Friday food for thought

Med students/schools ur doin' it wrong.  Some ideas.  I'm too tired to have an opinion right now.

It gets better

Advice columnist and openly gay activist Dan Savage found himself so moved by the recent suicide of a 15 year-old, bullied and picked-on boy in Indiana, that he started a youtube channel called the "It gets better project."  It's wonderful to see multimedia having potentially life-saving effects; and in the young (particularly openly gay or lesbian), suicide is a leading cause of death.

The creepy cashier and lessons in a heteronormative society

On the occasion of the United States Senate filibustering a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" I thought I would share an anecdote from several weeks ago.

I waited in line at the grocery store as the middle-old aged clerk (65-70 years old) struck up this conversation with the young daughter (~6 years old) of a woman buying groceries ahead of me:

Clerk: Hello there young lady.  Do you have a boyfriend?

Girl: No. [giggles, looks away.]

Clerk: Do you want to have a boyfriend?

Girl: I don't know. Maybe.  [looks away]

Clerk: Will you be my boyfriend?

Girl: NO!

Clerk: Why not? You'll get free groceries...

Girl: No.  [looks away].

Clerk: How about this, I'll give you a week to decide.

[Genuinely amused, the mother shakes her head, mumbles a few words about the girl being high maintenance, and then looks up as she hears her daughter, upon leaving yell:

Girl: Good luck, sucker!

Now, I laughed too.  The clerk was just silly. The girl was predictable.  The mother was amused.  And I got to thinking, would people have reacted this way had the girl instead been a boy?  What if the elder clerk was in fact a homosexual, and thus innocently struck up the same conversation with the woman's son.  I doubt anyone (I included) would have acted the same way.  People would say, "Oh, how dare he try to make her son GAY!" "God, he's such a creepy molester!" "What is he, a Catholic priest or something?"  In other words, they are afraid of such behavior, because it might influence the boy.  It might shatter his world view of boys + girls = love.  Quite simply, when the heterosexual "norm" of our society is enforced, even by slightly creepy, but good-natured clerks, we all laugh and move on.  Because we think that society is grooming everyone to be either gay or straight.  Straight is ok.  Gay? No homo.

I doubt it's so straightforward that society's influences play such a large role.  If they did, we wouldn't have had people identify with homosexuality in the dark ages of sexual identity (pre-gay rights/civil rights movement, which is by the way ongoing: see the link above).

I hope my (future) children grow up in a world that embraces both the straight and the gay clerk.  I have enough faith they will know how to figure out their own sexual identity, regardless of some old grocery store clerk's influence.

Kids and antipsychotics

I read bits and pieces of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV” (DSM-IV) during medical school, which was an informative yet frustrating experience: one that I would like to revisit and expand upon when DSM-V is released. My understanding of psychiatric illnesses and their diagnoses and treatments is extremely limited. I can only imagine how difficult it is to care for some psychiatric patients, let alone, children.

Enter Kyle. The NYTimes paints a grim portrait of his struggle with antipsychotic drugs:

“Kyle’s third birthday photo shows a pink-cheeked boy who had ballooned to 49 pounds.”

“Kyle smiles at the camera. He is sedated.”

“He was sedated, drooling and overweight…”

Kyle isn’t alone.

“Texas Medicaid data ... showed a record $96 million was spent last year on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children — including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.”

Kyle and other children from low-income families “were four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines” because it is “cheaper” than psychotherapy, according to a Rutgers U. study.

I wonder what things are like in the prison systems.