Battles with depression, stress are taking their toll (NATION OF VICTIMS Alert)

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 3/26/03 | Ulysses Torassa

[MikalM]

Normally healthy and vigorous, Deborah Dashow Ruth of Kensington has developed a case of shingles, her ulcer is acting up, and her head has been throbbing since the United States invaded Iraq a week ago.

Meanwhile, San Ramon advice-line nurse Jan Howe has been deluged with calls from people stressed out by current events. And the staff at the adolescent psychiatric unit at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco is seeing an upsurge in calls and requests for admission.

[Contra]

I bet you'll find all these "victims" are women, too. And you'll also find that they were nut cases long before the war started. Perhaps they would rather be in Iraq if they are so distressed here?

[CyberAnt]

CURE: TURN OFF YOUR TV!!!

[harpo11]

What a spoiled pampered people many of our fellow citizens have allowed themselves to become. What do they want, a pill specifically designed to relieve OIF Stress? Give me a bleeping break ,already.

If this were the attitude of the WWII generation I'd shudder to even contemplate what would have happened to the USA.

Grow some hair on your chest and callouses on your palms, stiffen your upper lip. Better yet, just grow some spine. Accentuate the Positive. Ignore the Negative.

[Revolting cat!]

You're right about Kensington being a Berkeley rather than San Francisco suburb. (I decided to write San Francisco for the benefit of the geographically challenged.) I also remembered that there is in fact a handful of small apartment buildings there, as well as a lesbian bookstore/cafe, though I doubt its clientele hails from Kensington proper. But it is a nice peaceful place not far from shopping and other attractions, where people like this "writer", who apparently doesn't read much judging from the level of her awareness, where they can indulge in their neuroses while the lower classes are fighting and dying for them in a distant desert.

You'll remember that the neighboring Berkeley has one of the highest if not the highest per capita population of therapists of all schools and creeds.

What I find obscene is the shamelesses of these neurotics who like the exhibitionists on trashy daytime TV shows are eager to share their intimate private matters with the rest of the world. That makes me so mad, I might get depressed myself and have to call one of those Berzerkely shrinks or psychics or gurus or liberation theologians at one of the theology schools they've got there (one of which, perhaps the Franciscan one, has a sign in front on Euclid Avenue stating that it houses a "Multicultural Institute"!)

[sauropod]

OMG! Ruth has stopped listening to Nina's Palestinian Radio!

That viral Republican administration probably put that little voice in her head to tell her to turn the radio off.

GAWD

[slane]

Maybe this was the same sobbing, wet-tissue-shredding female who called CSPAN on the day the war started, blubbering about how horrible the war was and how it would end everything. I don't know any one who thinks or acts like this , thank heavens!

[Revolting cat!]

Here's a smaple of this woman's thinking. "A Case for Educational Technology"

"Deborah Dashow Ruth concurs:

    Schools take the young child, who  uses a style of imagery derived
    from  direct  perceptions  through  all  of  his  senses,  and, by
    teaching him the alphabet and its related linear skills of reading
    and  writing, effectively  reduce the  child's sensory  world to a
    series  of  visual  abstractions.  Unless  the  educational system
    integrates  multisensory  experiences  into  the curriculum, youth
    will continue to categorize school  activities as separate from --
    and irrelevant to -- their own multisensorily stimulated lives."

[MikalM]

English translation: "Teaching kids how to read bores them."

[whipitgood]

Here is a sure cure for those blues: Get out to a pro-America rally and wave Old Glory in front of some anti-war types. It did me a world of good, and I'm looking forward to Austin on Sunday.

[Sam's Army]

"They'd rather thousands upon thousands suffer and die at the hands of a maniacal tyrant -- suffer actual, real physical torture and slaughter -- than to have to endure the pouting, self-induced "stress" and "depression" which they blame on the effort to remove the tyrant and free the people under him. In effect they cry, "Stop the war and let thousands upon thousands suffer and die -- abandon them -- so we don't have to be stressed and depressed . . ."

Worth repeating. Excellent post.

[Sam's Army]

BTW, welcome to FR. With insight like your post in #21, you'll be a very welcome addition around here.

[StolarStorm]

There might be a bit of truth to this. A friend of mine killed himself yesterday. He served in the first Gulf War.