The Man from Glad

For once, I'm not going to write something sad about a fellow high school classmate.

I'm going to write about Bill Borden, who turns 43 today. This is an excerpt from my book, "Generations," a book about my family that, hopefully, you'll see on the bookshelves (will there be bookshelves?) in a few years:

The person who really saved me, at least during my teenage years, was Bill Borden. He showed up at my house, in Point Pleasant, in 1984, wanting to go the beach. Something about that visit made him my best friend, forever, because he never did stop showing up at my house, unannounced, ready to have fun. I saw him as my strongest confidant, and even a savior.

We had known each other before, and we had worked together, too. But from then on, we were best friends. I learned more from Bill than anybody. I marveled at his ability to smile his way through problems. I was struck by his ability to just go up to people, almost randomly, and start talking to them. I was amazed at how little he would say, but he could somehow carry on a conversation with anybody – particularly women – for hours.

I was always too shy and cynical to be social. I felt insecure about the way I looked. I felt embarrassed about my family. Bill had a similar background, but he didn’t care about any of that. He was a slender, but strong kid who talked slowly and had an awkward, but honest and even charming way about him. He was a smart guy who did some silly things. Once, he read a dense geopolitical book from Ayn Rand in one day. Other times, he'll shave or shower right after a late-night party. I can always imagine him saying to those who question him about it, “I have to get clean. I have to go to work next morning."

Bill’s mission was to have fun, to smile and to live a good life. Bill had no lofty expectations for himself; he just wanted to work hard and go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

Bill's family had problems, too, the kind of problems every family has. He always found a positive way to look at things, and he always believed there was a solution to everything, even when everything seemed to be falling apart.

With Bill, I learned how to keep friends. I was too embarrassed by my own family life to invite them over, and have them bear witness to my mother getting one more “will you love me forever and ever?” out my father. I didn't want them to see her limp, and I certainly didn't want them to eat her food. But Bill didn't care. When he showed up at my door, during the summer of 1984, he just walked in and talked. He stayed for a good hour, talking to my mother and father, letting a warm, sunny day go by. He even had a sandwich, one that contained my mother’s thick, grisly meat loaf, and swallowed it nearly whole before finally we got on our bikes and headed for the beach. He built a bond that day with my parents and, as a result, with myself that would never go away.

With Bill, I felt like I finally had an equal. I no longer had to stand in the shadow of my family. I no longer had to depend on people who viewed life as a chore. When we were intense, he would be laid back. When we'd rush, he'd be methodical. When something upset us, Bill would brush it off. The more he came to my house, the more his attitude seemed to rub off on the others.

He made my mother laugh as hard as anybody. She seemed to be comfortable with him, too, and she even asked him some probing, personal questions. “Are you still dating Diane?” my mother would ask, and he Bill would then break down the history of the relationship before getting to the point.

Bill sometimes offers non sequiturs that would leave all of us hunched over, and laughing, largely because he misheard or misinterpreted something we said.

“So what you doing tonight?” she once asked Bill while sitting in the kitchen, a tall glass of beer and a bag of potato chips sitting in front of her.

“No thanks – I just had steak,” Bill replied.

My mother laughed for a long time, and didn’t get close to her beer for nearly a half-hour. For many years, she still talked about that exchange, and repeated it over and over, like it was the funniest thing she ever heard.

A tough time in a tough decade

Few memories in my life could remain so vivid: Stepping off the PATH train, and walking what seemed like 20 blocks to the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers, and breathing in the burning smell of God-knows-what.

It was Sept. 12, 2001, the day after. I was supposed to write a story on the PATH service, and how commuters were coping with the worst tragedy of their lives. Then I was to head south, and perhaps help with the news coverage down there.

But I had little interest in working. I just wanted to see Ground Zero, otherwise known as "the pile;" the day before, I saw Tower One fall, and crumble into a pile of beams and ash, as I drove north on the New Jersey Turnpike. I saw people with video cameras parked along the road, trying to squeeze some glimpse of history in between videos of their family memories.

But, on Sept. 12, as I walked down there, and I got closer, I saw images that seemed to stand out more than "the pile" ever did. I saw people walking around with posters, saying, "Please help me! Have you seen her? Please, can you help me?" They were like the people I used to see at airports who handed out brochures, saying there was "no tomorrow," and "God will be there to save us...believe in him."

To say it was surreal would be cliche. Simply, it was the most depressing thing I ever saw.

I tried to walk past the people, and get to the pile; instead, I just stood there, and saw the people walk around like zombies, holding the pictures close to their chests, or high over their heads, looking so helpless and hapless.

I somehow knew that they would never find those people; what I didn't know was that, eight years later, many of them still seem to be looking for the loved ones they lost, and they're still struggling with the idea that they'll never come back, and that their lives will never be the same.

Back then, I thought I was in another country. This was the United States, I thought, a country with bravado. This was a country that pushed the Germans back on D-Day, and eventually all the way back to Berlin. This was not a country where people look for someone to constantly reassure them, and tell them, "It's OK. Everything is OK. We'll get the bad guys. It's OK."

It's a memory I'll never lose, even as we, as a country, seem to be so detached from it now. Even last week's near-terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound jet didn't seem to ignite the feelings of vengeance that drives people's anger when they've been attacked.

But, in other ways, we're a nation that's still hurting. When we hear about talk of the economy, and we see the poll numbers showing a falling level of confidence in government, I wonder if it has more to do with nation's soul that was wounded eight years ago, and never really recovered from it.

I think that were less detached than we think from the zombie-like atmosphere that I saw in lower Manhattan eight years ago, and we're still looking for some hero to tell us, "It's OK. America will do fine. It's OK."

I've written a lot in this space about the services available for people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly people who were victims of 9-11. But, in a way, I feel like we're all suffering from nationwide PTSD, and we're still looking for some something to heal ourselves, and give us a chance to move on.

I think we're still looking for some ticker-tape parade, something that will declare that not only are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over, but it's OK to shop again, and it's OK to buy things again, because we're no longer spending money to fight wars against terrorists we can't see.

We're looking for some finality to the worst moment of our lives. But it never came, or it hasn't come yet; indeed, it's only escalated now that President Obama has sent in another 30,000 troops to fight the terrorist war in Afghanistan. It's only continuing when someone somehow finds a way to get the components of a bomb aboard a plane, and comes within minutes of creating our worst tragedy since Sept. 11.

In my personal life, it's continuing because I lost a friend. He's not dead, but he had a business in the World Trade Center that was obliterated when Tower One fell. Rich Kelly, another old Point Pleasant Borough high school buddy of mine, was a hero that day because he ordered people to run to Battery Park, and avoid getting buried under the crush of steel and ash.

The problem, however, was that no one was there to save Rich. Afterward, he tried to recover, buying himself a Porsche and taking me on a ride through Colts Neck, N.J., speeding up to 90 mph on some of the old, two-lane roads that run through one of the state's wealthiest communities. But he ran into trouble as he tried rescue his business life.

I tried to help, but he resisted, to the point that he virtually shut off contact with me. Rich always thought he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30. Last I heard, he was working around the clock, selling phone systems to businesses and still trying to recover that dream. Leaving him a phone message, or sending him an email is pointless. He won't return any of them.

A lot of people blame President Obama for doing little to turn the nation's confidence around. I don't fall into that category. Mostly, however, I look forward to this new year and new decade. I've heard people talk about the 1960s and 1970s, and how they looked forward to the end of those troubled times just by looking at the clock.

Perhaps time is our only ally here, and we can hope that a new decade will inspire hope. We can hope that people will find a way to get through their trauma, and that they'll find a way to move on as we move farther and farther away from 9-11. We can hope that someone can provide more services, or better services that people can use to help themselves. Or, maybe people find a way to have better access to those services, wherever they may exist.

We can hope that people like Rich can dream of being millionaires again. But if they can't, then maybe they can come to grips with who they are, and perhaps play a role that can inspire people, the same way Rich inspired people to run away from the falling tower.

Keep your holiday cheer at this time of year

The holidays are portrayed as a happy time of celebration. But it's not true for everyone - especially those who have mental illnesses, and even more so in today’s economic climate.

One of every four residents has a mental illness, such as depression or anxiety, which can be exacerbated during the holiday season and further intensified in reaction to financial stress, mental health professionals say.

Regardless of the time of year or the economy, it is critical to manage mental and physical health, recognize signs of mental illness and seek help when needed.

Anyone could experience holiday blues, especially if they experience high levels of stress. During this time of year, stress is commonly related to having unrealistically high expectations for the holidays, said Debra Wentz, chief executive officer of the New Jersey Association of Mental Health Agencies, Inc.

"But this year, it could be even worse because of the turbulent economy,” she said. “It is vitally important for everyone to take steps to manage their stress levels, which can greatly impact both mental and physical health.”

Stress can be reduced by managing what can be controlled. For example, expenses, such as gifts and entertainment, can be reduced. Healthy practices, such as exercising, eating right and getting enough sleep, are also helpful in managing stress, in addition to offering many physical health benefits, professionals say.

Stress and depression can also be related to increased use of alcohol or drugs, especially for individuals who are in the early stages of recovery from addictions. The holidays, with the accompanying stress or social more situations, can also lead to increased drug or alcohol use, professionals say.

Professional help may be needed if any of the following signs become evident:

- persistent sad, anxious or “empty” mood;
- changes in sleep patterns;
- reduced appetite and weight loss, or increased appetite and weight gain; and
- loss of pleasure and interest in once-enjoyable activities; restlessness or irritability.

It is important to realize that most of these symptoms also indicate holiday blues, professionals say. However, holiday blues will dissipate when the season ends and people return to daily routines and no longer experience holiday-related stress. By contrast, depression is indicated by these symptoms lasting for two weeks or longer.

Tiger Woods and the end of journalism as we knew it

Sometimes, in this Great Recession we're in, I think of the state of journalism, particularly the coverage of the Tiger Woods saga. I can't help but remember back to 1992, back when I was a reporter for The Delaware State News, back when a dead end was really dead.

I think back to my first encounters with what I call "journalism of desperation," where reporters and newspapers will do anything to hold onto their jobs, even if it means making a spoiled golfer's sex life your front-page poster boy.

Forget about taxes, war and poverty; a woman swinging a 9-iron at a billionaire athlete will move those stories to the inside pages every time.

Back in 1992, even small newspapers had that mentality, and they never really lost it. The reporters and editors all had that dream of making it big, even if it meant lying, cheating and exaggerating stories until they didn't even resemble news stories anymore. They were merely blogs, just without a cyberspace to give them a port.

Back in 1992, just like now, jobs were sparse, but everybody kept telling me that I was lucky, because I had one (sound familiar?). But it was hard to convince myself of that, especially when I walked up to my apartment window, looked out and saw the crowded truck stops, the farm houses and a big NASCAR raceway that was the largest thing in Delaware's capital city, if not the whole state.

It was hard to convince me of that when my dream of doing meaningful journalism, the kind of stuff that ended the Nixon presidency, was shattered by a 25,000 circulation daily, long before Tiger Woods ever won a tournament. It was shattered by a newspaper where most reporters I knew quit into unemployment rather than wait for a better job offer that would get them away from the editors with the tabloid-inspired ideas.

It's been reinforced by news coverage of Tiger Woods, coverage that really is no better than the stuff the Delaware State News did 17 years ago, when we joked that the newspaper's motto should have been this: "Every story is a good story, especially when it's bad."

As a child, I envisioned looking outside the window of a New York newspaper and seeing the glistening facades of the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. Instead, at our office in Dover, Del, I saw the cornfield that was never harvested, or so it seemed. There was a rail line that never had any trains. There was a crop duster that never really dusted any crops (yes, just like that famous scene from "North by Northwest").

I worked for a newspaper that still, to this day, does not have its own website. It still has the same design it had in the 1980s. It had its reporters writing front-page recipes. It substituted editorials for a "sound-off" column that included anonymous gripes from people in "Smyrna" and "Camden-Wyoming" that were borderline - if not fully - slanderous.

I felt so empty, and even useless. Just a few years earlier, I was a college journalism star at Rutgers. From 1990 to 1993, however, I was reporter covering something called "Levy Court" in Kent County, Del., run by a man who could say little more than: "George Schulz...he's a good man! Joe Biden...he's a good man!....George Bush...he's a good man!"

I'd go up to him and say, "Mr. Paskey, why did you open up a smelly sewage treatment plant in the middle of a residential community?" and he'd say, "Tom Davis, you're a good man!" and then walk away.

The editors knew this stuff was boring, so it's no wonder they pushed me to write stories I didn't want to write, the Tiger Woods kind-of-stuff that was more about projecting gabby headlines than making people's lives better.

One of them even went to an interview I had a with a woman whose husband served in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The editor took no notes; when we got back to the office, she not only wrote the story for me - she inserted the quotes, or her version of them. Some of the quotes had electricity, and some even tugged at your heart. But many of those weren't even said.

After a day like that, I often looked out that window, and saw Dover. In my mind, I'd see that view, that dead-end view, and I'd paraphrase what Capt. Willard said in the movie, "Apocalypse Now," when he looked out at the Army men, and the flat ricelands of Saigon, and saw despair.

"Dover," I said to myself. "Shit...I'm still in Dover."

As much as I loved being a journalist, I always wanted more. Ironically, I didn't care so much about the setting, or even the money. I didn't care if there was a cornfield or a skyscraper outside my window. I cared about making an impact, and being in a position where I could bring about change.

From that apartment window, I felt far from that goal, perhaps as far away as the cornfields of Delaware were from the palatial headquarters of The New York Times. Now, 17 years later, I see the Tiger Woods coverage and, at times, I feel as far away as I did then.

I feel powerless, just as I did then, when I watched bogus quotes being insert into my story. I feel powerless as I watch the Woods coverage, realizing that journalism has little choice but cheapen itself, because Tiger Woods sells. With advertising revenue in the tank, what better way to sell your newspaper than to get the king of commercial endorsements on your front page every day?

I see the media lowering itself to the standards of that "sound-off" column, relying on nothing better than rumor and innuendo to drive the news. I see coverage that's repetitive and, frankly, getting so boring that I'd enjoy reading three recipes for Spam Surprise (an actual front page story from the State News) before watching another minute of "The Insider," and getting the latest dirt on Woods.

I feel powerless, just as I did in Delaware, when I couldn't stop the newspaper from publishing a story on a guy who was copycatting the Rodney King beating of 1991, claiming that the cops pounded him into the hospital. The whole thing turned out to be a lie, and I even suggested that to the editors. They printed it anyway.

That's not to say that I haven't made progress in 17 years. I certainly have much more influence now than I did then. I'm in a better position than ever to teach, and to shift attention away from the spoiled golfer of privilege who has never met an endorsement deal he didn't like, who has been wearing that Nike-swoosh hat on his head since he was old enough to crawl.

I've always found, to coin another Vietnam-era cliche, some light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it involved the stress associated with family, and having kids, and everything associated with the life, I always found a way around the dead end. I always found a way to move to a higher level, and put myself in a better position than I was before.

Now I'm not writing about vocabulary-challenged politicians in the middle of Delaware. I'm the transportation writer at The Record and The Star-Ledger. I write stories that got traction during the 2009 gubernatorial election, and one of them may have played a role in Governor Jon Corzine's election defeat.

I teach courses in traditional and digital media at Rutgers University. Now I walk up to the window in my house and see pretty houses on an old, suburban New Jersey street, and see Rockwellian holiday decorations lighting the street, and I no longer feel that pit I had in my stomach, when I felt like my career was going nowhere.

Now I feel an empty feeling, but it's no longer one of hopelessness. It's one of ambition, the feeling of being on the cusp of something good, even great.

But when I sat in the Trenton bureau last night, and I watched the tabloid T.V. shows pop on with their wall-to-wall coverage of Tiger, I couldn't help but get that old sense of helplessness back. I looked at the story I'm writing and I start to think: Who's going to read it? Will they care?

I forget about the accomplishments I've had; I can only think about where journalism is going, and it's not good.

"Tiger," I thought to myself. "Shit....it's still Tiger."

WikiAnswers - Is Tiger Woods mentally ill?

Is Tiger Woods mentally ill?

WikiAnswers - Does Tiger Woods have a mental illness?

Does Tiger Woods have a mental illness?

Healing thy mother's keeper

I have found the book of my life. And I didn't even write it.

I'm not even half-way done with it, but I feel like it's my story already.

"My Mother's Keeper," by Tara Elgin Holley and Joe Holley, is storytelling that's so vivid that the scenes seem to jump off the page. The descriptions are so effective in stimulating the imagination that a movie seems unnecessary (but I'm sure it could be a great one).

It's the story of Tara's mother, Dawn, whose descent into schizophrenia ended a promising singing career. Tara grows up knowing her mother, but not really knowing her sickness - not until she was an adult, really, and she tried to care for her, and keep her from being known as the local "bag lady."

It's a book that speaks to the power of words, and how good writing can help heal the wounds of the soul. Writing can be therapeutic not only for the writer, but also the reader - like myself - who can identify with the plight of the characters. In my case, I know them very well: Dawn and Tara's family resemble my own, in a way.

In my case, my mother had severe obsessive compulsive disorder, and lived with it for much of her life. She inherited the family disease, the symptoms for which were evident with my grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother. Like Dawn, they battled their symptoms but never really found solutions.

Like Tara and Joe, I'm writing a book about it, and how I dealt with it all and learned from it. The book is entitled "Generations: A Portrait of a Family Struggling with Mental Illness," and I hope to have it done within the year.

In my book, unlike "My Mother's Keeper," the characters meet their demise too early. Suicide lingers in the shadows of my family, because it's how my great-grandfather, and possibly my great-great-grandmother, ended their lives. With my grandfather and mother, it was self-destruction through alcoholism and personal neglect.

But it's the kind of book that provides validation for your life. When you read about Dawn's impact on the family, you realize that you're not alone, dealing with the problems of finding care for a loved one when there really isn't any that is any good, or good enough.

You realize that you and your family, as well your children are susceptible to what seems like a family curse, and to think that is not the product of paranoia. If others suffer this way, so could you. If others could find a way to manage it, and address these issues before they manifest into something intolerable, so could you.

I've stopped writing over the past few days because I need to read this book. I need to see how Tara and Joe did it, and how they mastered the ability to write about how mental illness is not something that's only suffered by the homeless on the street.

It's something that affects people who live in California - where Tara's mother lived, and where Tara enjoyed a family life, and a sometimes stable one, being cared for by her grandparents before her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital and her conditioned worsened.

It certainly affects people in Point Pleasant, N.J., a suburban bedroom community at the Jersey Shore, where I grew up, and dealt with my mother's symptoms of OCD most of my life.

There, in 2003, my mother passed away after a fall. She was heading toward the bathroom, worried that her chest felt tight and she was short of breath. The bathroom was where she often went in times of crisis, and she spent hours in there, washing her hands until they were red, and the skin peeled off. But she never made it; she collapsed on the couch, about 30 feet short of her goal.

In that same house, just two years earlier, she drank beer until she passed out in a reclining chair, uttering things that were incoherent before she, too, was committed to a psychiatric hospital. When she was committed, my father found cases of beer and boxes containing moldy pizza stuffed in the refrigerator.

Indeed, one of the opening scenes of the book made me feel like I was living it again. This scene was at Tara's apartment, and it was told by her husband, Joe:

It was a warm night, a beautiful night, but as we walked across the yard and stepped onto the porch, we could tell something was wrong. Empty beer cans were scattered about, and as we started to unlock the door, we could see that it had been forced open. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck prickle and my stomach tighten. Was the burglar inside? Did he have a gun? Should we hurry away and call the police?

As we slowly pushed open the door and peered into the darkness of the living room, I smelled the stabbing odor of urine and stale beer and an unwashed human being. In the darkness, I could barely make out someone sitting on the floor, someone mumbling incoherently.

I was scared, but Tara wasn't. She was angry and upset, not scared. She knew who had invaded her home, her well-ordered life. It was her mother waiting in the darkness. It was Dawn.

Like me, Tara loved her mother, and loved being with her, especially when she was young. In the book, she calls her "mommy," just as I did my mother, long after I wasn't supposed to call her that anymore.

But, when she was young, Tara went out for a car ride with Dawn one day, the door flung open, and Tara found herself on the pavement, with scratches and cuts. Or so her memories tell her.

When Tara played hide-and-go-seek with her mother, Dawn disappeared, and didn't reappear for a while. Instead of her mother coming out from behind the tree, and saying, "Here I am!" Dawn was gone.

Tara found herself in the police station, sitting on a counter top, eating ice cream, waiting for her grandparents to take her home.

The moment reminded me of the time I was 10, and I was chased in a department store by a woman who tried to stuff me in her overcoat. She chased me to the parking lot, and I hid between the cars while she looked for me. Finally, after looking for a good 10 minutes, she walked away and I warily walked back inside.

I found my mother looking at the clothes, the same clothes she obsessed over, and bought so many of them that she stuffed her closet, nearly breaking the sliding door. She had left me alone, in the book section, while she spent nearly an hour looking and trying on the same clothes, over and over. Each piece of clothing wasn't just the right fit....or maybe it was, she'd think, and she'd ask to try them on all over again.

I said to her, "Mommy! A woman just chased me around the store!"

"Oh, really. Wow," she said, half-interested. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," I said.

"OK, well I'm going to buy these clothes," she said. "You wait here while I try them on."

Then she left me along again, standing in the women's clothing section, feeling like I could be snatched at any second.

When Tara went to live with other relatives, she traveled with her mother from Hollywood, taking a long bus ride to Houston. It would be her last sustained experience with her mother, who would be taken away from her once they arrived.

From then on, Dawn would shuttle in-and-out of psychiatric care and institutions for the rest of her life, much as my mother did when her symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder worsened.

With every passing chapter, right up until Dawn grew old, and preferred living on the street, selling cigarettes, Tara offers a voice of frustration, but also a proclamation of love. She always kept her mother's within her grasp, and she was always ready to save her from whatever embarrassment she might cause, and she was ready to defend her whenever she was mocked or mistreated. She was always ready to commit her whenever she was a danger to herself, but she also realized that she could not always stop Dawn from being Dawn.

At the heart of my book is my mother, and how we showed our love in a similar way. In my mother's final years, we couldn't get close to her because she was afraid of our germs. She wouldn't let us kiss her unless it was all the way under ear, where her skin was red and chapped from the constant washing or her neck and face.

But we did the best we could, and like Tara, we tried to stabilize and comfort her life. We always wondered if we didn't do enough, even at the end, when we finally addressed my mother's battle with OCD after years of neglect, but it just seemed too late as her physical health declined.

Six years later, after reading Tara and Joe's book, I realize now that, perhaps, we did what we could do.

Neil Young/Heart of Gold

I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean
for a heart of gold
I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
That keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

Keep me searching
for a heart of gold
You keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm growing old.
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.

More troops will mean more stress

Once President Obama announces tonight that more than 30,000 additional troops will be sent to Afghanistan, don't think of it as a solution or a Band-Aid.

Don't think that war is ever a solution to problems. At best, it's a measure of prevention; the use of force is sometimes - though rarely - necessary to secure the safety the United States.

Think this: Another 30,000 troops will eventually become veterans who will be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Remember that there will be more people who not only will be seeking assistance for their physical wounds, but also for their damaged state of mental health.

Since we've had two war fronts since 2003, we've already seen evidence of the impact.

The number of soldiers and Marines diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2007, according to statistics released by the Army’s surgeon general, as reported by Stars and Stripes.

The military attributed the rise in the Army numbers in part to the increase in the overall number of soldiers exposed to combat, but also better record-keeping by the service. But soldiers realize that, if there was no war, the numbers would be significantly lower.

And the numbers could go up even higher since the symptoms of PTSD sometimes don't appear until 10 to 20 years after service.

There are places for veterans with mental illness to turn and find ways to escape a life of ruin and despair.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Center for Mental Health Services is accepting applications for the Jail Diversion and Trauma Recovery Program's "Priority to Veterans grants."

The purpose of this program is to support expansion of trauma-integrated jail diversion programs to reach the growing number of individuals with post traumatic stress disorder and trauma-related disorders involved in the justice system.

In recognition of the dramatically higher prevalence of trauma related illnesses among veterans, this program will prioritize eligibility for veterans, organizers say. Click here for more information on this grant program, along with the request for applications.

The age of Thanksgiving, and how to survive it

My "age of innocence" ended on a New Year's Day, back in the early '90s, when I heard a police call about a house fire in southern New Jersey. I was an ambitious, but somewhat undisciplined reporter in a rural area - rural for New Jersey - and I paid attention to police calls as often as I cleaned my refrigerator.

It wasn't just a lack of discipline, I should say. The cackles from the scanner normally sounded like the speaker at a McDonald's drive-thru. All you heard was the buzz. Something about this call, a four-alarm fire, made it louder than all the others.

I drove south, riding along Route 9 and through the southern New Jersey towns that a friend of mine once called "Appalachia by the Sea." They didn't have the big box-shaped shopping centers that New Jersey is known for. They were houses that looked like they were sinking into the ground. When we got to where needed to go, all we saw were these one-story ranchers, each of them looking like little tinderboxes just asking for abuse.

The photographer and I got out of the car, saw the charred house and walked up to it.

A man popped out and saw me and Dave, the photographer. The guy had a big gut and big red beard, a kind of scary looking guy who I didn't really have time to look at.

"Get 'em!" he yelled, and a big, drooling dog came running out, chasing me and Dave. I literally jumped on top of my car, and watched the dog leaping up at me, saliva forming around his mouth. The guy with the big gut laughed as he puffed on his smoke.

Dave? He was doing what he always did: He took pictures.

I went to the police department later, at Little Egg Harbor Township, N.J. I went in there with the prejudice that this is the kind of thing that happens there, that there was something about this class of people that made them not respect holidays. Who would burn their house on New Year's Day?

This was, of course, before meth labs were in vogue, so there was little chance that they blew up themselves.

"You should see what it's like on Thanksgiving," the chief said. "That's the worst day of the year."

He was right. Later, I looked back at old clips from The Press of Atlantic City library. Something happened on Thanksgiving every day for years. They weren't just petty crimes, either. Murders, armed robberies - they were Law and Order stuff, set in Appalachia.

You'd think holidays would be the easy time of year. People get time off, and get paid for it. They get to go somebody's house - hopefully - and eat somebody else's food.

But a lot of people don't get all that, and when they don't, they get lonely. And when they get lonely, they get depressed.

And if they're already lonely and depressed, they could even be angry. If they have to meet with family - family they don't like - the encounters could lead to what the police dispatchers call "domestic disputes." In the years after that fire, I covered a lot of these kinds of crimes, and my image of Thanksgiving changed from turkey and stuffing to crime and punishment.

Family issues inspired me to write about mental health. But maybe it was more than that: Maybe it was the experience of dealing with the average person, and how the holidays they have don't ever symbolize the joy and peacefulness of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Indeed, in this recession, a lot more people are closer to those people in Little Egg Harbor than they think. A lot of people lack money - last year, my brother-in-law joked that we're all going to be eating peanut butter for Thanksgiving this year, and he wasn't too far off - and that added stress is bound to make things busy for police departments across the country.

Worse yet, it could make things busier for mental health professionals who are dealing with people who just don't understand what is making them angry, depressed and lonely.

Mental Health America, a leading mental health advocacy group, understands this, and is trying to fight it and deal with it.

Many factors can cause the holiday blues, according to MHA: stress, fatigue, unrealistic expectations, over-commercialization, financial constraints and the inability to be with one’s family and friends.

The demands of shopping, parties, family reunions and house guests also contribute to feelings of tension. People may also develop other stress responses such as headaches, excessive drinking, over-eating and difficulty sleeping.

Even more people experience post-holiday let down after January 1. This can result from disappointments during the preceding months compounded by the excess fatigue and stress, according the MHA.

Mental Health America offers some suggestions:

- Keep expectations for the holiday season manageable. Try to set realistic goals for yourself. Pace yourself. Organize your time. Make a list and prioritize the important activities.

- Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Don’t put the entire focus on just one day (i.e., Thanksgiving Day). Remember that it’s a season of holiday sentiment, and activities can be spread out to lessen stress and increase enjoyment.

- Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely; there is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them.

- Leave “yesteryear” in the past and look toward the future. Life brings changes. Each season is different and can be enjoyed in its own way. Don’t set yourself up in comparing today with the “good ol’ days.”

- Do something for someone else. Try volunteering some of your time to help others.

- Enjoy activities that are free, such as taking a drive to look at holiday decorations, going window shopping or making a snowman with children.

- Be aware that excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.

- Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.

- Spend time with supportive and caring people. Reach out and make new friends, or contact someone you haven’t heard from in a while.

- Save time for yourself! Recharge your batteries! Let others share in the responsibility of planning activities.

My own personal suggestion: If you're going light anything up, light up a firecracker or something. Don't play with matches, and stay away from meth.

Something about John

John Clear walked out of a jail two years ago, declared that he found religion and went home, to Point Pleasant, N.J., where he thought he could find a new life in an old place.

Maybe he could patch things up with his father, he thought, even though the two of them never really got along.

Maybe he could find old friends, the ones he left behind long ago, because the drugs got too big even for them.

Maybe he could find a job, and hold it for longer than a month this time. Maybe that brain power that was locked up long ago, the same smarts that made him the funniest guy I ever knew, could be put to good use for once.

John tried. But, like everything with John, it didn't last. Forty-two years old now, the funniest guy I ever knew can only sustain a life as a purse snatcher and drug addict.

At 42, the only thing that's long is his rap sheet. The only thing that's consistent is his drug use, usually heroin.

The only thing that's funny is that there were some of us who thought he could clean himself up this time, after trying many times. Now we play the fools.

You've heard this story before. Smart kid gets into drugs, and finds himself going through the revolving, recidivism door of jail.

For me, however, the old people from the old life never get old. I told his father the other day that no one inspired my sense of humor more than him. When I hear of this kind of thing, I feel like I could be looking at myself.

If I stuck with him, I could have followed the same path. I had a mother who was an alcoholic, too. I had a need to make others like me, too. I had a need to make others laugh. I got into trouble, too. I had the same issues of need, attention and gratification.

I asked his father if he was mentally ill. He paused for a few seconds. "He now says he's bipolar," his father said. "I don't know what to think."

Maybe we need to know that, I told him. Because that could explain everything.

Maybe I'm the fool, again, but maybe it could be the one thing that's needed to get him the right care.

Maybe it's the one thing that can turn him in the right direction, because his future looks far from the kind of life he knew growing up at the Jersey Shore.

Unless he gets a plea bargain, his life before he turns 60 will be concrete walls and bars, the same life that did little for him before, other than teach him how to become a 42-year-old man who snatches purses from people at children's stores.

John faces 10 to 15 years, possibly, in state prison. Last month, he grabbed a pocketbook from a baby carriage in the parking lot of Babies R Us on Route 36 in Eatontown, N.J., according to The Asbury Park Press.

As the woman put her child in her vehicle, John grabbed her pocketbook from her carriage. She began to struggle with him, and the handle of the purse broke. John escaped with the pocketbook, and left in a four-door Saturn, driven by his girlfriend.

By the time the woman managed to cancel her credit cards, John and his girlfriend - his father called her "the wheel" - had charged cartons of cigarettes and gift card purchases at Rite-Aids in nearby Neptune and Asbury Park, police said. Then they tried to buy the same items at a Walgreens in Neptune, but were denied.

The next day, in Wall Township, N.J., the girlfriend grabbed an 84-year-old woman's pocketbook from her shopping cart inside a Foodtown, police said. Some witnesses stopped her and managed to retrieve the victim's purse, but the girlfriend ran from the supermarket and got into a four-door Saturn driven by John.

Police said they sent out an alert to surrounding communities, and Bradley Beach police stopped the vehicle. After their arrest, police found the hold-up note. Now he's in jail, with bail set at more than $100,000.

This time, no one is rushing to get him out.

Two years ago, I got a call from John. We talked about how he wanted everything the way it was, sitting in my house, watching the Mets on T.V. , just like we did in seventh grade.

Or maybe we could watch the Mets at a bar, he said, and talk about running wild in music class, getting Miss Mason upset and getting tossed out in the middle of a square dance.

Two years ago, John was just out of jail, and he was on the phone, talking to me. He didn't want to get off. He wanted to stay on, his deep, husky voice bellowing through the speaker so much that I had to turn down the volume.

He wanted to meet face-to-face. But the more we talked, the more I realized: He needed more than talk. He needed something. He needed help.

He wanted his kids back. He wanted his ex-wife out of his life. The more he talked, the louder he got. By the time we signed off, I had the volume on the cell turned down to nothing.

This was John excited. maybe even manic. This was a man going through an extreme high, or at least acting like it, who had just lived a life of many downs and, apparently, was heading toward an even bigger fall.

This was a man with mental illness, I thought, because many people with mental illness just don't straighten out. Many people with mental illness lie to themselves, and to others. If they find a way to heal themselves, they realize they're never cured. They just find a way to manage.

And if they ever do find peace, they find it through honesty and truth, not deception, false hopes and lies.

But this was John, talking a good game, saying he wanted to straighten his life out. This was John, trying to get people to forget the state prison mugshot that's still on the Internet, a dark, fading picture that adds 15 years to his age.

John wanted me to write about his life, and everything that was wrong with it. He wanted me to write about it all. In the ensuing weeks, he sent me the letters he sent to the Ocean County Prosecutors Office, demanding a hearing that would address his desire to see his kids.

He didn't do this to himself, he said. He wanted me to blow the lid on the judicial system, and bring down all the people who, he believed, did this to him.

He wanted me to do it so badly that he tried to get others involved, getting one of them to send me a large envelope filled with documents that was a paper trail of the guy's criminal history.

"Let me see what I can do," I kept telling him, though I knew I couldn't do much.

I thought of things I could do. I thought of things I could write. Little came to mind, however. Work, school and family life always seemed to get in the way, of course.

But those excuses were easy. There was something else, something more that bothered me. It wasn't the drugs or his shattered family life. It was the jail or the mugshot.

What I wanted to tell him was, geez, John, I don't remember sitting down in my house, watching the Mets.

I don't remember John ever sitting down.

Whenever we did anything, it was usually a prank or something that 12 or 13-year-old kids shouldn't do in department stores.

It involved water balloons going "splat" against somebody's car windshield, with my hands covering my face in embarrassment. "Oh, no, we're going to get into trouble!" I'd say, and John would just laugh.

Back then, John didn't care. He didn't need to impress. He joked, and he joked often. But he didn't really lie.

Now the John Clear I know tells stories. He's in jail after telling his family and friends the same thing, over and over. I'm going to get it right, he'd say. I'm not going to do any more drugs.

He told another friend he had Hepatitis C. He had to be driven up to Asbury Park at 5 a.m. every day to get a shot.

The friend obliged, and this went on for weeks. But after a while, the friend caught on. Nobody gets shots at 5 a.m. for Hepatitis C. Nobody has to wait in the parking lot and wait for them to come out to get a shot.

"It was probably methadone," the friend said, the drug heroin users take as a cleaner substitute.

This was the same time as our phone conversation, when he told me he was done with drugs, that they were just some short, stupid phase of his life.

There's just something about John.

Bruce Springsteen — Nebraska lyrics

I saw her standin on her front lawn just twirlin her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

From the town of lincoln nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of wyoming I killed everything in my path

I can't say that Im sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun

The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor neck back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my sould
Be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

The life and art of Kimberly Green

Last week, I wrote a well-received blog on Kimberly Green, a woman who's suffering from stage 4 breast cancer, but nonetheless has sacrificed so much of herself to give to so many others.

I was particularly impressed with her organization, the Green Family Foundation, and the work it's done in Haiti with the Clinton Global Initiative and President Clinton. I saw the pictures of the kind of work her foundation performs, and I saw the close relationship the organization has had with Clinton in bringing health care to a health-ravaged nation.

What bugged me was when I did a Google search of Kimberly's work, and I did an additional search of her foundation's association with Clinton. I came up with next-to-nothing.

This blog entry is an attempt to bring it all together. Below are clips of a slideshow I put together that includes clips of the foundation's work in Haiti. The show is accompanied by a voice-over narration of my blog post from last week, spoken by me.

This is an all-attempt to get the Internet to recognize the good work that these people do. This is also an attempt to show that the work the foundation does isn't done in a vacuum. It's attracting help from the most powerful people in the world.

It's time to recognize the Green Foundation for what it is and what it has done.





NOTE: The Green Family Foundation has a Facebook page that can be found here.

Bloggers beware?

What you're about to read was written by me.

All the tools and labor were paid by me.

The advertisers? I probably pay more to have them on my blog than they pay me.

Free products? Scroll down and look at my suit. Do I look like I was outfitted by Starbucks or the Wisconsin Cheeseman (two of my sponsors)?

Have I disclosed enough?

It's hard to say. To the Federal Trade Commission, it may not be.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments. The new rules are scheduled to take effect Dec. 1.

An existing FTC rule that states product reviewers must reveal any connection they have with advertisers was extended to bloggers, according to news reports.

The rules carry a fine as high as $11,000 if product endorsers and reviewers don't comply.

This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban allegedly deceptive or unfair business practices, according to news reports.

The guidelines, of course, will be hard to enforce, and the FTC admits this. No new personnel would be hired to handle the new responsibilities, and there are thousands - maybe millions - of bloggers to watch after.

One FTC administrator put it best when he said the rule extension could create a "whack-a-mole enforcement" scenario in which the agency goes after only those who blatantly disregard the rules.

Or it'll go after those sites that get a lot of traffic - and there aren't many of those. Most bloggers get less traffic than I do. We all have dreams that, someday, we can turn what we do into a Drudge Report or Huffington Post for our specialty. More often than not, however, that doesn't happen.

To the FTC, the rules would allow the agency to go after bloggers for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest, according to news reports.

The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links - for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process, according to the Associated Press.

From my vantage point, the rules are a double-edged sword. It's fair for the consumer to know if a blogger is working as an agent for an industry or a company.

Truth - or, as Bob Woodward said, the most obtainable version of it - always wins out over lies and deception. High profile bloggers could ruin their credibility - much like reporters would - if the consumer were to later learn that they're on the side of the seller... not the buyer.

But I'm also a civil libertarian. Besides the obvious free-speech concerns I have, I feel that it's unfair for bloggers to be singled out for something that the so-called mainstream media does all the time.

Why shouldn't Greta Van Susteren disclose that her husband performs consulting work, among many things, for Sarah Palin whenever she provides an always too-gentle profile on the former Alaska governor?

For the average blogger, however, all those issues are irrelevant. Only people with big pockets would be able to challenge the rules in court. They will go into effect, and there is little anybody can do - short of a Bill Gates - to stop it.

The biggest question is what should bloggers do now. Providing a disclosure statement may be difficult for the First Amendment defender who views the FTC's actions as an intrusion on free speech.

In practice, however, adding a simple disclosure statement at the bottom of a post (if that's what the FTC considers a legitimate form of disclosure) should be no different than a political advertiser adding a line from its promoted candidate - "this is so-and-so, and I approve this message" - at the end of a television or radio commercial.

Perhaps advertisers will feel that this disclosure will discredit their message. But, as always, truth should always be the goal.

Nikon can do business with a blogger - and have the blogger write a complementary article on a camera that was provided by the company. The entry should have a disclosure statement, sure. But the disclosure shouldn't matter to the reader if the blog post includes testimony from a Nikon user - perhaps a newspaper or magazine photographer - who has a credible reputation and whose opinions are rarely disputed.

Will the disclosure matter if the blog post carries a slideshow of high-resolution Nikon photographs that are clearly better than what a Cannon camera can provide?

As a Nikon user who hasn't gotten a freebie, I would be glad to oblige.

Behind every gun is a story

President Obama says we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the shooting deaths at Fort Hood. It's understandable, however, what many people's first impulses might be.

There is anger. There were calls of revenge. Worse yet, however, there are feelings of deceit.

The man who is suspected to be responsible for the killings was a psychiatrist.

This, as a result, is more than a case of potential post-traumatic stress disorder. The very kind of person who is responsible for healing the minds of beleaguered troops who have been shuffled in-and-out of war zones could do nothing to heal himself.

But it also shows that the toll of war has gone far beyond the battlefield. Casualties no longer are the "grunts," the enlisted men and women who have seen their lives turned upside-down over the past seven years. They're also the officers, the handlers and, finally, the medical practitioners who have not only suffered personally, but also suffered as a result of their work.

There is a human side to war, and it was, perhaps, best captured by a New York Times piece published this past week. We often hear of evil when we hear death and war and casualties. But behind every gun is a life.

From The New York Times:

Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.

But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., began having second thoughts about a military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.

He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.

“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier became aware of Internet postings by a man calling himself Nidal Hasan, a law enforcement official said. The postings discussed suicide bombings favorably, but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan.

In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.

“If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory,” the man wrote. It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan.

Major Hasan was wounded and taken into custody by the Fort Hood police after the shooting rampage, in which 12 people were killed and at least 31 others were wounded.

Though Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas reported that Major Hasan was to be deployed this month, that could not be confirmed with the Army on Thursday night.

Nader Hasan said his cousin never mentioned in recent phone calls to Virginia that he was going to be deployed, and he said the family was shocked when it heard the news on television on Thursday afternoon.

“He was doing everything he could to avoid that,” Mr. Hasan said. “He wanted to do whatever he could within the rules to make sure he wouldn’t go over.”

Some years ago, that included retaining a lawyer and asking if he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, because of the harassment he had received as a Muslim. But Nader Hasan said the lawyer had told his cousin that even if he paid the Army back for his education, it would not allow him to leave before his commitment was up.

“I think he gave up that fight and was just doing his time,” Mr. Hasan said.

Nader Hasan said his cousin’s parents had both been American citizens who owned businesses, including restaurants and a store, in Roanoke, Va. He declined to confirm reports that they were Jordanian but said the parents, who are both dead, had immigrated from a small town near Jerusalem many years ago.

His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952. It described her as a restaurant owner “known for her ability to keep sometimes rowdy customers out of trouble and always had a warm meal for someone who otherwise would not have anything to eat that evening.”

Records show that Major Hasan received an undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech and a medical degree at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He did a residency at Walter Reed Medical Center and worked there for years before a transfer to the Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood this year.

Major Hasan had two brothers, one in Virginia and another in Jerusalem, his cousin said. The family, by and large, prospered in the United States, Mr. Hasan said.

The former imam at a Silver Spring, Md., mosque where Major Hasan worshiped for about 10 years described him as proud of his work in the Army and “very serious about his religion.” The former imam, Faizul Khan, said that Major Hasan had wanted to marry an equally religious woman but that his efforts to find one had failed.

“He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab, and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things,” the former imam said.

Mr. Hasan, 40, a lawyer in Virginia, described his cousin as a respectful, hard-working man who had devoted himself to his parents and his career.

Mr. Hasan said his cousin became more devout after his parents died in 1998 and 2001.

“His parents didn’t want him to go into the military,” Mr. Hasan said. “He said, ‘No, I was born and raised here, I’m going to do my duty to the country.’ ”

What can be done about health care?

If you don't understand health care, then maybe you should see somebody who is sick.

Like Kimberly Green.

She's had breast cancer for more than three years. Her treatment costs $6,000 a month. Without it, she said, "I would die."

Myself, Kimberly, some fellow bloggers and health practitioners got together a few weeks ago to talk to her, and to talk about her.

But we also talked about a health care system that's broken. Tens of millions of people are without health insurance, all lacking what she's got that's kept her alive.

As much as we wanted to know about Kimberly, we acted as though we were going to solve this health-care problem ourselves, and we hoped to solve it within a 90-minute span. We didn't get there, but at least we had a healthy dialogue that - if the Obama administration is listening - produced some ideas for finally getting efforts to pass health care reform off the dime.

Click on the below photo to get a glimpse of our Healthcare Reform Blogger Roundtable in New York City, and learn about how Kimberly's work with the Green Family Foundation that has emboldened her to be aware of her environment, and to not take life for granted.

Then, listen to what we have to say (I'm the one sitting against the wall with a tie).


NOTE: The Green Family Foundation has a Facebook page that can be found here.

Give her health insurance, or give her...

When it comes to health care, Kimberly Green doesn't get it.

Oh, don't think for a minute she doesn't know anything about sickness. She's had breast cancer for more than three years. She's had highs and lows, but she knows that wellness can only last for so long when you have stage 4 cancer.

Green - like much of the country - could be one health crisis away from financial ruin. What she doesn't get is why so many people just don't understand.

Her treatment costs $6,000 a month. Without it, she said, "I would die."

Green shakes her head when thinks about it. Tens of millions of people without health insurance, all lacking what she's got that's kept her alive.

Now, as the nation debates how to finally deliver health care to those who need it, Green isn't afraid to use herself - and her words - as a vehicle to convey a message that, she believes, much of the country still has a hard time understanding.

Give them treatment, she says. Or they will die.

"There are a lot of things that can help people, but these things should be available to everybody," Green said.

Green's family has understood this for a while. They have a foundation that's dedicated to improving global health and elevating socioeconomic conditions in impoverished countries.

The Green Family Foundation, a private, non-profit organization, has worked with the Clinton Global Initiative in benefiting Haiti. Just recently, the foundation committed more than $280,000 to improving villages and restoring the country's musical heritage. The foundation also provided a $10 million gift to Florida International University - including a state match - to fund a community medicine program.

Green, speaking at the foundation's Healthcare Reform Blogger Roundtable on Thursday, said her family's work has emboldened her to be aware of her environment, and to not take life for granted. She has made a number of trips to Haiti, appearing with former President Clinton in photos and seeing the worst that poverty can bring.

There, she once saw a woman whose breast was very enlarged. She knew it was breast cancer, but she asked one of the doctors: What will happen to that woman?

"It will be cut off," she said, recalling what the doctor told her. "She will die."

This is a life without health insurance, she realized. And it was the kind of image that inspired her - after her mother was diagnosed - to get a mammogram. Her cancer was diagnosed soon after, and she underwent treatments. She sorted through options until she found what worked best for her.

But when she thinks of the health care in the United States, she thinks of that woman. Costs are rising. Drugs are becoming less accessible. She's worried about how bad things can get. She wonders if we're not so far away from facing the same consequences.

In the United States, at least, many people like Green have choice. But many do not. How long?

"I don't know why it has to be this way," she said.

NOTE: The Green Family Foundation has a Facebook page that can be found here.

Bringing changes to the mind

Glenn Close, in a film directed by Ron Howard, has marked the launch of the "Bring Change 2 Mind" campaign, a nationwide effort to raise awareness about the toll of the stigma associated with mental illness in our communities.

Mental health professionals have partnered with Close and "Bring Change to Mind" to support their work against stigma, and to bring to the public the latest research on effective treatments for mental illness.

To usher in the launch of the campaign, Close has appeared on the following shows to discuss her involvement, and provide more details on how you can get involved: ABC's Good Morning America; ABC's The View; and MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Show.

More information is available here: http://bringchange2mind.org/index.php.

Hope isn't a dangerous thing

Every time I hear of more job losses, or I see more reports of a failing economy, I think back to when I was a kid, and I had dreams of being a best-selling book author by the age of 23. Or I was going to make enough money to buy the Mets and turn them into the Yankees, and spend my senior years in a box by the dugout, with my feet up on the orange Shea Stadium railing, admiring my World Series rings as they glistened in the Queens sunshine.

I was going to make enough money and give it to my brother, the scientist, so he could find a cure for my mother's obsessive behavior. I was going to buy a big house and have round-the-clock nursing care that would give her the relief and the medication she needed. And she would go along with it, of course, because this was only a dream.

Or maybe I was going to be president and run in the 2004 election, as an independent. I was going to get elected as the youngest president ever and solve everybody's problems, because I was independent.

I was going do it without the influence of money and greed, and I was going to resist the John-Edwards-like impulses of narcissism. I was going to run a country based on the same principles that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote about in either the Federalist Papers or the Declaration of Independence.

I could have that dream because, I knew, as an American, I lived in a country where power is shared, not consolidated.

I knew that as an American, I was lucky, and good enough to be born in a country that didn't have poverty and disease like they have poverty and disease in Africa. I knew I could get a job, and I'd have an opportunity to live a life that was something close to my dreams, even if I didn't get everything that I wanted.

But with every bad thing coming out of Washington, and every little nasty political attack I hear on the radio or I see on television, and every bit of talk about credit and jobs drying up, I wonder if everything I hoped for was just that: a dream.

I wonder if I'll ever have anything close to not only what I not wanted, but what I expected. I always expected big things for myself, and I believed all the things my guidance counselors and my parents said about me. But when I look at my profession, and I see newspapers vaporizing, I sometimes wonder if it's a dream that's going to waste.

I have to stop myself, and remind myself that America, yes, is a land of dreams. But it's more a land of hope. I'm 42, and I could still live some or all of my dreams. Without hope, however, I never would have survived.

I never would been able to deal with the struggles I had early on, when I worked for The Delaware State News and a ring of reporters who were jealous of my salary conspired to get me fired. I never would have sought help when I needed it, and turned to a food pantry in 1990 because I couldn't afford to buy anything more than a 79-cent taco at Taco Bell for dinner.

I never would have maintained the friendships I've had, because I've always believed in the people I trust. Even when they've driven me crazy, I always knew there was good in them, and even if they did something wrong, their intentions were right.

I never would have been able to run five miles in 33 minutes and 26 seconds, as I did last week, despite being 42 and long past the prime of my athletic life.

I never would have raised the family I've raised, with an utterly tolerant, open-minded and beautiful wife who has been my saving grace. For that, I am not only hopeful. I'm thankful.

I'd like to think that, if this were 1989 again, and I had the opportunity to look into the future, I'd say I had a life worth living. I didn't know this then, but I know it now: I'll always have the strength and desire to live through the struggles, because I've done it before. As long I'm healthy - not just in body, but in spirit - I'll do it again.

Twenty years ago, on the day I graduated from Rutgers University, I started my first job. I piled my clothes in my back seat, rolled down the windows of my Dodge Dart and drove from New Brunswick to South Brunswick, N.J., with the hot sun rays shooting through the front windshield. I had no air conditioner, so I couldn't stop sweating. I had no FM radio so I couldn't really listen to music.

"Don't worry about it," I thought to myself. "It won't always be like this."

But a song kept repeating in my head, and its meaning was magnified with every pang of nausea I felt in my gut as I felt anxious about a career not yet started. I felt anxious about a newspaper industry that was taking it on the chin, just like it's taking it on the chin now.

Twenty years later, the song never really left, and every now and then, I still hear the strings of the acoustic guitar at the song's opening with every bit of bad news not just about the newspaper industry, but also America.

It was that John Mellencamp song, "Pink Houses," and there was a line in there that seemed to say everything about my life then. More importantly, it says something about our lives now.

Well theres a young man in a t-shirt
Listening to a rockin' rollin' station
He's got a greasy hair, greasy smile
He says: Lord, this must be my destination
'Cuz they told me, when I was younger
"Boy, youre gonna be president"
But just like everyting else, those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went

"Ain't that America" he says. Ain't that America, for you and me.

I love that song, but not because it's a song of failed dreams. Behind every lament, I believe, is a feeling of hope.

I believe that Mellencamp saw his song as a message. He believed that lives could be turned around, and not left to die. He saw the farms diseappearing in the Midwest during the early 1980s, and he hoped that people would hear his song, and come to their aid. And they did.

Every time I hear a cry of panic about America, I hope it's not political posturing. I hope it's about hope, and bringing attention to the problems that exist in this country, a nation that's established and strong but young enough to evolve and improve.

I think of The Shawshank Redemption, a movie about inmates at a prison who felt institutionalized by their lives. I remember the scene when the character "Red," played by Morgan Freedman, told his friend, Andy, that hope is a dangerous thing. It could drive a man insane, he said.

Andy, played by Tim Robbins, later broke out of jail and essentially cleared his name. He wrote Red a letter, which Red read when he, too, was able to leave the notorious prison.

"Remember Red," he wrote. "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. "

Fear and loathing of the flu

As I've tried to put the finishing touches on my book proposal, I couldn't find anything to write about.

A'vast ye swine! Now there is.

To paraphrase FDR, sometimes it's the fear of the disease that's more damaging than the disease itself. The fear-of-pandemic syndrome is always a media sensation, no matter what the cost.

Here's some facts on swine flu, courtesy of Dr. Geoffrey W. Rutledge of wellsphere.com:

There is quite a buzz about the Swine Flu outbreak that has so far caused 1,995 hospitalizations and an estimated 149 deaths in Mexico, especially after the US department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the swine flu outbreak had reached "phase 4", just one step away from a worldwide pandemic.

The swine flu is caused by the influenza A (subtype H1N1) virus that normally causes respiratory infections in pigs. This virus is not the same as the previously identified human form of influenza A subtype H1N1, and it is not expected that this year's influenza vaccine, which does protect against the human H1N1 flu will provide good protection against the swine flu.

So the concern is that the illnesses and deaths that occurred in Mexico could represent the beginning of a serious influenza outbreak. Of greatest concern is the possibility of a repeat of the famous influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that killed about 50 million people in the worst global epidemic in human history. That pandemic of "Spanish flu" (an avian variant of influenza A H1N1) killed more people than died during World War I, and more than died during the four years of the "Black Death" or bubonic plague, from 1347-1351. But, don’t go building an underground bunker just yet…

The data provide some hopeful news regarding this outbreak. So far, unlike the swine flu cases in Mexico, all the U.S. cases of swine flu have been less severe and have not threatened the lives of any of those affected. The second piece of hopeful news is that we are at the end of the natural influenza season, so the seasonal factors that lead to enhanced transmission of the virus are not present. It's hard to predict these events, but I'm quite hopeful that the outbreak will not turn into a major pandemic within the U.S.

Here are some resources that you may find helpful if you would like to learn about the swine flu virus and the potential for a widening outbreak of influenza in the U.S.

- A great starting point for information about swine flu is the WellPage on this topic, which lists the articles from the HealthBlogger network, and also shows valuable links in the Trusted Web Resources and News sections: http://www.wellsphere.com/wellpage/swine-flu

- HealthCentral has created a special page on the Swine flu at http://www.healthcentral.com/cold-flu/swine-flu.html

- Daily updates of progress of the outbreak are issued by the CDC at http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

- You can find a comprehensive and understandable summary of the virus causing this illness on the World health Organization website: http://www.who.int/csr/swine_flu/swine_flu_faq.pdf
Note that in this document, the question "Where have human cases occurred" is not fully answered, because it leaves out several countries such as Mexico, Canada, England, and New Zealand, where confirmed cases have occurred.

- One thing that does help restrict the spread of the infection is treating close contacts of infected people with the right anti-viral medications (the CDC defines "close contact" as coming within 6 feet of a person with confirmed swine flu). The CDC recommendations for who should be given preventive treatment (prophylaxis) are at http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/recommendations.htm
and the actual treatment dosages are at http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/antivirals/dosagetable.htm#table

- A great resource to help understand the patterns of influenza outbreaks in the U.S., and to see where we are in the annual flu season cycle, is the Google flu trend application, at
http:// www.google.org/flutrends/. This shows that there is no evidence yet of a widening pandemic in the U.S.

Even the best media can't avoid treating mental illness like a horror show

Even The Associated Press isn't immune to promoting stigma.

Here's a story about a person who's accused of killing his therapist. Count the number of mental health stereotypes that the clever reporter and editor managed to weave into the text.

The point is: Can we find another way of describing people with mental illness without resorting to adjectives and verbs that are best reserved for a horror movie?

Here's the story (stereotypes are in bold):

A lawyer for a mental patient accused of hacking a Manhattan psychotherapist to death with a meat cleaver said Tuesday that his client will offer an insanity defense at his trial.

Defense lawyer Bryan Konoski said in Manhattan's state Supreme Court that a psychiatrist he hired to examine murder suspect David Tarloff, 40, said he has "very strong grounds" for a psychiatric defense (above photo: Tarloff).

Konoski's court papers say he will offer evidence of Tarloff's "lack of criminal responsibility by reason of mental disease or defect." They also say Tarloff suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, depression, intrusive delusional thoughts of God and Satan, belief he is the Messiah and other mental disorders.

Tarloff, who told police he has been in mental institutions at least 20 times, is charged with first- and second-degree murder in the death of Kathryn Faughey, 56, in her Upper East Side office on Feb. 12, 2008.

Tarloff is also charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault in the cleaver attack on Dr. Kent Shinbach, 70, who was hurt when he tried to help Faughey. Shinbach, whose office was near Faughey's, was Tarloff's therapist.

Konoski said "the evidence is clear that he (Tarloff) did it, but the reasons he did it, what was behind it, are so crazy that we believe we have a very strong insanity defense."

"He was having visual and auditory hallucinations, communications with God telling him how to act," Konoski said. "He believed through prayer that God had approved what he was going to do at Dr. Shinbach's office to save his mother."

The lawyer said Tarloff, who is being held in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, was examined there by his psychiatrist for eight to 10 hours on Feb. 27 and four to five hours on March 28.

Here's the definition of mental, when it's used in the above context:

Slang - Emotionally upset; crazed: "got mental when he saw the dent in his new car."
Offensive Slang - Mentally or psychologically disturbed.

So, what's mental?

Are people who take psychotropic medicine "crazed?" Are people who go see psychotherapists or seek treatment at a facility "disturbed?"

Personally, the only thing I ever like to "hack" is any story that compares mentally ill behavior to Frankenstein.