was still pumping out lots of news stories with optimistic economic headlines and many Americans still did not believe that we were actually in a depression. And of course we are experiencing a very similar thing today. The United States is in the worst financial shape that it has ever been in, our economic infrastructure is being systematically gutted, and poverty is absolutely exploding. Since the stock market crash...

This is the first consecutive monthly drop in 14 months and the largest miss vs expectations on record. Printing at 76.8 (against an expectation of 82.0), this is the lowest in 5 months and points to the picture we have been painting of a consumer increasingly affected by rising rates and soaring gas prices amid stagnant incomes. As Citi notes below, this is the exact same pattern we have seen play out in the last 2 cycles and suggest significant downside risk to US equities. The economic outlook sub-index collapsed to its lowest since January. Biggest miss on the headline...

Chicken Alaska…no, it’s not some savory culinary dish a la chicken alexander but rather a small gold mining town with a population of 17.The members of this town were treated to a rather rude awakening when their little slice of the last frontier was descended upon by a cavalcade of Federal and State agencies.  Or more accurately, the Federal Agencies descended while bringing on some token State agencies in order to make it look less like an invasion and subjugation of state sovereignty.This raid, in which the agencies involved (10) nearly outnumbered the residents of the town (17) is somehow...

More of us than ever are feeling blue. Prescriptions for antidepressants have topped 50 million a year for the first time, according to recent figures by the Health & Social Care Information Center. But in addition to the well-known triggers for depression—such as stress, money and relationship worries—there are some more surprising reasons you might be feeling low… If you’ve cut down on burgers for health reasons, a lack of iron could be making you gloomy. This key nutrient is essential for the formation of hemoglobin, which is present is red blood cells and transports oxygen around the body. …...

An enticing new study from BMC Medicine reports that people over 55 who drink a little alcohol, averaging about a glass – generally of wine – per day, are less likely to be clinically depressed than those who drink more and those who don’t drink at all. It turned out that low-to-moderate alcohol consumption was linked to reduced risk of depression: People who drank between two and seven glasses of wine per week seemed to derive the greatest benefit, having a third the risk of being depressed as people who did not drink.

Inflation has been notably absent from the economy this summer, despite bullish moves in gold and a continued debate over the tapering of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve. According to Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, the central bank's effect on the financial system has worrying parallels to the period leading up to the Great Depression. "The weak data that we've gotten, particularly the housing on Friday, hints that tapering may be held back or may not be a factor, " Cashin told "Squawk on the Street" on Monday. "Many of the proponents of gold...

A ParaPundit post from a few months ago: Greek Economy Shrinks 19 Quarters In A Row So Far. The Greeks have now reached an even worse milestone: 20 quarters (5 years) going down and still counting. The 24% contraction since 2008 is similar to the US Great Depression contraction of 27%. So the Greeks will probably surpass the worst US economic contraction some time in 2014 or 2015. You might think that central bankers and economists know how to avoid economic contractions that severe. But Greece gave up having its own central bank when it joined the Euro zone. The...

Billionaire George Soros' family office hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, filed its 13F quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. As Marketwatch reporter Barbara Kollmeyer points out, one interesting highlight from Soros' filing is that he bought a bunch of puts on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF in Q2. It's his biggest holding in the filing.

A White House spokesman called July’s 7.4 percent unemployment rate proof that “the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.” He said it with a straight face. The data tell another story: America remains mired in the Great Obama Depression. The unemployment rate that the administration trumpets is a liar’s number. The formula for the unemployment figure that is released every month is rigged to look favorable to the administration in power. The true numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a far different picture. They show an America that is in...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

Chester, NJ—A recent clinical trial published in Phytotherapy Research indicated that a high-absorption curcumin (BCM-95 from Dolcas Biotech, based here) had similar effects as a generic form of Prozac (fluoxetine) on depression, sans the adverse effects. “It is a novel and surprising application for this natural medicine,” said Ajay Goel, Ph.D., Baylor Research Institute and Charles A Sammons Cancer Center, Baylor University Medical Center and study co-author. “People with depression have higher levels of inflammation in the brain. Also, people with depression have lower levels of neurogenesis in the brain, meaning they make fewer new brain cells than people with no...