Tony At 10: MENTAL PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD; BLOG # 198; AUG 28, 2015

THE MESSAGE:

1) DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

There is some evidence that the culture of relentless achievement and success is driving young people to suicide. The increasing number of suicides among college students and aspiring young professionals seems to indicate that more high achievers are giving in to the social pressures emphasizing perfection.

THIS VIDEO HAS SOME IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS

We need to look further. No doubt the intense social pressure on young people, especially girls and young women, is daunting, but stress is only part of the story: We should also focus on adolescent mental illness and its treatment or lack of. Many victims of suicide are depressed, or suffer from alcohol or drug abuse.

According to some studies, parents, teenagers, and their doctors should not be afraid of antidepressants and should know that they can be very helpful and with careful use and monitoring, they can be lifesaving. The one thing we should all fear is depression, a natural killer that we should be able to treat and overcome.

2) HOMICIDES OF PREGNANT WOMEN BY PSYCHOPATHIC MEN

Murder Is One of Top Causes of Death for Pregnant Women. Studies in Maryland, New York and Chicago determined that about 20 percent of women who die during pregnancy are murder victims of boyfriends or husbands. In most cases these murderers are psychopaths and never show much interest in their wives or their unborn children. They have feelings only about themselves.

MARK HACKING:

LORI AND MARK HACKING

Lori Was pregnant with her first child when she was killed just after telling her husband, Mark, about the pregnancy. Mark Hacking eventually pleaded guilty to murdering her, admitting that he left her body in the Salt Lake City dump.

Lori had told her family that she was about five weeks pregnant when she vanished. She was planning a move to North Carolina where her husband had said he was about to start medical school at UNC. Actually he had not even completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Utah as he led family and friends to believe. The medical school had no record of him having ever applied.

SCOTT PETERSON:

The California woman who was murdered on Christmas Eve when she was eight months pregnant. Husband Scott was later convicted of her murder. His motivation is believed to have been the desire to have another woman without the complications of a wife and newborn baby..

While Laci Peterson was still missing, Scott Peterson told Diane Sawyer in an interview how difficult it was on him to walk the family dog. "A lot of times, I can't make it very far," he said at the time. "I make it part of the way. I certainly can't make it to the part of the park where currently there's a big poster of her up.

3) DISCRIMINATION:

JANE ELLIOT AND THE BLUE-EYED CHILDREN EXPERIMENT 1968

This teacher first asked her third graders if they thought it would be interesting to judge people by the colour of their eyes and if they wanted to try it. They enthusiastically agreed and Jane Elliot said that since she was blue-eyed, the blue-eyed people should be on top for the first day over the brown-eyed people. She then went on to tell her class that blue-eyes are better and smarter than brown-eyed people. A blue-eyed child in the class tried to defend his father, who had brown-eyes by saying that he wasn’t stupid. Jane replied by reminding him that the child recently reported that his dad kicked him. Then she asked the child if he thought a blue-eyed father would ever kick his child. She then pointed out that two blue-eyed dads of other children in the class had never kicked them and said that this proves that blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.

Next, she set up rules for the day. The blue-eyed children would get five extra minutes of recess while the brown eyes had to stay in. The brown-eyed people were not allowed to use the water fountains, they had to use the paper cups. The brown-eyed people were also not allowed to play with the blue-eyed people because they are not as good as the blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed people were also to wear collars so that their eye color could be identified from a distance.

At recess, two of her students got in a fight. A brown-eyed student hit a blue-eyed student in the gut for calling him brown eyes. When asked what’s wrong with being called brown eyes, the response was because it means that (brown-eyed) people are stupider. One student said it was the equivalent of black people being called derogatory names. Jane asked the blue-eyed student why he called the other student brown eyes and when the student replied it was only because he had brown eyes, she pointed out that he had brown eyes yesterday too and he hadn’t felt the need to call him brown eyes then. In the end, of course, it was admitted that it was just a way to be mean.

The next day, she turned the tables and the brown-eyed children were as the blue-eyed children were yesterday. She said she had lied yesterday by saying that brown-eyed people weren’t as good or as smart as blue-eyed people. Now the blue-eyed children were not allowed to play with the brown-eyed children because they were not as good as them. They would have to stay in at recess, use paper cups and wear collars.

Elliot stated, “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”

Academic research into Elliott's exercise shows moderate results in reducing long-term prejudice but is inconclusive on the question of whether the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits.

4) RAPE, A REALITY WORLDWIDE

QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.

Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.

“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’

IF THERE EVER WAS A REASON FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD TO GO TO ALL OUT WAR AND WIPE OUT THESE EVIL BELIEVERS IN SOME KIND OF GOD........

THE QUESTION: