Posted on 08/28/2002 5:29:46 AM PDT by CholeraJoe
Edited on 05/07/2004 7:33:59 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
No one is perfect. It is ridiculous to defend nonsense. If ones' ego is so tenuous as to be threatened by a refutation of an argument, there are some real "issues" there.
good luck.
all you have to support your point are facts: better SAT, ACT, always win the spelling bee, etc, etc.
this guy is nothing but a flack for the NEA or some similar outfit. Does this sound like libertarianism or conservatism....advocating state run school, jabbering about Montana, schizophrenically trying to switch contexts by cryptically weaving together Montana, paxil, and a vendetta against home schooling?
do you really think it has escaped this shill that the state run institutions know as schools MANDATE taking pacification (control) drugs?
give me a break. so what is the identity of one who makes such arguments? a madman or an imposter.
at least they aren't in freemasons and the cfr yet, eh?<[;-)
There's a Chick tract in there somewhere, I can feel it. Well, maybe not, but they have infiltrated Fox News ;)
I found this on WebMD and thought I would post it for anyone interested.
Have a great Day,
Cindy
What about Those Suicide Reports?
Copied from WebMD-All bout Prozac
http://my.webmd.com/content/dmk/dmk_article_5963107
"There's an ongoing controversy about whether Prozac causes people to try to kill themselves, or whether suicide attempts by users of Prozac are the result of the depression itself.
Studies have shown that at the beginning of treatment, 10 percent to 15 percent of patients feel more anxious after taking Prozac, but this anxiety eventually passes.
There also have been reports of anger and irritability among users of Prozac. Very irritable patients usually find their temperaments improving on Prozac, but it's a different story with manic-depressives. If manic highs involve anger, paranoia, or irritability and you take Prozac without first being stabilized on lithium, the manic side of your mood may break through and you could experience these symptoms. Many scientists believe that Prozac may initially increase manic symptoms because the drug increases a person's energy before it has successfully altered mood. This could suddenly prompt a suicide attempt in someone who had previously been too lethargic to make the effort. Indeed, several studies have suggested that people who are slowed down by depression in this way do appear to have a temporary increased risk of suicide as the depression eases.
Prozac experienced a temporary backlash in 1990 after reports circulated that it induced violent and suicidal tendencies in some users; the Church of Scientology led the attack against the drug, which focused on a small group of patients who had suicidal or violent thoughts.
In 1990 the church filed a citizen's petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asking that Prozac be withdrawn from the market, citing a Harvard Medical School study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry stating that 6 out of 172 high-risk mental patients who had been resistant to other drugs had become preoccupied with violent suicidal thoughts while on Prozac. Two of them tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves. Although none of the six had appeared to be suicidal when they started taking Prozac, five had had suicidal thoughts before. At the time, four of the six were also taking other medications (one was taking five other drugs).
The Scientologists took that study's findings of the six individuals and extrapolated them to the entire United States population, claiming that 140,000 people in the United States have become violent and suicidal on Prozac and charging that widespread use of Prozac would promote waves of violence. They backed up this claim by pointing to mass murderer Joseph Wesbecker, who killed himself and eight coworkers at a printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, with an AK-47 assault rifle. A Scientology group alleged that Wesbecker, who they said had no history of violence, went berserk because he took Prozac. Subsequent media reports revealed Wesbecker had a large gun collection, had tried to kill himself 12 times in the past, and had often talked about killing his employers.
Because so many depressed people are also suicidal, the fact that a few severely depressed patients taking antidepressants became suicidal didn't surprise researchers. The FDA was concerned, however, because Prozac affects serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to be linked with aggression. After further study, however, in 1991 the FDA rejected the petition, reaffirming Prozac's safety. This decision was followed two months later by a unanimous announcement by the FDA advisory committee and an independent scientific advisory committee that Prozac and other antidepressants do not cause violence or suicidal behavior, and that Prozac, on the contrary, appears to guard against violent behavior. The announcement included the information that large-scale studies show that people taking Prozac are less suicidal than those taking a placebo or other antidepressant drugs. This affirmation of support was backed by the National Mental Health Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
The research the groups relied on included an extremely large comparison of 3,065 patients on anti-depressants published in the British Medical Journal. The study found no evidence of increased suicide risk or suicidal thoughts in people taking Prozac or tricyclics. In the study, Prozac caused fewer substantial suicidal thoughts than did tricyclics or placebo. Of those people who did have suicidal thoughts when they started taking the drugs, those given a placebo had the highest increase in those thoughts, with Prozac showing the least increase (17.9 percent for placebo, 16.3 percent for tricyclics and 15.3 percent for Prozac). Most patients taking Prozac and tricyclics experienced a decrease in suicidal thoughts (about 72 percent).
By January 1994, 78 suits against Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturers) had been dismissed and 160 others had been filed, charging that Prozac causes everything from rashes to violent death.
"When I first went on Prozac, it was in the early days when everyone was talking about suicide and this drug," Marie says. "I was somewhat concerned about that. My friends asked me if I was sure I knew what I was doing."
Indeed, despite the suits and bad publicity, the popularity of this drug never declined; Lilly's Prozac sales haven't had a bad year since the drug was released in 1987. In 1993, sales reached $1.2 billion worldwide ($880 million in the United States alone), surpassing the sales of all previously used antidepressants around the world. Sales are expected to increase another 12 percent in 1994.
As we've seen from the above discussion, if you're depressed, it's possible you might have some suicidal thoughts; between 40 and 60 percent of people with major depression do. Tell your doctor immediately if you start feeling self-destructive."
Looks like it to me! See my previous post, about half way through (yeah, I know it's LONG, sorry).
If you remember from the original thread, I made the point that my wife, who does the bulk of the teaching at home, hated high school and barely graduated. If someone's teaching skills are limited to passing on pure information to a child, then I would agree with CholeraJoe that the best candidate is obviously the most educated. But teaching goes beyond just the transference of information from one parent (adult) to child. My wife absolutely adores children and loves nurturing them, and this "skill" is absolutely necessary in the learning process. This love is the birthplace of learning, which makes the home an ideal place for early learning.
As the child grows, it becomes more important to that the parent have a grasp on the "knowledge" part of teaching or the child may become frustrated. If the parents skills are lacking, the child will suffer. The proverbial Master/Pupil theory of education becomes very important at this stage of the game. That is one reason we encouraged our oldest kids to start taking classes at the local Junior College when they were 15 or 16. They were beyond our abilities to teach "knowledge" in some subjects.
If I am not mistaken, education followed this pattern up until the mid-1800's. Parents taught the children the basics at home, and then the child, if he/she displayed above average abilities, might be privately tutored or sent to university for a formal education. Other children, with lesser abilities, were apprenticed into a family business or some local trade.
Scientologists? ... Looks like it to me!
Confirmed here.
As to the idea that a child might develop to the point where s/he can develop further only with guidance from someone more expert than the parent, I would say that unless the parent is raising the child to follow directly in his/her own footsteps, that is a question not of "if" but of when.
And speaking of a child following in a parent's footsteps, here's a case for you:
dad runs contracting businessWhat will come of that boy? Just like an immigrant to America wants to go home a success or not at all, our emigrant from school to work had something to prove. The son takes over the father's business, increases its profits, and retires to Florida well-off. No college degree, nor even a high school diploma. Both his daughters are prosperous college grads--and he never broke a sweat paying for their tuition.son shows up on the job site
dad says, "Why aren't you in school?"
son says, "School is boring and I want to work."
dad says, "You'll never wear a white shirt."
son says, "I know."
Anne Ruell didn't blame the Prozac, instead she demonized this formerly highly accomplished woman. The doctor herself describes feeling split off from herself and watching someone else do the crimes...which is a constant theme among Prozac users...dissociation.
There have been less than flattering things posted about the Yates family. Similarly, immediately after the Columbine massacre, before the hagiographers got started, there were stories of jocks running rampant, and having the school staff look the other way, if not encourage them, as they assaulted the more bookish kids there.
IMO the drugs do, sometimes, cause problems, but these can't be examined and addressed until common sense solutions are required before drugs are used to blunt the emotions of the disaffected.
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